Fast times and wild living with (the former) Baby Whozit…
Nov 24th, 2010 by Jessica
Last night, Simon wanted to eat at what should have been bedtime. I tried to put him off. He tried to sound desperate. I parried with equal force. Then he opted to curry favor with flattery:
Hey Daphne. Can you hook me up with some peanut butter?
As a friend noted, I am, always was, and always will be the Velma. Amusingly, in a parallel bid to get Matt to take him to the video store to get a DVD of Return of the Jedi, Simon called Matt Fred. I don’t have to explain that he’s the Shaggy, do I?
Nov 23rd, 2010 by Jessica
A funny thing has happened over here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. These are my Agotich days, the days that Gabriel drops her off at my house between 7:15 and 7:30 in the morning on his way to work.
In the beginning, I was happy to help but found these days long. Between the child-minding, the extra driving, and the getting up a full hour earlier, I was pretty tired by the end of the day. (Parents of more than one child, feel free to groan at this point. I know….)
Then, as Agotich got used to me and my house and began to understand our routine and a bit of English, things got easier. Simon needed less hand-holding to have her in the house, and she needed less hand-holding to be here. We still had to monitor things closely, and Agotich still didn’t like it if I dashed upstairs and left her down, but for the most part she was content to play with toys and follow me around. I still had to get up earlier and drive more, but it seemed a smaller thing.
Now, unexpectedly, she’s been a real boon in the morning. Simon has decided that she is funny. He peppers us with questions about her and interacts with her sweetly. He’s also a bit competitive with her. If she puts on her shoes, Simon feels the need to show me that he can put on his shoes faster. If she tries to put on her coat, Simon races to put on his. And if she makes for the door, he bolts ahead to get out first.
Conveniently, all this rushing about is happening against a backdrop of increased opposition and sluggishness on non-Agotich days. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we argue about eating breakfast, we argue about going to the bathroom, and we argue about putting on his coat and heading out the door. It’s part of the mini-adolescence I had been warned about, it’s tedious, and it makes us very nearly late every day.
But on Agotich days, everything is different. Simon puts on his clothes to show her what a big boy he is, he is proud to show off his ability to use the toilet, and he bounds out the door for school with a smile on his face. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we arrive at school at least 15 minutes early, and Simon runs to the door with a spring in his step.
Would it not be an unkindness to Agotich herself, I’d ask to borrow her on the other days to hustle Simon out the door. And so long as she confines her upcoming terrible twos to her parents, I can see that this arrangement is going to be quite helpful until Simon works through the whiny/dawdling phase.
Nov 21st, 2010 by Jessica
I often wonder how many things I attribute to Simon are, in fact, symptomatic of a specific developmental stage and vice versa?
For the most part, I’ll never know. But a friend’s blogging has just turned up one instance of something I thought peculiar to Simon. Of late, Simon has been enthralled by games of hide-and-seek. Only there is a catch: He either does not hide, or he tells me where he’ll hide. Just Wednesday I picked him up from school and took him straight to a park. Before long, we were playing hide-and-seek. Each time, he’d tell me where he was going to hide, insist I count down from 10, make me “look” for him, and then squeal with delight when I found him exactly where he told me he’d be! For added measure, he “hid” behind a very skinny tree. A few months ago, he “hid” on our living room couch. To be fair, he did cover his eyes….
I assumed this was a Simon thing, then just tonight read about a friend (Hello Katherine!) whose nearly 5-year-old son does the exact same thing. This can’t just be a coincidence. What’s going on here?
Thankfully, a friend of a cognitive psychologist writing at Open Salon encountered something very similar and wrote it up. It seems it all comes down to kids this age working out the complexities of spatial relationships, thus hiding behind a skinny tree, and not being able to take a different perspective, thus assuming he could hide by covering his eyes or thinking the game was still fun if he told me where he’d be.
Fascinating! And really, a good reminder that interesting developments are on display even amid seemingly tedious play. The catch is, as with all scientific pursuits, you have to know what you are looking for.
