MamaStories

We were looking for a good example to draw from, and I pulled out the huge tome about Paintings in the Louvre Museum that DH and I lugged home all the way from Paris. We leafed through and as the book starts with art from the Middle Ages, the predominant image was of Jesus on the Cross.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“His name is Jesus.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He is nailed to the cross.”

“Why?”

“Because people didn’t like what he said,” I said (making it up as I went along).

“Is that his blood?”

“Yes.”

She was fascinated. She leafed through the entire 1000-pager looking for more Jesus-on-the-Cross. She asked questions about details, like if he had a ledge to stand on or not. Then she also got interested in Jesus as a baby.

“There must be a picture of Jesus on the Cross as a baby,” she said. “I think that also happened.”

A couple of days later Amie was ready to draw Jesus. We got out our Hildegarde von Bingen book, from which she had already drawn Cultivating the Cosmic Tree and as expected she chose an image of Jesus on the Cross.

She drew the body and head of Jesus first, then the outstretched arms, and then she gave him a big smile.

I asked: “Really? Is he smiling, do you think?”

She looked closely. “No,” she said, confused. She always draws her human figures with a smile.

I suggested she keep that drawing but use it in another picture, and we found Christ Sits in Judgment.

“But he is sitting here,” Amie protested.

Then she solved the problem herself, by drawing a line across the figure’s body to indicate his knees. Then she spent a lot of time on all the circles that envelop him.

After a couple of days, when she again asked to see the big book with Jesus on the Cross (again without any prompting by me), I asked her: “Do you want me to tell you the story of Jesus?”

The answer was an eager yes. I should have prepared better, I think I made a mighty mess of it! Especially the question “Who’s God?” got me all muddled. But she was interested. Later that day she came to me and said:

“You know, in Jesus’ time, they called Jesus ‘Mama’. Did you know that? Some people called him ‘Mama’.”

How strange!

We’re all sick.

Amie came down with a cold on Friday. She often has a bit of a runny/sneezy nose in the mornings, and Friday morning was no different, except that she didn’t want to go to school. She loves her preschool, but only gets “fully committed” when she is actually there, or after she has come home. Getting her ready and over there and especially over the threshold – especially when it’s me who’s doing the drop-off – is a less enthusiastic affair.

I asked her: “Are you feeling sick?” She said: “Yes”.  She had no fever, though I caught her shivering a bit – but then this was the first really chilly morning of the season. Was she “faking it”? I doubted she could. Can they, at her age (3.3)? I explained to her about lying, and about how important and fun school is, and how much it costs and Baba needs to work for paying for it, and that Mama also needs to work in the mornings. I explained what “feeling sick” means. Etc.  She still said she was sick.

By that moment in the conversation we had reached the school gate and the teacher  was inviting us in. Amie did the usual thing of clinging to me, but unusually she didn’t let herself be persuaded. I decided to bring her home.

On the way back home I was torn: was she faking it not to have to go to school? Or was she sick? Either way, I realized, I was sunk!

I remember faking it myself. I did that quite often because I didn’t have a happy school life for the most part.  I remember also the despair of my mom on those occasions. She sort of seemed to know, I thought, or at least I persuaded myself so I didn’t have to feel too guilty about it. My woes at school always seemed to legitimize my duplicity to myself, but still there was always my mom’s quiet sadness. Was it because she had work to do at home and I would be in the way, or because she knew the sad reasons for my faking it, or because in the end it meant she had to be unsure now whenever I claimed to be sick, and it made her judgment of the real situation so perilous…

Driving my child back home from school, I finally understood.

In a couple of hours it became clear she was really sick, so though I felt very sad for Amie, I also felt relieved.

It quickly deteriorated into something worse.  Yesterday I thought we might have to run to the ER because her breathing was very shallow and rapid, and the wheezing and rumbling in her chest was alarming. I watched her closely as she slept for most of the day. When awake she was so fully invested into getting enough air into her lungs that she didn’t speak all day, not a singly word except for “tissue”, until after a nap at 5 pm. Then she suddenly perked up with a feverish energy, and she couldn’t stop talking and singing for a while, in a high-pitched, trembling, short-of-breath voice that broke my heart. But she was breathing easier, and today, though she is still sick, and vomited up what little she finally ate, I know she has turned the page on this one.

