Spitting image

Monkey is the image of his father, in many ways. People have been telling me that ever since he was born, but it's taken me a long time to see it. (Apart from their hairlines, which were clearly similar, one coming and one going.)

As a baby, Monkey looked to me the very picture of generic baby, with no particular identifying features. When I look in the mirror myself, I have always seen two eyes neither far apart nor close together, a nose in the middle that is not button-like, and a mouth that opens and closes as directed, under some brown hair. Beyond the fact that the skin is pale and the eyes are green, I can't tell you what I look like. So of course I can't see it if my children look like me, but you'd think I would recognise my husband in them.

And yet. Finally, now, when I look at photos of baby Monkey, I can fleetingly see what they were all talking about. It's the brow, the eyes, the slightly anxious expression in the few photos where he's not grinning delightfully for the camera.

 

I've just gone through all his baby photos twice, and this is the best example I can find. Please excuse the prison-issue pyjamas and escaping foot. (He's about seven months old here.) It's all but impossible to see the boy he is now in these pictures, too; now and then I catch a glimpse of a still-familiar expression in the eyes, but his face shape is so different, now that he's a pixie-chinned imp, that it's hard to reconcile the two.

See? Can you even tell it's the same child? Or is it just me who fails to see the obvious resemblance? (I, even.) (What does it mean when I can't even tell that my own firstborn looks like himself?)


But then. There's the matter of accents. One reason I could never countenance staying in America for long enough to have children here (way back when I thought I had a choice about this sort of thing) was that they would have American accents. How could I love a child with an American accent as my own? Wouldn't they seem like little, twangy, aliens? But life works in mysterious ways, and that's not how it has turned out.

For a long time I allowed myself to believe that my children didn't have any accents. (This is exactly the same delusion that many people have about themselves, or all denizens of the place they grew up in. They think, "We [Californians/Dubliners/Glaswegians] sound totally neutral and speak pure, correct English. Everyone else sounds all funny because they're saying it wrong.") Even last summer, when I overheard some mothers in a playground in England remark of my son, "Oh, he's a little American boy," I thought they might have it wrong. English people don't really understand Irish accents, you know. (Seriously. I spent a summer waitressing in London after college, and more than once had local customers ask me if I was American.)

But yes, they do both have American accents, though an American would probably detect a twinge of other in there. Mabel still says zed (and zebbra), but Monkey is fully assimilated and goes with zee and zeebra. Luckily for me, that's about as much regional specificity as I can detect in them, so as far as I'm concerned my children are the only totally accentless English speakers on the planet.