26 Feb Just Be Here
Emma is curled into the crook of my arm tonight, warm and flushed, finally asleep.
Before she drifted off, I kept offering things.
Do you want me to get you a smoothie from that place you like?
I could make soup.
What about crackers? Or an ice pack for your head?
I was moving through the checklist of care, offering comfort in the form of something measurable.
Emma turned toward me, eyes glassy with fever, and whispered, “Just be here, Mama.”
Now the room is dark except for the light of my phone. My arm is numb beneath her, but I don’t shift. I scroll and watch a clip of a baby macaque named Punch at a zoo outside Tokyo. His mother rejected him, so keepers raised him by hand. Since those early days, he has carried a stuffed orangutan.
Recently, they reintroduced Punch to his troop. The older monkeys grab him, shove him, fling his small body aside. Every time it happens, he scrambles back to the orangutan. He wraps both arms around its bright orange belly and presses his face into it. He sits there, holding on, until he settles.
Watching little Punch, I think about Harry Harlow’s experiments decades ago. Infant rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and given two monkey-shaped surrogates: a wire figure that held a bottle of milk and one wrapped in soft terry cloth that offered no food at all. The babies spent all of their time with the cloth mothers, going to the wire mother only to feed.
We like to imagine that resilience is grit, that strength is standing alone. But watch a baby monkey cling to a soft cloth surrogate for comfort. Watch a young macaque, just flung by his own kind, gather a stuffed orangutan into his arms and steady himself against it. There is another kind of strength there. The kind that knows to reach for something soft when the world is unkind.
Crackers and soup matter. And milk does, too. But tonight, in this dark room, with my daughter tucked against me and a baby monkey halfway across the world snuggling into the orange fur of his stuffed orangutan, I am reminded that what steadies us most is often simpler than that.
Just be here.