Not so hubby, who lies moaning in bed. And I also have a runny nose. I’m fighting it, though, by frenetically vacuuming the house, cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry and turning over the compost while Amie is asleep. Which she is now, on the sofa next to me,  rumbling and snoring away while I blog.

How about you? How does it make you feel when you suspect your child is faking it? How do you remember it from your own childhood?

Amie started asking “Why?” a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t stopped. Some of her why-s are genuine questions, asked out of curiosity, but many (more, I suspect) are not. It’s fascinating and annoying and often a challenge. I find myself in conversations like these:

• Amie, please don’t make that mess.
• Why?
• Why do you think?
• (Silence. Reads her book. Obviously wasn’t a genuine question. Let’s pursue:)
• Hmmmmm? Why do you think? Amie? Why do you think?

Or:

• Mama, why do you need a spoon?
• Why do think?
• I don’t know.
• Yes, you do. Why do you think I need a spoon?
• To stir your tea?
• Yes! See, so you knew why all along. So there was no need for you to ask why at all!

My response depends on my estimation of her reason for asking. These are many, and not readily discernible!

1. She wants to know: e.g., “Why is it dark?”
2. She’s curious about the wider topic: “Why is X crying?”
3. She’s not really interested, she’s just asking for the sake of talking/pronouncing words/uttering sounds, like singing
4. It’s a game, she’s playing with language and that most intriguing and versatile of words (why yes: “why”)
5. It’s a reflex, like in the examples above (mostly when she just asks “why?”, without elaborating the full question)
6. She just wants to get attention and the annoying aspect is unintentional
7. She wants to get attention by being annoying
8. She just wants to annoy

Can you think of other reasons? I’m sure there’s many more, just like there are many possible responses:

1. “Because our part of the earth is slowly turning away from the sun and so the sun can’t shine on our place anymore and it gets dark. Then it’s night. But tomorrow morning our place will be turning back to the sun and so it will become light again. Then it will be day again. Here, wait, lemme me look it up in this en-cy-clow-pee-dia.”
2. “Why do you think?” as a conversation starter: “Because she banged her knee? Remember that day when I got that booboo?”
3. “Is that a real why? Do you really want to know?”
4. “Why do you think?” as a Ha! Gotcha back! But this doesn’t work very long (“No, Mama, what do you think?”)
5. “Why what?” “I don’t understand your question, please eee-la-bo-raate“. This might make her understand that the why-question must be respected and asked in earnest.
6. “Why are you asking? Is it because you need a hug? A kiss? A gobble?”
7. “Because that’s how they made it.” Also not a why?-stopper for long (and rightly so?)”
8. “Because I said so!” This often deserves a new why in return.
9. “Because Mama knows best!” This is sometimes legitimate, e.g., to “Why should I hold you hand on the busy street?”
10. “That’s a really stupid question!”: this in my view is a no-no. She might think she is stupid for asking it! A stupid way to go, really.
11. “That’s enough questions for now” or “I’m all out of answers”.
12. “Mama can’t answer anymore, sweetie, I’ve got a headache.” If followed by a genuine “Why?”, answer truthfully. If not, go to next alternative:
13. Silence (turn up the radio volume)

There must be a lesson in this… I guess it’s live with it, make the best of it, and make sure you don’t discourage the real why questions.

But then there’s also this:

Listen, I’m a philosopher (I alway say: “student of philosophy”) by training, and what really, really bugs me about this incessant why? is that often it is the wrong question. What Amie wants to know is not why?, but how?!

It’s the difference between causes and reasons, people!

• How does it work? = what causes this to happen? “The lever pushes the wheel. That’s how it turns.” (Domain of science and technology)
• Why does it work? = what motivates something or someone, what is the purpose? “The turning wheel makes the toy cars go round. That why it turns.” (Domain of morality and psychology)

Now how am I going to explain that one to a two-year-old? I guess I could start with:

“Why? Oh, you mean how come? Well…”

I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini.

I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read that now?”. But I am unashamed, because I’m a writer. It gives me the license to “imagine things” without having to be embarrassed about it. So, yes, I’ve imagined the worst for Amie: what if she died, what if I died, what if her father died? I’ve “lived” through these scenarios, and would like to, one day, write a novel about one of them and really explore such an event.

But I read these books first of all because, as any mother, I want to know what to do, or I want DH to know what to do, if Amie experiences a loss. I want to be prepared. Being a bookish person I naturally reach for texts, and find there my knowledge and my hope.

