Naturalist poet

Driving by the river this morning. From the back seat: "Mom! I saw a heron!" [pause] "At least I think it was a heron. It was as tall as a baby tree and as thin as a bicycle wheel. And kind of blue-ish."

The three little wolves

New favorite story: one Little Man told me at bedtime last night, about the three little wolves and the big, bad pig, who kept trying to blow their newly-built houses down. See, the bricks- and cement-based houses went down easily with sledgehammers and jackhammers, but the one made of flowers? That one survived. Because of the beauty and aroma of the flowers, people. The pig was overcome by beauty and decided to make friends with the wolves instead of eating them.

See? It's like I've always said: Art saves lives.

Independence, inter-dependence

The blog about my conflicts as a parent. Is what it should be called. Today I am thinking about Little Man's struggle for independence -- or, more accurately, his struggle for its opposite. Mommy, can you put my shoes on? help me in the bathroom? zipper my coat? He's my first and only (so far), and I just don't know what is reasonable to expect. At five, he sometimes strikes me as, I don't know, weirdly done. No, not done, of course, not like he's ready to look for an apartment and get his own checking account. But he needs me for so little now. He can get his own snacks out of the kitchen, pour his own milk, design his own craft projects. He can negotiate with me over rules, he can remember tiny details about animals who live in the rainforest halfway around the world, he corrects me on my spotty understanding of how a steam train works. He knows what he wants to wear, and he reminds me to put on my seatbelt, after having clicked on his own.

But he also wants to be a baby forever. And who doesn't want to be babied? (See my husband during his last cold. Ahem. But, honestly, me too -- when my latest cooking project wasn't going well, did I not want someone to step in and say "Oh don't worry, honey, I'll finish that. You got put your feet up and let me bring you a cup of tea"?) But when Little Man won't fasten his own kid-friendly shoes "because it's hard," (and we're talking velcro, here, people), or won't even try to take care of his own bathroom hygiene, or is reluctant to zipper his own coat, I wonder. The bad part is that I find myself wavering between empathy (I do understand his feelings, after all) and frustration. The thing to do, I begin to understand as I'm writing this, is to express the empathy but without letting him get away with fostering his own dependence. Because it's the emotional part I find compelling; it's not that I don't want him to learn to take care of himself; I just don't want him to feel abandoned.

This morning at preschool, when he said he wanted me to stuff his mittens into his coat sleeve because it's "too hard," and I said, "Honey, it's not that hard," and he said "Because you're a grownup," I could simultaneously see two things: sure it's manipulative, in a way, but it's also true that his world is full of things that he struggles to do and grownups find easy. My refusal to help must seem to him arbitrarily mean at times. Look, it's easy for you and hard for me, why not just do it for me? Right. Reasonable. Except that you won't be a kid forever, and I can't come to college with you to tie your shoes.

I want to do both: wrap my kid up in my arms, making him feel safe and warm forever, cherished and cared for all of his days. And, also: I want to help him grow up to be self-sufficient, stable, clear-visioned adult, not looking to other people to fill up the holes in his own heart. I need to stop indulging his feelings by doing for him, because indulging a feeling isn't the same as honoring it. Instead, I can empathize while also helping him find his way to greater independence. Even if it means he will eventually leave me and go to college, or a mountain in Tibet, or wherever. Because he will do that anyway, and it would be better if he didn't need to ask a dorm advisor or passing yak farmer to zip his coat for him.

ESP?

My five-year-old guessed what I was thinking last night. Then he said, "Mom, I read your mind!" (pause) "I took a book out of your mind and read it, and then put it back." (pause) "The book WAS your mind!" Me: "You took my mind out? Did you put it back?" He: "Not yet. Here you go."

On that slightly scary note, Happy New Year!

Reader Response

When Little Man started to memorize books, when he was able to recite all of "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" over dinner, I had a feeling I'm not sure I can describe. It's connected to another feeling I can't describe, one which always comes over me while I'm reading to him. Let me preface this by saying that I really, really enjoy reading aloud. That whole learning to read silently thing we all get to in elementary school, after the stage of sounding out all the letters, one pudgy finger under each word; it was a real falling off for me, the end of something good. There's not much reason to read aloud anymore, once you're beyond that stage, until you find yourself doing a reading at a wedding, or, say, mocking a mean-spirited ex-lover by reading his narcissistic letter out loud to your drunken girlfriends. (You've never done that? Um, me neither.)

Maybe I'm a frustrated actor or something, but it's fun to me, much much fun, to wind your way through someone else's words, letting just the right expressive tone slip in, paying attention to meter and volume. It's like singing. I used to try to read to my partners, romantic or erotic poetry (what can be sexier than The Goblin Market, for example? all that licking and sucking and dripping juices, warmth and open mouths?), but usually they were politely unimpressed, and in one case actually fell asleep. (I ended up marrying that one, so probably I didn't hold it against him, but rather chose to interpret it as his being soothed by my voice into a profound state of relaxation. Which, I'm sure, is exactly what it was.)

