The Teeth of Night

People laugh when i refer to my son as a Were-baby.
I laugh too.
It's a joke I made up because the day I went to the hospital to be induced was December 11th, and it was 60 degrees farenheit. I remember stepping out the back door with my hoodie and coat on and realizing I probably didn't need the latter. I was anxious, and I stood on the porch, while Beard finished packing up things and tending to the details, a talent with which he is exceptionally gifted.
I watched as a long, slow tendril of fog unfurled across our driveway and spread thickly over the backyard. The sky was a flannel kind of grey, and if I had been inside looking out I would have expected it to be a good twenty degrees chillier. In fact I had, hence the coat.
I placed a hand below my bulging abdomen, and felt the taut skin stretched to capacity over the overripe moon of my belly, and I remembered the phrase, "werewolf weather" a term we used anytime the fog was of this particular quality and the air felt somehow wrong.
I hoped it wasn't an indication that things were going to go poorly in the delivery room.
Then Beard came out, and we got in the car to drive toward the future.

When Bastian was born, it was between moons. It wasn't full, in fact, I think it had been full a week earlier, and I'd been disappointed that the celestial event hadn't tugged my stubborn uterus into action, but just the same, as I lay in a daze in the early hours of Saturday morning, with my newborn son clinging to my chest, I reached a hot, pink finger down to stroke the backs of his perfect, folded little ears, and noticed a fine layer of black hair coating them. There were similar stripes of this fur on the backs of his shoulders, where feathers might be if he had wings. Beard laughed at them, and I did too, but secretly, I repeated to myself, "werewolf weather".

Six months (and a little bit) later it is a full moon in Bastian's birth sign of Sagittarius. It is also the summer solstice. The shortest nights of the year are passing by as quickly as bright yellow sheets on a post it calendar that we tear off with sweaty abandon, crumple and toss, not caring in the heat if they make it to the trash basket. These days of summer are so forgettable in their miasma of pollen in its ochre death throes, the New England meteorological disposition making good on its humid reputation, and the nights are so fevered and the stars so bright, they make sleep a kind of brief attempt at respite from the burning blue flame of a midday sky. Night is a navy tongue that lashes briefly across the earth, searing with salt crystals, and then retracts so quickly, we small animals have no chance for the long consideration of the peppermint midnights of winter, or even the smoky, pensive twilights of fall.

Here, inside these days that are millennia long, and nights that are crackles and flashes of darkness, my baby boy is growing his first teeth.
Long gone is the black fur of his birth. The down rubbed off in his second bath, and I didn't even noticed its disappearance. Teeth are another story. Their entrance is fraught and preempted by months of struggle and discomfort. Indeed, we have yet to see a whitecap break the surface, but Bastian has been drooling and chewing for months now, growing slowly in fervor until we have reached this point in his transformation where there are only brief flashes of respite, when he eats or sleeps, brief and teasing as those swipes of night we get in this early season, and the rest of his waking hours are spent squirming and gnawing on anything he can get his hands on. His pudgy fists clenched like claws around any object he can lift, always straining, always pulling, always working toward bringing the thing to his mouth in the effort of seeking relief from the eruptions working their way to fruition inside his gums.

Alone in the wee hours of the brief night, when he stirs and quiets himself, and I, being the adult, cannot find sleep as readily available as exhaustion would have you believe, I search the internet for possible ways to soothe him, for symptoms I can compare to his, for reassurance that the bairn is experiencing a typical rite of passage.

Only page after page of testimonials, diatribes, and dialogues between mothers reveals over and over that the first teeth a baby breaks are always the two in the front, either bottom or top, making for that hilarious and precious kind of pudgy, hairless, gopher look that is so adorable in a largely pink, and harmless infant smile. And Bastian is not cutting his front teeth. Those, in fact, are noticeably not a source of discomfort in any way.
Instead, when I slide my hot pink finger into his jaws, I feel the gleaming point of an incisor working desperately to come through the top right gumline, and diagonally across from it, on the bottom left, its mate struggles to break the surface in a bulging lump of flesh with the telltale bud of sharp, new bone, a translucent white beneath.

I lie awake in the brief snatches of time when the moon is wide and watching through our window, and I let my werebaby child chew harmlessly on my hand in his sleep, wondering when the change will happen, when the elements will align, and that first shard of bone breaks out of its pink prison, and draws blood.