Kid Amnesiac

Last year around Easter, my step mom showed up with a huge stuffed bunny for Simon. “Oh, for Easter!” I smiled as I admired the giant white bunny with a bow around its neck.

“Yes,” Ruth replied. “For Easter. But there’s more. You’ll understand later today.”

I would?

Several hours later a giant white bunny made its appearance on the stage at Actor’s Theater of Louisville during their Festival of New American Plays. I smiled broadly at the sight of the thing and the understanding of what Ruth had meant. As it turns out, “Bob” the bunny was the only thing I really liked about the play, “All Hail Hurricane Gordo,” which I otherwise found painful to watch.

Over a year later, Bob the Bunny has become “Baby Bob”, and he has a very special place in our home.

Yes, I did call him baby Bob, and no, that wasn’t a typo.

I guess because of his size, Simon started carrying Bob and tucking him under blankets as though he were a baby. He became a great favorite amid the entourage, and he is frequently tucked in beside Simon at night and during naps.

Lately, though, things have gotten more complicated: Baby Bob has become Simon’s surrogate, and many of Simon’s emotions get projected onto him and then addressed in reference to him.

I can’t pinpoint when this began, but I remember exactly when it reached its full flower. It was about two weeks ago, and Simon had just awoken from a nap and was inconsolable. This is a common occurrence, sufficiently so that Matt and I have a term for it: “difficult re-entry.” Simon has a hard time fully waking up from his afternoon nap and often needs a long time to warm up. If he’s going to be fussy for more than a few minutes, odds are it will happen between his nap and dinner.

By now, we are used to this and we have a recipe for dealing with it. We change his diaper while he cries, we carry him downstairs while he cries, we bring him a glass of water and a fruit bar while he cries, and then we plug him into Curious George or a movie as fast as we can and ignore him for 20-30 minutes, by which time he’s come out of his funk and is our delightful little boy once more.

This routine is effective 99% of the time and lazy 100% of the time. So about two weeks ago, when Simon awoke and seemed to be having a difficult time of it, I had a rare parenting epiphany, picked up Bob, and began to talk to him as though he were Simon.

“Oh, Bob. I’m so sorry honey. I know… I know. It can be really hard to wake up from a nap.”

Simon quit crying and looked over at the scene. I turned to face him.

“Simon, Baby Bob is having a hard time waking up. Do you think you can help him?”

A few sniffles. Tears wiped with the back of his hand. And then, in a tiny voice: “Yeah.”

“What shall we do with Baby Bob? Does he need a hug?”

A little bolder now, and with drying eyes. “Yeah. I hug Baby Bob.”

I handed Bob over to him and had Simon “console” him.

“What about a snack? Shall we go downstairs and give Baby Bob a snack.”

“Yes!” said emphatically this time, with his attention focused solely on Bob.

I then hauled Simon hauling Baby Bob down the stairs, set them beside each other on the couch, went to get a fruit bar, and looked on with surprised delight as Simon “fed” Baby Bob bites of the bar and then gobbled it up himself. The entire difficult re-entry lasted two minutes or less, and I felt much better about the parenting going on.

Since then, we’ve worked through many issues with Baby Bob. Not just naps, but also scary dreams, scary loud noises, and even a few cuts and scrapes.

I’m not sure exactly why this is so effective. I don’t know if Bob is a distraction, or if by having Bob mirror Simon he better understands what he is feeling, or if it’s another mechanism entirely.

I just know that at this point, Simon and I both adore Baby Bob. All hail Bob!

There’s an author I worked with, whom I also consider a friend, who has a son about six months older than Simon, also named Simon. [I swore to him at the time, truthfully, that “Simon” was on our short-list before I learned his son’s name.] We meet up at conferences about twice a year, during which time we catch each other up on what our respective Simons are up to and marvel at how much we’re in love with our sweet little boys.

When we last chatted, Brian was telling me about his son’s memory, and how it’s more developed than he or his wife expected. Specifically, at about two and a half, their Simon began talking about things that happened before he could talk well, things like his early days at pre-school or the day his parents took him out to choose and purchase a doll. “They’re taking in more than you realize,” my friend advised me. “Don’t underestimate him.”

Since that conversation, I’ve been waiting for Simon to regal me with tales of his first day at school or about the time we set up his train, and it hasn’t happened. Except I was made to realize yesterday that it absolutely has happened, I just missed the signs, because my Simon’s memory has manifest itself differently than the other Simon’s did.