One of the first tasks of mourning, writes Trozzi, is understanding: understanding what death is. Not “going to sleep”, “passing away,” “going to heaven” or “being lost. Death is a physical process that ends everything that we call “human” that attaches to a person’s body. A child needs to understand that, and we need to stop using euphemisms. If a child doesn’t understand the most basic meaning of death, he or she will never be able to deal with loss, will never be able to mourn.

As I read that, I realized I had already started this task with Amie. For one, as I wrote earlier, I don’t want her to be ignorant of where her food comes from: that beef was a cow, that sausage was a pig, the wood in the hearth was a tree, etc.

But it has gone further. Many months ago Amie had repeated nightmares about a dinosaur. She woke up screaming and often would refuse to close her eyes again, because there was a dinosaur in the room, or it was coming. The way we helped her through this fearful time was by simply telling her that the dinosaurs are dead.

“What’s ‘dead’?”

“Dead means the dinosaur can’t move, can’t walk. Dead means he can’t talk, or listen, or look. Dead means his body is lying in the ground somewhere, buried, often even crushed to pieces. So he can’t get up and come here.”

She was quite resourceful. She said:

“But this dinosaur isn’t dead.”

“That’s not possible. All dinosaurs are dead. That’s why we call them a special word: ‘extinct’. ‘Extinct’ means that all the dinosaurs, without exception, are dead. So no dinosaur can come here.”

Sure, she was the only 2,5-year-old who knew the meaning of (and could pronounce) ‘extinct’. But hey, I believe in the power of words (and of their definitions, and of their correct application to the things in the world). And this was one clear-cut example of that power. Amie’s nightmares stopped.

Amie has been having nightmares about a dinosaur coming into the bedroom at night. It has spurred us to investigate whether she understands the difference between what is real and what is not, or “fake”. It is a good idea – we agree with several child developmental specialists – to make sure she does understand.

Baba was convinced she knows the difference already, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not because she knows the words that she knows what they mean. So he asked her.

- Baba: Amie, is Monsters, Inc. real?

- Amie: Yes.

- Baba: Okay, yes, the movie is real. But is what happens in the movie real, or fake?

- Amie: Fake.

- Baba gestures triumphantly: See?

- Amie adds spontaneously: Boys are fake too.

Ha!

The next morning at breakfast we broached the subject again.

- Baba: Amie, am I real, or fake?

- Amie: You not real and you are not fake, you are just a boy.

We have a lot of work ahead of us and I so look forward to it!

Turns out Baba is just as much a softie as I am. When we went to bed after yesterday’s ordeal, I found Amie had finally fallen asleep in her own little bed. We lay there on our big bed for a minute or two, then I whispered: “I wish she were here with us…” He said, without hesitation: “You pick her up and I’ll get her pillow.” Soon we were all snuggled up together. Back to normal.

And today, this:

She calls it “Membery” or “Rememory”. It’s the first and so far only board game Amie has played!

Someone gave it to us. I am not fond of Dora – I don’t like the art (call me a snob), and while reading a story to another child I found careless gaps in the plot, while it was supposed to teach logic! So I hid it.

Unfortunately, Amie’ discovered an episode of Dora on the plane to Singapore, and during that ride she must have watched it 20 times (curiously, she didn’t want the headphones). Not since then: not on tv or in books – I’ve managed to keep Dora away.

Of course Amie found the game in my “squirelly cupboard”, where I keep books and games that are too old for her still. She wanted to know what it was.

I told her: it’s a memory game. With Dora.

“Let’s play it!” she called.

I was skeptical about whether she would be interested in anything more than the cards, and if so, whether she would get frustrated because it is too difficult for it. But it was worth a try.

I told her the rules of the game – so simple: “Find the match and you get to keep the cards!” Then I taught her to point to each card in a pair, naming them (“Dora, Dora! Monkey, monkey! Chicken, chicken!) and then to take one last hard look before they are turned around. I ask her: “Ready?” She looks with burning concentration, then says: “Yes!”

First we played with 6 cards – 3 pairs in 2 rows. Way too easy! Soon I added a pair: 8 cards – 4 pairs in 2 rows… Well, you know the rules are that the youngest begins each game and that she loses her turn only if she makes a mistake. Let’s just say that in the end, she had nearly all the cards (of which there are 72) in her box.