Nov 17th, 2010 by Jessica
One of the more unkind pleasures of being young is making fun—gently—of the older generation. Specifically, when I was a kid the teasing focused on the clothes my parents’ generation wore, the music I heard on the oldies radio station (even if I liked it), and the way they generally took care of pets and children. Cereal at 3 weeks! Can you imagine? Walkers for babies! Did you not understand how dangerous those are? What if they “walked” right off the edge of a staircase? And the biggie: You let us ride in the car WITHOUT A CARSEAT OR EVEN A SEAT-BELT! Were you completely mad?
Boy, those old people sure are funny/stupid.
So here’s the thing. I’m 40. Not so old I don’t think. And these are the indignities visited on me within the last year, many in the last three months:
Boy old people sure are funny/stupid. I think I’ll go put on my acid wash jeans and shoulder pads now, crank up the oldies, and try to foist my dangerous baby gear on unsuspecting friends. One last question: They do still tell you to put babies to sleep on their backs, right?
Nov 15th, 2010 by Jessica
Questions most parents dread fielding from their children:
Anxiety producing questions for me and Matt:
Saints preserve us, Simon is showing early signs of being a gear head. To fully appreciate the horror of this, you must understand the degree of mechanical ineptitude Matt and I jointly and severally possess. It ain’t pretty.
Matt descends from a family whose idea of a tool-chest is a kitchen drawer containing a ruler, screwdriver, hammer, and pencil. Perhaps more tragically, I descend from handy folks on both sides, but express none of the genes myself. It’s partially a matter of a really bad spatial capacity and partially a matter of total lack of interest.
So when, say, Simon wants to take the lid off the toilet tank and watch the parts move, the conversation with his father sounds like this:
“What’s that Daddy?”
“I don’t know. But did you know your mommy can fix a toilet?”
And with me the conversation sounds like this:
“What’s that, Mommy?”
“That’s the fill valve. I tried to replace one once.”
“And what’s that?”
“That’s the flush valve. I broke that once while fixing the fill valve.”
“How does it work?”
“Magic, kid, magic.”
I’m quite serious about this last bit. Matt just recently looked shocked that I could not explain the workings of an internal combustion engine. My mom was pretty horrified, too. But I just cannot get the information to stick in my head. Simon asked me to lift the hood on the car a week or so ago, and I halfway expected to find a fire-breathing dragon in there. And really, Matt should be kinder to me, as his own attempts to install a car battery himself left me stranded in a parking lot THREE TIMES in as many weeks. (That would be the vet, the mall, and Adath Jeshurun preschool, in order.)
When Matt and I last discussed Simon’s un-nurtured proclivities, I laughed off the situation with a taunt. “Good luck with that, kiddo. Look at your parents!” Matt is taking another tack: “Awesome. How soon before he can fix stuff for us?” Time, I think, to arrange for Simon to spend some quality time with his metal-forging, car-repairing, floor-laying, crown-molding-installing hydraulics engineer of an Uncle Perry.
Help him, Uncle Perry. You are his only hope.
Nov 11th, 2010 by Jessica
I am being rather rudely awakened from a 12-month slackening in my maternal duties. Once the terrible twos ended, I found myself with an increasingly independent, increasingly verbal, increasingly compliant, and above all increasingly predictable child.
Simon was tightly scheduled, and the very few times I veered from that schedule (like attending Baron’s birthday party last April during nap-time), we both paid dearly. It got so that whenever Simon grew crabby, I could look at the clock, determine if it was time for food or sleep, and cure the crabbiness in short order.
Farewell to all of that. Two complications have forced me to step up my game:
Just after turning 4, Simon hit the dreaded “little adolescence”, featuring a new dose of negative persistence and oppositional behavior. It’s just like the terrible twos, only with less head-banging and more back-talk!
And he’s giving up his nap. For a month or so, Simon has simply rested during many of his naps. He will lie down under mild protest, ask for his Radiohead CD and covers, and then yell for me the minute the music stops playing. He actually sleeps about every third or fourth day. However, these days do not necessarily correspond to the occasions on which he seems the most tired or grumpy.