But now! the luxury of it! the rapt audience! how many times a day do I hear "Mommy, can you read this book to me? and this firetruck one too, and this one with the goats?" It's a guilty pleasure, running out to the library to pick up 10 more delicious books for him from the lovely buffet of the children's room, knowing that he will page through them in his car seat on the way home, and immediately upon regaining the house demand that I read all of them to him, immediately. I like everything about reading to him: the cuddly presence on my lap, the rapt attention, the stream of questions "Mommy, why is that donkey sitting in her dress on that rock?" "Mommy, why is the sun leaning down in this picture?" "Is that a frog or a bug?" And I love the trance I get into, every time, as if coasting on the current of someone else's words, someone else's story, the emotional lives of donkeys and fish, my voice like a canoe, slipping through the ripples. ("Mommy, why are you beating this water metaphor to death?")

And the weird internal jokes: am I the only one who thinks of Fergie's "My Humps" every time I read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish"? ("Mr. Gump has a seven-hump gump!") and try to get through the page without my adults-only internal guffaw coming out of my mouth? ("What you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?" Hm, Seussical echoes in Fergie? No? Maybe just me, then.) This internal dialogue I have with myself cracks me up, literally, every time. A very weird but satisfying pleasure -- it's the aburdity of the connection that gets me, I think.

It's odd that I should enjoy this activity so much, since usually, I hate the sound of my own voice. I occasionally leave messages on my home answering machine for my partner, making arrangements for dinner or the plumber or picking up the Little Man, and as soon as I get home I hurriedly erase it, as if fearing that someone will hear how awful I sound, as if they couldn't hear that every time I open my mouth. But somehow, when it's "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" instead of "should I stop and get some veggie burgers for dinner?", somehow it's ok. Weirdly, it's a more bodily experience of books than reading silently to yourself, and I can see how different tones or expressive choices can effect Little Man differently. Depending on how tired I am, I can put more or less expression into what I'm saying: "Frogs are frogs and fish are fish and that's IT!" And he will correct me if I accidentally, in a moment of failed attention, lend Piglet's voice to Eeyore's words, or (unimaginable, really) vice versa. As well he should.

Milestones

Since I went back to work (in the fall of 2007), the sleep arrangements in my house have deteriorated badly, and I have not had the wherewithal to turn the tide. Little Man's dad used to put him to bed: after reading a few books together in his dimly-lit room and singing a few songs, Little Man's dad would place him gently in his crib, pat his back a few times, and leave the room. Little Man would sing sleepily to himself for a little while, maybe hold a brief, one-sided conversation with himself on possible breakfast foods or doggie escapades, and then go quiet. No problem. We were blessed (after a period of utter sleep hell in his infancy, during which no one in the family got more than 4 hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, we felt we had earned the right to this bliss).

Then I went back to work, and Little Man went to daycare. And got sick. And got sick again. And got sick some more. And coughed all night, feverish, crying because his throat hurt, his stomach hurt, he hated the coughing, he was too hot. Etc., etc., etc. We were still nursing then, only minimally (usually once a day at bedtime), but we ramped it up again, because it helped with the coughing and sore throat. I finally took him to bed with me, during the worst of it, because I had to get up and remember how to teach the next day.
Then he got better, and we tried to get him back to the old ways. But he had seen a glimpse of paradise, and he wasn't going to let it go that easily. I can sleep with Mama? really? why would I stop doing that?

And so on and so on. We worked on it, we stopped working on it, there was strep throat, there was weaning, we worked on it, finally ending up with a pattern of my lying down with him in his now-big-boy bed, reading bedtime books and telling a long, serial story we make up together about Sally-the-Cow and her many and varied animal friends (living in some kind of throwback commune on a mountaintop), and I lay with him until he's asleep. At various points, that would be the end of it and I would eventually be able to retreat to my own bed/life; at other points, he would wake up at some point and call for me and I would have to repeat the process until he slept again. For weeks I might fall asleep in his bed before he does, and wake up groggily at 2 a.m. to stumble into my own bed, only to find that I can't sleep (because I had slept from 8:00 to 2:00!) and end up downstairs, reading. Until he would wake up and call for me again, and I would go up to him and lay with him until he fell asleep again.

Drag. Double drag. If I had to go out at night, Little Man refused to even think about going to bed until I returned. Daddy would NOT do. Daddy doesn't have the right voice for bedtime reading, Daddy doesn't know the Sally story saga, Daddy takes up too much room when he lies in bed with me. So I would come home after a dinner out with my friends, to find Daddy and Little Man both asleep sprawled on the couch, all lights on, everyone still in their clothes. Rebelling against any changes in sleep management. All alert to any possibility of going back to the old ways of independent sleep. Vigilantly defending his post.

