Everything About Everything

August 26, 2015

By Olivia Campbell

Parenting is less about acquired knowledge and more about becoming skilled in creatively winging it.

I had just strapped my almost-2-month-old son into his vibrating bouncy chair when the weight of my newfound responsibility of motherhood finally sunk in. It was a dreary winter afternoon in our drafty second-floor, one-and-a-half bedroom apartment in the museum district of Richmond, Virginia. The bouncy chair was one of the few places my son enjoyed being other than latched onto my nipple. At this point, I was only just beginning to acclimate to this state of constantly being needed by another human.

The bouncy chair was a simple machine: a fabric sleeve enveloping a wire frame with a battery pack that produced vibrations. The frame eased back with the weight of the baby and the more he moved, the more it bounced. The chair looked vaguely like a baby slingshot. On the arch curving over the chair hung three wild animals: two hard-plastic elephants: one green and one blue, each with large orange ears made of crinkly fabric that toy manufacturers hope babies will find as fun to gnaw as newspaper. In between the elephants hung a small yellow stuffed lion with pieces of teal ribbon for a mane. My son stared up at the colorful creatures dangling above him. It was a rare, beautiful moment of…