Put these two facets of development together, and you have many a head-scratching moment. It’s 3:00 p.m. and Simon is wired. Do I even attempt a nap? Or, it’s 3:00 p.m. and Simon is horribly grumpy and complaining he needs food. Snack or bed?
Sometimes I betray my internal instincts, such as our Halloween birthday party/trick-or-treating double-header, and end the day with an exhausted-but-happy kid. He was more timid than usual at the birthday party (scheduled during his regular nap-time), but rallied nicely and never got mouthy with me.
Other times, like last weekend’s two-playdate-Sunday, I similarly over-planned and ended up creating a catastrophe. Well, perhaps not catastrophe, but a child who seemed happy one minute, grew mouthy and sarcastic the next, proceeded to throw an old-school tantrum over getting into pajamas, reached aphasia-inducing levels of hysteria, and then fell asleep on top of my and Matt’s bed seconds after calming down. I wasn’t taking any chances of awakening that particular beast: Matt and I bunked in the guest bedroom while Simon snoozed for eleven hours on top of my bedspread. (I did throw a blanket over his legs to create a simulacrum of normality.)
I have yet to find a discernable pattern. Just yesterday Simon seemed very tired at 2:30 but did not sleep, and then appeared happy and energetic last night. So of course he requested his bath at 7:00, crawled into bed of his own accord at 8:00, and kicked me out at 8:15 sharp. And was never once mouthy. Go figure.
The only way I know to see my way out of this is to experiment with schedules and routines until I find one that works. At age four, Simon is not suddenly going to become the non-scheduled child. That’s not in his DNA.
I have done this before, of course. At around 16 months or so, Simon went from two naps a day to one. I had to adjust then, too. The difference is that at age 16 months he simply rubbed his eyes when he was tired—there were no behavior issues to sort out, fatigue related or otherwise. Now it’s a bit more complicated: When exhaustion is the root cause of nastiness, I feel the only solution is to take care of Simon and get him to sleep. But if it’s the little adolescence rearing its head, then correction is in order. My parenting philosophy on this is clear, if only I were better at recognizing what lies before me.
Nov 9th, 2010 by Jessica
A few weeks ago, we had houseguests Arnie and Jane stay with us. Arnie is my mom’s first cousin and a current resident of Northern California; Matt and I got to know him and his wife Jane during our time in San Francisco.
A typical Arnie and Jane visit revolves around Matt, Simon, and I lazing from the sidelines as they pack in 4 days of activity into a weekend. It’s exhausting just watching, but works out well for us because they inevitably bring us a variety of food goodies from their various adventures that Matt and I pounce on like vultures. A typical visit also includes some opportunistic catching up over breakfast or late-night tea. They always thank us profusely, but we really look forward to their visits and need little thanks.
This last trip coincided with my bringing Cambria home. They arrived on the fourth day of his tenure, and “cat” was very much on the brain. This information is relevant within the context of my last chat with Jane, minutes before she left for the airport. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but the general tone is exactly as follows. Our conversation began with a discussion of my not-terribly-inspiring efforts towards career reinvention.
“Well thank you again so much for your hospitality. And keep me posted on everything that is going on, will you?”
“I will, but so far I’ve mostly been busy with KIP, Agotich, and other volunteering. I’ll get there eventually, I suppose.”
“Oh, I know. And you know what? The most important thing right now is upstairs.”
“I do know that, trust me. I think he’s going to work out just fine.”
“I do, too.”
“It could change, but he seems like a real sweetie.”
“Oh, very sweet. I have no doubt about that.”
“I think we’ll keep him!”
“He’s definitely a keeper.”
“But you know, we have to knock two pounds off of him.”
“What?! Who said that.”
“The doctor. He’s overweight.”
“Simon has to lose two pounds!?”
And that is when the verbal wheels screeched to a halt.
“No, no. Not Simon, Cambria.”
Jane looked a bit confused. Then she smiled and continued walking to her car. And then it occurred to me. It’s not just that we had been talking about different “him”s at the very end. We had been talking about different “him”s the entire time! So what’s worse? The self absorbed mother who thinks everything is about her child? Or the distracted mother who doesn’t realize when someone is talking about her child?
