Recently Raffi realized that he can pull up my shirt and poke my belly button and play a drumbeat on my stomach. He finds this hilarious. I think it’s the existence of my stomach, one – stomachs are inherently funny – and also that he can reveal or conceal it via pulling my shirt up and down. I probably shouldn’t let him do this but it makes him happy, so I indulge him. I say stuff like “you also have a tummy! There’s your tummy!” and poke him gently, which he doesn’t care about at all (this might be slightly too advanced of a concept.) The word “tummy” is awful but I use it anyway. I say the dumbest things to Raffi all the time, often in a baby talk tone I thought I would never use but which seems to just happen. Lately it seems like he is beginning to understand us. So it seems important to try to be as comprehensible as possible, even if that means saying “tummy.”
Sometimes I touch my own stomach and take a moment to be weirded out and amazed that Raffi used to be in there. As he gets bigger and more independent, it seems increasingly improbable, like maybe it didn’t even happen. When he’s poking me in the belly button, sometimes I say “That’s where you used to live.” Maybe he does remember it, in some inarticulable way. Maybe that is also part of the joke.  If your mom gave birth to you and you still have access to her, this is a fun thing to think about next time you see her. You can give her a hug and see whether your body still dimly remembers being a part of hers.