What don’t you do now, little boy. In the last week alone, you mastered walking so well that now you sometimes run. You stand without assistance. You go up stairs confidently. All this has meant that the promised testing of boundaries is well underway. We get to try and fail and fail again at setting boundaries, at maintaining boundaries, at striking the balance between respecting your curiosity and bodily integrity (when we have to physically restrain you) and keeping you from harm.
It is complete chaos—and/or/but I love it. I always wanted a child not like me—no hilahila, extroverted, ready for the new, spirited and unafraid.
Well, I got you, my darling, and you’re very much in the stage of do first, think later. Or maybe that’s not exactly it—for I can often see the wheels turning: what is this, what does it do, it must be cool because Papa or Mama said “no,” so how do I get it, and then what handful of things shall I do with it when they are not looking?
Oh, how I love you, my little boy-o, but in order to deal with this morning, this month, I also need more coffee--or a few martinis, or a vacation, or a staycation to just turn off the mother and turn on a frivolous earlier draft of myself who could sit around all morning reading Murakami if she wanted to. I write these things as you call “mamamamamammamamamama” and bang your head against my chair. Sigh.
Eleven and a half months, beautiful boy, and this month has become dangerous. It has become about showing me how much I can’t and won’t always be there to catch you.
Example: Last saturday was your friend Lexi’s party in Palos Verdes. Her parents rented a mobile pizza oven, the birthday cake was delicious, the decorations tasteful and yet precious. Here you had your first taste of “escargot.” You picked up a garden snail while Mama and several other parents nearby weren’t watching. Papa had already started saying “nonono” and trying to move around crowds of people conversing to get to you—but then it was in your mouth. Let’s just pause there: EWWWWWWWWWWWW. Papa fished it out. Really glad he did that because it would have kind of killed me to pull that out of your mouth. Ew ew ew. Snails and slugs and slippery suches are mama’s kryptonite. Are you going to be that kind of little boy? Really??
Example: today, wherein Mama felt like winner of The Worst Mother Ever award for sure. First, during an important and emotional discussion with Bachan, I realized it was a bit quiet, saw that I had forgotten to secure the child's gate to the second floor, and flew upstairs to find that you had climbed not only the entire first flight of stairs but half of the second. This took no more than two to three minutes. You are really good at going up stairs, but I can't even look the possibility in the eye of what would have happened had you changed your mind and decided to head down again. Later I was trying to get a quick shower in while letting you wander between the master bed and bath, and you were happily throwing toys in the shower at me, and then all of a sudden I had a boy in my shower, head-first, fully clothed, soaking diaper. I had a boy in my shower, red in the face from wailing.
This accounting is not meant to reveal me as the worst mother ever or make any readers call CPS. Because for every instance I describe above, there are a corresponding five times that I managed to be there, that my mama spidey senses kicked in, that I caught you before you fell, I prevented a hurt, I kept you from harm. Example: the time I was meal planning and flew across the living room just in time to catch you mid-roll off the couch--you didn't even wake from your nap. Example: how little time it takes me to round a playground in order to sit you at the top of the slide and catch you at the bottom. Example: I hold your hand and walk a great distance this way but know when you've lost your balance because something changes in the rhythm of your gait, in the grip of your hands. Example. Example. Example.
Let's just put it this way: It is best not to look parenting in the eye before you begin . . . you might be terrified away from the whole enterprise. The way it changes everything else. Like last spring, holding him so new and becoming alert to my own mortality. The strangeness of hoping that someday he will be in the world and I will not, because that will mean we kept him safe. Such strangeness that both comforts and crumples my heart.
Well, I got you, my darling, and you’re very much in the stage of do first, think later. Or maybe that’s not exactly it—for I can often see the wheels turning: what is this, what does it do, it must be cool because Papa or Mama said “no,” so how do I get it, and then what handful of things shall I do with it when they are not looking?
