Are You My Mother? (a picture book for the modern age)

The other night my husband and I were sitting on the couch playing with our son.  I was doing something intensely fascinating like saying, "Who is the best baby in the world?  Is Owen the best baby in the world? Yes, he is!  Does Mommy love Owen?  Of course she does!" etc., etc., when Owen actually laughed out loud for the first time, cackled in fact.  Now, Owen has smiled before but this was his first official laugh, around seven o'clock, smack dab in the middle of week ten and eleven of life.  I responded in the way any normal new twenty-first century parent would, I squealed, I cried - and then I tried to videotape it with my phone.  I should have just stuck with the first response, the pure enjoyment part of it.  Not only because I in fact failed at videotaping this, or should I say digitally recording a mini-movie, but because I left the moment of it.

Now, I don't feel that this separation happened in any dramatic way.  I did not feel disconnected when it happened and in retrospect I can't even pinpoint a real "lack of being in the moment" feeling.  But without a doubt the most pure moment was the first few laughs, not only for the sheer miracle of watching him verbally express joy for the first time but for the heart-wrenching, if narcissistic knowledge that it was my connecting with him eyeball to eyeball that made him laugh in the first place.  The camera/cell phone does not make him laugh.  The proof is that whenever I take it out to capture the moment of a smile, a particularly happy, funny, or expressive moment, he pretty much stops what he's doing.  I try to encourage the moment back by peering around the camera to re-inspire him but the moment never comes back, he's a little too fickle for that.

One of my favorite childhood books was, "Are You My Mother?" where the baby bird wakes up alone in his nest without his mother and starts walking around trying to find her.  He encounters many things, including several different animals and even a bulldozer, asking each of them, "Are you my mother?" until at the end he finally finds his real mom.  I picture the babies of our generation are moving through their own disturbing version of this book, asking video cameras and cell phones, and web cams the same insistent question.  I'm pretty sure that if the first time Owen says 'mama' he is looking at our digital camera it will break my heart.

Obviously, I know this is not going to happen, that Owen and I spend hours of time together, and I do mean HOURS AND HOURS, where cameras are not present.  And I also recognize that there is a magic of catching these moments on 'film' even if film really doesn't exist anymore.  But I want to be a little more aware that it's actually I that made Owen laugh, not our Sony Digital, and I wonder if the laugh would have lasted a little bit longer if I had not bothered to pick up the camera.