6/19/07, one shower later

The other heavy piece of yesterday's session was telling about how a few months after she was born, we took Z. to a post-wedding meal where there was a lot of singing and by coincidence more male voices than she was used to. She was bopping along, in her element--from her earliest days, Z. was always happiest where there were 40 people in a room, infant extrovert--and the singing started and her face crumpled and she fell apart into tears. We didn't understand it. It happened again a little later, at friends' house for shabbat dinner, she was playing on the husband's lap, happily discovering facial hair, when he started singing and again, she crumpled. We did an experiment, and when he sang in falsetto she stayed happy. She also had a little sunsuit with a cow on it, and I would push the cow like it was a button and low. Crying. Just "moo," no tears. Lowing, tears. Finally I figured it out--the low, resonant singing, the lowing, sounded like the moans I made in labor, for three days.

Think about how unbelievably scared she was to be born. And then she was alone in a plastic bin for a week.