Part Thirty-Two: The Art of Communication

            My fourteen-month-old grandson, Josiah, has a melodious voice.  Such happy emotion and inflection go into his incomprehensible baby babbling.  I get the feeling that he is speaking in sentences already; it’s just that we don’t understand the content.  Yet there is one particular word which he pronounces with great gusto.  He loves to say it, and he loves to have it repeated back to him.  This word does not seem to be connected to any object or meaning other than his pride in pronouncing it:  guck.

            On the other hand, three-and-a-half-year-old Joelle has a lot of information to convey. She likes to repeat important facts and relevant questions as much as she likes to keep everyone current on what she is doing, thinking, pretending, and feeling.  There are two things I can count on every time I see her.  She will come up to me, carefully touch my turban, and ask, “Grandma, where did your hair go?”  Then, she lifts my head covering with a finger, touches the fuzz on my head that has never fallen out, and proclaims, “You have tiny hair!”

            Benjamin, at seven, prefers action communications.  Ever hoping to watch a video, he slyly smiles at me and hands me the remote.  When he wants to go home with me, he grabs my hand and escorts me to the front door.  And when he wants me to sing his favorite song, “The Wheels on the Bus,” he personalizes the sign for “please”:  instead of rubbing his palm across his tummy, he rubs it across mine.  When he was a baby, he went through a period of time in which his favorite vocalization was “blah, blah, blah.”  Oh, and he also roared like a lion when I picked him up.

            It makes me happy that my grandchildren like to communicate with me.  I also like to remember how my own two children expressed themselves when they were little.  Joseph had his own unique gibberish that sounded like rapid-fire Chinese.  Dana, on the other hand, was precise in her communications, using fully understandable sentences at an early age.  There was a single exception, one made-up word that served a dual purpose.  “Ma-mu,” or perhaps I should spell it “Ma-moo,” was her word for apple and for mother’s milk.

            This second week out of the hospital has been a rather long one because I’ve kept away from my family due to Dana’s nasty cold.  I miss my grandkids mightily.  It’s also been entirely too long since I’ve had the older two over to my house—all summer, in fact.  What I want is enough energy to have them over one at a time.  Benjamin could jam on the piano, go grab his See ‘n Say out of the toy room, and take it to the kitchen where he loves to sit on the floor and croon.  I long to cuddle up with Joelle on the couch to watch a silly episode of Peppa Pig on my computer, followed by looking through my jewelry box and trying on necklaces and bracelets.  Then I could cut some frozen grapes in half while she gathers the necessary plastic lids and containers for our fruit-eating.  The plastic outnumbers the grapes, but I trust that there is a three-year-old logic driving her routine.

            However, having my grandchildren over, even one at a time, might be delayed for some time.  Already, I’m experiencing the expected side effects of Taxol:  fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and peripheral neuropathy.  It’s pretty much like having a fibromyalgia flare.  It’s discouraging to think about the next ten weeks of treatments, because chemo side effects tend to worsen as time goes on.  Oh, well.  At least this is familiar territory, and because today I spent several hours collecting a week’s worth of grandchildren hugs, I will be fine until tomorrow.