We first got clues to this about a week ago, when we were pointing out friends and family in the two framed pictures in our hall. Matt asked Simon to say goodnight to Uncle Ian, Aunt Christine, and little Alise, because they are coming to visit us soon. Simon happily complied with the request, then threw out a goodnight to Shawn, who is also in the picture. Simon hasn’t seen Shawn for over a year, and we’ve only visited where Shawn lives twice. But he immediately gravitated to Shawn when we did visit, he loved playing with him, and he clearly has not forgotten his California buddy.

Then it began happening with books. I got out some books we hadn’t read in several months to refresh our pile, and Simon surprised me by knowing their titles and being able to “read” some of the inside text. This was a more obvious example of memory at work, as it involved rather lengthy recitations of text after a lengthy absence.

And the final shocker came three nights ago. Matt fired up the Winnie the Pooh featurettes we all used to like so much to ward off (yet another) evening of Cars. The final scene is Christopher leaving the Hundred Acre Wood and saying goodbye to his friends, as he is growing up going off to school. The scene is a metaphor for Christopher Robin leaving his childhood behind, and it’s so sweet that I get teary-eyed every time I see it.

Sunday night, when the music and narration that introduces this scene came across the screen, Simon looked up and Matt and said, “Christopher Robin going away now.” He hasn’t seen this movie in at least four months, and he never before discussed or, I thought, even understood the final scene.

He remembered and understood more than I realized, and I did indeed underestimate him. I’m also very grateful for my friend Brian’s advice, as I know it helped me recognize what was happening faster than I otherwise would have. Now I really must call him and see what his Simon is up to so I can get a jump-start on what my Simon will be doing next fall.

Certain sayings are trops of motherhood. Especially of mothers who end up getting quoted.

For example: When you become a mother, you are supposed to love your child more than you have loved anyone ever in your life. That was true enough for me.

You are supposed to feel immensely protective of your child, preferring that harm come your way—be it emotional or physical—than your child’s way. Also true.

Having a child is supposed to make you newly interested in and appreciative of other people’s children if you weren’t so much before. Yup, that is/was true for me.

Becoming a mother is supposed to mean you read the news in a whole new way. Don’t even get me started on that one….

And having a child is supposed to make it hard for you to do or buy things for yourself.

Huh?

I mean, think about it. How often do you see or read something about a “Queen for a day”, where some poor mother who feels guilty spending money on herself or taking five minutes for herself gets new clothes, a new hairstyle, and a weekend away at a spa. Of course, she also feels guilty the whole thing, has a hard time following through, and cries about how hard it is to even consider herself in any equation about family resources. Heck, half the makeovers on What Not to Wear are for moms who have lost sight of themselves. (The other half are for folks whose teenage style should have ended two to five decades ago, if you were curious.)

Who are these people? I may have let myself go and/or adjusted my habits in some regards since Simon came along, but I enjoy (and get) regular pedicures, and I enjoy (and get) time to myself to run errands, knit, read, garden, volunteer, and freelance. (Not as much as I used to, granted, but some.) And by gum I have NO problem at all spending money on myself. Barring a severe financial setback, I have absolutely no plans to keep wearing clothes until they are hopelessly out of style and/or thread-bare, I do not own “Mom” jeans (nor does my mom, for the record), and every two months the brilliant Darryl attends to my hair.

This selfishness is genetic. My mom always looked nice and tended to herself. There was certainly some sacrificing along the way, but you never saw her looking haggard, and you never, ever, see her without her makeup, AKA her “face”, on. And my Bubbie, bless her, insisted on capital “D” dressing at all times, put on make-up twice a day, thought you were naked without earrings, and tended to her eyebrows like monks tend to a shrine.

Notably, both of these women loved being moms. They were happy being moms, they were fulfilled by motherhood, and they were pretty darned good at it, too, raising independent, happy, and respectful children.

All of which makes mommy martyrdom even more mysterious to me. What purpose does it serve? Am I missing a point or justifying selfishness when I assert that if you completely lose yourself in the job, you lose something important and send your children the wrong message about a parent’s worth? I sure hope not, because I just replenished my spring wardrobe, got a haircut, had my toes done, traveled for work, finished a grant for a volunteer project, did some freelance work, and did some gardening. And in the next two weeks, I’ve got a lot more gardening and some painting to do, and several hundred pages of a juicy ghost story to read. No mommy martyr here!