Nov 5th, 2010 by Jessica
My inquisitive little fellow is really ramping up the questions.
Some lead to investigations. “Where is the water coming from?” he asks my mother after flushing the toilet. To answer him, Mom took the lid off the tank and let Simon watch the magic of valves.
Others lead to laughs. “Where is R2? Does R2 have a neck? Where did Luke’s hand go? Are they getting close for a kiss?” Kiddo loves The Empire Strikes Back, no doubt about it. (It’s my favorite of the three, too.)
And some questions, when asked for the hundredth time, lead to difficult and unexpected conversations.
“Mommy, why did you cry in the guest bedroom a month ago?”
I wondered if this would ever come up. The day we put Tristan down, when it came time to tuck Simon into bed, I lost it and had to leave the room. I was fine with Simon seeing me tear up or have an average cry, I even thought that was important. But I did not want him to see heaving sobs if I could avoid it.
“Do you mean when Percy and Tristan died? I cried because I knew I would miss them and was very sad.”
“Are they coming back?”
This didn’t surprise me, either. I know kids Simon’s age have a hard time understanding the finality of death.
“No honey, they died. They can’t come back.”
“Where are they?”
“They aren’t anywhere. They went to the doctor, but they were old and sick, and they died. Their bodies broke.”
“Where are their bodies?”
He’s been stuck on this last part. I keep saying, “Their bodies broke” and “They are gone.” But this is not a satisfactory answer for Simon. He wants to know where these broken bodies are. If I took Percy and Tristan to the vet and they did not come home, shouldn’t they still be at the office? What the heck happens there anyway?
I have side-stepped this question dozens of times, thinking Simon too young for the truth. Last night, though, I saw Simon’s confused and questioning eyes and decided that if he’s still asking, he deserves a better, fuller answer than the one I’ve been serving. I did a fair bit of reading on children and death when Percy got sick, and the script I have been using is one recommended in the literature. Nothing told me what to do in the event my child started pushing for specifics, though, so I had to go off script. As a cautious person, this is akin to flying without a net: It makes me very uneasy.
“Well, honey, when you die, your body stops working. And once that happens—once you stop hearing and seeing, and once your heart stops beating, and once you stop being able to walk or move—your body changes. After a while, it turns into dust, or dirt. Once Percy and Tristan died, they became dust.”
Even as I said it, I could not believe I was going there regarding decomposition/cremation. Never in a million years did I think I’d visit the source of my own existential angst on a preschooler. But oddly, I think it’s what Simon needed to begin to put the issue to bed. That or to actually have seen Percy or Tristan after they died, but I obviously can’t go back and redo things now. And while Simon did look intense and wide-eyed, he did not look distressed or scared. He just matter-of-factly repeated it, then said one day he’d get old and sick and die and turn to dust, too. At which point I said,
“Oh honey. Not for a long, long, time. You are young! You can’t even imagine how many years will go by first.”
To which he matter-of-factly responded,
“But when I do get really old, I’ll get sick and die and turn to dust.”
To this I just gulped hard and answered the only way I knew how:
“Yes, honey. One day we will all get old and die. Everyone does.”
I have no way of knowing what part of that, if any, he understood. Was he unshaken because he still doesn’t understand the permanence of death? Probably. Did he really understand the “dust” parts? Probably not. But for all of that, he seemed more satisfied than when he thought Percy and Tristan were stuck for all eternity at the Louisville Cat Clinic. Next stop, a quick chat with a pediatrician or child psychologist to find out if I need to unsay anything.
Nov 4th, 2010 by Jessica
It’s true. I played my first game of Candyland by-proxy yesterday. The shrieking player opposite me might have looked a lot like Simon, but the things that he said! Anyone reading this who knows Matt will surely recognize him in the following:
Upon receiving many one-square cards in a row: “Wa-wa-wa [trombone sound]. I keep getting the weakest cards!”
Upon landing on Princess Frostine: “Wassup, Princess?”
Upon landing on licorice and losing a turn: “Oh no! I’m stuck on licorice. I’m doomed!”
After I land on the same spot as him: “The race is on!”
