Between shower and bedtime, my toddler, Clyde, and I take off our shirts and bump bellies to help us wind down. I never told him — didn’t think I had to — that belly bumping is steeped in a sacred decorum, kinda like Fight Club, that we don’t talk about belly bumps with people outside of our immediate household. Not everyone understands the ceremonial value in high-fiving bare bellies while chanting, “Belly bump, belly bump, Clyde and Dada belly bump.” Yet Clyde has recently demonstrated that he feels exactly zero inhibition about lifting up his shirt and requesting bumps in front of people we simply don’t know like that.
Last weekend, I strapped my 10-week-old son, Shep, to my chest and followed my wife as she pushed Clyde in a blue plastic car toward the playground near our house. Clyde honked his horn as he bumped along the uneven sidewalk while Shep screamed every one of his feelings into my neck. I was too busy patting Shep’s back and shushing to notice a speeding truck braking too quickly at the stop-signed intersection we were waiting to cross, too distracted to see the fuck-you look my wife must have shot him as we passed. But I perked up when he pulled beside us and shouted from his window, “Why is she looking at me like that?” He repeated the question. “I’ll cut your fucking eyes out, lady.” He was wearing sunglasses but I could feel the burn of his stare, see the high in his intensity, and hear the disdain for women in his timbre. And with my son on my chest I had never wanted to fight anyone less in my entire life. And with my son on my chest I felt absolutely certain that if this guy stepped out of his truck I’d pitch Shep to my wife and crack the sidewalk with this motherfucker’s head. And there’s a world where we apologize and walk away. And there’s a world where this man has a gun. And there’s a world where Clyde hops out of his blue car and lifts up his shirt, and I lift up mine too, and suddenly it becomes clear which parts of myself I’m actually desperate to hide. And there’s a world that Clyde can’t unsee, a world where this man is not, in fact, this man. But in the world we lived I stood still, staring, waiting, quiet—none of which seemed to bother him at all. After a few moments he drove away in his truck, Clyde in his blue car. We went to the playground. That night we bumped bellies before we dreamed.
