Soft Touch

Such a cool kid.

Drawing by Liz.

You know a child loves something when they christen it. So when our daughter named her new comforter “Soft Touch,” a line she gleaned from the Target packaging, we knew we’d bought well.

She’s too old for a blanky but lugs Soft Touch around for fort-making and TV-watching. “Where’s Soft Touch?” is a common bedtime refrain, alongside “Can you find Lolly?” and “Has anyone seen the binky?” and “Where are the stuffed dinosaurs?” Our nightly parade: looking for loveys, prolonging lights out.

I learned the term Touched Out when our second child came along. Like, learned it in my bones. And then: I learned it again with babies three and four. Our sons all clung to me like baby kangaroos. Honestly, they still do, and they suck the freaking life force from my body.

Our daughter, though, belonged only to herself.

I remember feeling many things as a new mother to this difficult, colicky firstborn: dazed, frustrated, and unable to understand her screaming and inability to keep milk down. So I cradled her. And she hated it. She arched her tiny, squishy body away from whoever might have the gall to hold her tight.

It took time for us to realize she wanted nearness but not entanglement. As a toddler, she eschewed our laps. Rather than pulling our arms around her, she wedged herself against us and held our wrists in her munchkin fingers, gently pulsing the bones like a cat kneading in contentment. The softest, lightest touch.

Supposedly we all have love languages with which we listen and with which we speak. Supposedly the languages with which we listen and speak can be different. I think about this when I watch my now long and lanky daughter lead her gang of small brothers.

I see her observe our two- and four-year-olds as they beg for physicality. “Hol’ me?” they ask their harried mother, arms outstretched. I see her see me: impatient, Touched Out.

“I can hold you,” she pipes up. And then she does, lifting her little brothers into her own kind arms, doling out the gift of soft touch she herself never wanted. 

I don’t know a better way to explain this kid as she tips over the edge of little into big, as complex and oceanic and spiky-soft as love itself.