Oh, how I love you, my little boy-o, but in order to deal with this morning, this month, I also need more coffee--or a few martinis, or a vacation, or a staycation to just turn off the mother and turn on a frivolous earlier draft of myself who could sit around all morning reading Murakami if she wanted to. I write these things as you call “mamamamamammamamamama” and bang your head against my chair. Sigh.
Eleven and a half months, beautiful boy, and this month has become dangerous. It has become about showing me how much I can’t and won’t always be there to catch you.
Examples: you have a scratch on your left foot from an overexcited Nahe greeting; a gash on your right brow from falling (from a sitting position!!) off the edge of the picnic blanket onto the stone path at Wayfarer’s Chapel.
Example: on a morning that Papa woke to shower and Mama only half-woke, you stretched and yawned awake where you lay between us, then calmly, casually, rolled over and off the bed.
Example: until recently you would let go of something or other and land flat on your back at least once a day.
Example: another day, you were in the living room or the dining room or the pantry or the tupperware drawer up to your elbows in clean spoons from the dishwasher—that is, I swear you were nowhere near the oven—so how is it that I hear you yelp when touching the one hot part of the preheating oven? I had been chopping sweet potatoes, and all of a sudden you were discovering “hot.” That the world contains the possibility of pain. You were not burned, just startled. It was over in a second: you cried out and then you were in my arms, and then your hands were under cold water and then we were sitting on the floor in the kitchen, nursing away the scare.
Example: Last saturday was your friend Lexi’s party in Palos Verdes. Her parents rented a mobile pizza oven, the birthday cake was delicious, the decorations tasteful and yet precious. Here you had your first taste of “escargot.” You picked up a garden snail while Mama and several other parents nearby weren’t watching. Papa had already started saying “nonono” and trying to move around crowds of people conversing to get to you—but then it was in your mouth. Let’s just pause there: EWWWWWWWWWWWW. Papa fished it out. Really glad he did that because it would have kind of killed me to pull that out of your mouth. Ew ew ew. Snails and slugs and slippery suches are mama’s kryptonite. Are you going to be that kind of little boy? Really??
Example: today, wherein Mama felt like winner of The Worst Mother Ever award for sure. First, during an important and emotional discussion with Bachan, I realized it was a bit quiet, saw that I had forgotten to secure the child's gate to the second floor, and flew upstairs to find that you had climbed not only the entire first flight of stairs but half of the second. This took no more than two to three minutes. You are really good at going up stairs, but I can't even look the possibility in the eye of what would have happened had you changed your mind and decided to head down again. Later I was trying to get a quick shower in while letting you wander between the master bed and bath, and you were happily throwing toys in the shower at me, and then all of a sudden I had a boy in my shower, head-first, fully clothed, soaking diaper. I had a boy in my shower, red in the face from wailing.
This accounting is not meant to reveal me as the worst mother ever or make any readers call CPS. Because for every instance I describe above, there are a corresponding five times that I managed to be there, that my mama spidey senses kicked in, that I caught you before you fell, I prevented a hurt, I kept you from harm. Example: the time I was meal planning and flew across the living room just in time to catch you mid-roll off the couch--you didn't even wake from your nap. Example: how little time it takes me to round a playground in order to sit you at the top of the slide and catch you at the bottom. Example: I hold your hand and walk a great distance this way but know when you've lost your balance because something changes in the rhythm of your gait, in the grip of your hands. Example. Example. Example.
Let's just put it this way: It is best not to look parenting in the eye before you begin . . . you might be terrified away from the whole enterprise. The way it changes everything else. Like last spring, holding him so new and becoming alert to my own mortality. The strangeness of hoping that someday he will be in the world and I will not, because that will mean we kept him safe. Such strangeness that both comforts and crumples my heart.
1 comment:
LOVED this! Hope you don't mind that I shared out to FB, but I just adore reading these Waika letters; it makes me feel like I know him as well as I know you!
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