And the thing is, I get it. Really -- it's nice to fall asleep with your arm tossed around a loved one, a foot leaning against a knee, a butt cozying up to a stomach. I can't reconcile this: I need to sleep in my own bed, with my own husband, vacationing from parenthood for a few precious hours. I myself don't particularly want to sleep alone, and I am an adult. Not four, unclear on the existence of robbers and/or bad guys, negotiating the pull towards independence and the desire always to stay a baby, cuddled in mama's arms. (I mean, you know, on a good day I'm not.) Why shouldn't he prefer co-sleeping to isolation in his own room, away from the family that makes him feel safe?

It's not that I hate it myself. There are times, curled up like spoons with my small son, his hot little bare feet resting on my bent knees, my arm around his waist, my face leaned up against the hair on the back of his head, when I feel as happy and cozy as a blind newborn kitten, surrounded by siblings and nuzzled up against her mama cat's belly. He will say, sleepily, in those moments: "Mama, I love you." "Mama, you're my best friend." "Mama, you're the best best best best best best best mom in the wholewideworld." Or there's the night we had a long sleepy conversation about my extended family, and his dad's, and the grandparents and great-grandparents and what were all their names and where did they live? He was thrilled to find out that my aunt was his great-aunt: "She is my aunt and your aunt too?" he asked delightedly. Anything that means we are the same, related, connected forever, makes him happy. And the tales of our family's interconnectedness made me feel happy too, unconscious for a moment of the factors which separate, divide us in conflict or disagreement. We both fell asleep content that night. Still, the fact remains that this system is not a good long-term plan.

This post is too long already, but the upshot is, I think we may have fixed it, via a surprising ally. More in next post. I will miss the weird intimacy, but I think it may be over, or on the road to being over. And since it's appropriate and right that it be over, I will reserve my ambivalence on the subject to this blog, and celebrate with my husband and son our new independence.

Tag, I'm it!

I was tagged on Facebook and thought I'd reproduce my list here.

25 random things about ME:

1. I often surprise myself by enjoying things I hate doing (like scraping ice off my windshield), and hating things I love doing;
2. Maybe that's why I tend to deprive myself of doing things I love doing, like writing. I don't want to find myself hating it;
3. I am a fool for old-school funk;
4. Dancing is one of the few areas of life in which I have very little self-consciousness. Well, there are a few more, but not many;
5. Cooking is weirdly stressful for me. Even things I've made a million times. Even when it's only me who's going to be eating it. I love food, though. If I were rich I'd hire someone to cook me gourmet health food meals every day (hi Karen);
6. There are areas in the world I love beyond all reason, for reasons of nostalgia: Portland, OR; the Catskills; Edgartown, MA; the Isle of Skye; and a small mountain town in Morrocco the name of which I can't spell and am too lazy to look up;
7. I am ambivalent about most poetry. Not all, though;
8. I have a short list of novels I read at least once a year. I have to work to wait that long, but if I don't, the magic doesn't work as well. It's a great and very rare pleasure to add to that list;
9. Becoming a mother, somewhat late in life, shattered me, in almost exactly the same way a sprout shatters a seed. After four years, I'm still trying to figure out where some of the pieces of me went;
10. I have daydreams of getting together everybody I've madly loved, men and women, for a dinner party, without telling them what the connecting link is. I'm pretty sure lots of them would not like each other. (Some of them might not even know they were madly loved by me at one time.) I like to think of them sitting around, asking themselves, "Why am I here? who are all of these people? Some of them are VERY ODD." Or trading phone numbers.
11. I love driving, and also riding a bike;
12. Jazz always makes me think of my dad, and the expressions on his face when he listened to it;
13. I miss my dad (who died while I was pregnant), all the time. He lacked a few parenting skills, but he was a wonderful friend;
14. I like getting things done in very short spurts. I am also very good at doing very little (read: nothing) for long stretches of time. It doesn't feel like doing nothing when I'm doing it, but technically, that's what it is;
15. I am getting very good at telling elaborately detailed bedtime stories (see #4). I feel as though I should write them down;
16. I read several mommy blogs, and feel oddly close to the writers, whom I've never met;
17. I like talking and writing about myself, but I fear I enjoy it too much;
18. Some of my goals in life are mutually exclusive, but I have no real intention of reconciling them;
19. I am not always consistent, but I am excellent in an emergency;
20. When I think about my own death, I feel a sudden shock which isn't entirely unpleasant. It's good for me to have deadlines;
21. I am happiest when I'm socializing more often than I usually have time for;
22. I often think of a Shakespeare professor I had in 1984, one of the smartest and coolest women I've ever met, whom I haven't seen since;
23. I am sensitive to the sounds of people's voices, and remember them vividly no matter how much time has passed;
24. I once sold a book to David Byrne, in a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. It was a book by Doris Lessing (hi Jean);
25. I should give up coffee, but I never, ever will.