After he gets sent back to the gingerbread space: “The race is not on.”
As he closes in on victory: “I’m going to win! I’m going to crush you!”
The other way I could tell I was playing with mini-Matt was his exaggerated agony (accompanied by a huge smile) when he got sent back to the gingerbread space at the beginning of the board. At the time, he was only one turn from reaching Candyland and beating me handily. In the same spot, I would have just sulked.
Nov 2nd, 2010 by Jessica
“She’s adorable. Where did you get her?”
That little gem was my first taste of what it’s like to be an adoptive mother to a child of color. I’m not, of course, but this is what I look like to the other parents when I carry Agotich to and from her preschool class. The AJ preschool community (Agotich goes to Adath Jeshurun) doesn’t know me, and no one could reasonably think she’s biologically mine. The very first day I carried Agotich down the hall to Ms. Barb’s toddler class, a fellow mother stopper in her tracks and asked me this before spitting out even a cursory greeting.
Even at KIP (Simon’s school), where I am well known, a few have assumed Agotich is mine. I had to bring her inside the building one day to pick up Simon, and more than one person did a double-take. A friendly acquaintance stopped in her tracks, smiled widely, and asked “Now when did this happen? And how did I miss it?” Another, an adoptive mother of a child from a different racial group herself, simply raised her eyebrows and said, “Do you have some news to share?” I just kept smiling and saying “No, no, she’s a friend’s daughter. I just have her on loan.” It was all friendly and benign.
And then I hit someone who knew me well enough to know that I had not added to my family. It started well enough.
“Now who’s this with you?”
“Oh, she’s a friend’s daughter. I have her twice a week because I take her to preschool.”
“Oh. [voice lowers to a hushed whisper] Is she adopted?”
That kind of took the wind out of my sails, betraying as it did the fact that where I live, it’s more likely I would have white friends who completed a trans-racial adoption than simply have African (or African-American) friends. Latent in that whisper was the 40-year effort—and failure—to integrate my hometown. What’s more, I am well aware that were I African or Latina and Agotich white, many of the parents I bump into would simply assume I was her nanny. The racial politics of adoption, real or presumed, is complicated and fraught.*
I’ve had enough of these encounters by now that I’ve created a ranking system for the questions and the askers. Top marks go to the mother who assumed Agotich was mine and asked no questions. She only betrayed her assumption when she said “I don’t have one in diapers any more” in a way that suggested I did. Top honors are shared with the mother who saw me carry Agotich in her classroom room, smiled hugely, and said, “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you! Little Braden [name changed] talks about Agotich all the time!”
I’m even OK with those who inquire, “Now where is your beautiful daughter from?” or the like. It’s nosy, I know, and many adoptive parents rankle at it, but it’s human nature to be curious and I’d probably ask, too. Actually, I did ask someone not too long ago, and we ended up having a very long and cordial chat about work, our cats (this was at the vet), and how he was one of the first Americans to adopt from Gambia. Also, I don’t get asked this question every day of my life, so I’m not worn out by it.
Somehow, though, “Where did you get her?” just rankles, as though a baby is some commodity for which you go shopping. A friend of mine, whose own adoptive daughter belongs to a different racial group and who hears this all the time, suggested a few responses. There was:
“Ebay.”
Which is elegant and gets the job done, but might be more in-your-face than I’d like. Then there was:
“Oh no—she’s mine. Her father is French.”
Which turns expectation on its head in a way I like, but requires a poker face that I lack. And then there was:
“I don’t know. Angelina turned her head and I just grabbed her.”
Which is on the clunky side, and is not my style at all.
It’s taken me two-and-a-half months, and the questions come less frequently now, but I have arrived at a new answer that is easy, natural, and reflective of how I am positioned in the family.
“I’m her Auntie.”
*Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog on the New York Times has run a terrific series on adoption, domestic and international, trans-racial and intra-racial. For anyone interested in the topic, I recommend it highly. There are also interesting posts from biological parents of biracial children. This is where I learned and absorbed the full meaning of the fact that when mom is brown, she’s presumed to be the baby-sitter, and when mom is white, she’s presumed to be an adoptive mother.