Then she got careless – we had been playing nonstop for over 30 minutes – and didn’t get the match. She gladly let me take my turn, but when I found the match and wanted another turn, oh no!

Funny how they dazzle you with their intellectual skills, their fabulous memory, intense concentration and grownup language at the age of two… but they fall apart when such little things don’t go their way. It truly reveals how there are so many sides to a child’s development, not just if she knows her letters or can draw between the lines. As for the matters of the will, or emotional development, or character: aren’t they matters of experience, of maturity?

Amie has been around for a little over two years, how could I expect her to be mature about it? I gave her a big hug, let her take over again, and we decided that, for the time being, Amie has all the turns in Memory.

I’m sitting in the living room, it’s 9:30 pm. And I am listening to Amie screaming that she wants Mama to lie next to her and that she wants to go see Mama.

DH has been ill for a week so he has been sleeping in the guest room/study and has also not been putting Amie to bed at night – I usually do the nap. This evening is the first time he is putting her back to bed and she is hysterical.

The first time she climbed out of the bed I heard him say: “Mama will be angry with you.” This seemed to stall her – the thought of angering me?! – and she stood in the corridor, at the bedroom door, screaming pathetically, not knowing what to do.

I went to her, gave her a hug and explained calmly that it was Baba’s turn to take her to bed and I was right nearby. I carried her to the bed and she resumed her crying. Baba was a bit upset that I hadn’t been angry like he had said.

I felt I shouldn’t be angry with her. I wanted to be supportive (“I know you can do it”) and sympathetic (“I know how you feel”), but also decisive (“I am not coming to bed, you have to go to sleep with Baba”).

I feel Amie and I have become very close this last week, perhaps due to Baba’s semi-absence, perhaps due to her having a high-fever flu over the weekend and spending a lot of time close to me. She comes to give me hugs and kisses more often, more intensely too – harder squeezes, bone-crushing snuggles, softer kisses, the expression on her face always almost one of pain and worry. I hadn’t thought she would also have separation anxiety. Her babysitter came this morning and she let me go off to work without a thought…

Now she is coming out again and I am resolved to sit here in the sofa and not give her a hug. Can I smile

…

I didn’t give her a hug, kept a neutral face, and told her to go back and no, not climb onto the sofa next to me. Baba was right behind her and for a moment we were at an impasse. Amie sobbing in the middle of the living room, me on the sofa trying to keep my cool, Baba in the corridor looking in not knowing what to do.

I could tell he didn’t think I was being firm enough. I told him to pick her up and hug her – as I was evidently prohibited from doing – and to carry her up and down the corridor a couple of times.This seemed to work: she calmed down, probably because she could see me each time they passed by the living room. But then she began to insist she sleep next to me on the sofa – which she did when she was sick – and we were back at square one.

Baba carried her back to the bedroom and closed the bedroom door. She is now screaming even more hysterically and I heard her pulling on the doorknob but Baba must have brought her back to the bed.

Now it’s 10:10 and she is still crying, but calmer, or more exhausted. It reminds me of along period months ago, when she was having such separation anxiety it was almost debilitating to herself and all around her. She screamed when she was dropped off at daycare, when Baba tried to put her to sleep, even when I left the room, and we couldn’t get a babysitter…. She screamed so badly at nap in daycare that we changed her to a mornings-only schedule, which helped tremendously (sleep seems to be a factor here). We stopped the Baba every-other-day bedtime to an only-Baba-bedtime, and after a couple of bad evenings (never as bad as this), it became her routine. We went to Singapore and India where she was kind and open to so many people… When she came back to daycare they called her “a different Amie!”

She needs to be up early to go to daycare. The practical part of me says to just go in and take over and, exhausted as she is, she will be asleep in 5 minutes. The wife part of me feels for Baba – though it is also somewhat upset at his berating me for being too soft – and wants to respect Baba’s belief that if I do that, it will give her the message that screaming will get her what she wants. That’s a belief I subscribe to… but in this situation? The Mama part of me says: just go, go! Then: no, wait! If you go you might precipitate another bout of separation anxiety…

Now she is quiet. Is she asleep?

How to love and nurture your child and also make sure that her love is not so exclusively of you? I want her to love others, for their sake, of course, but for hers first of all. Because what if something happened to me? What if one day I’m not there for her, and the only way she could stop crying is from exhaustion? I think of that possibility every day. I know it happens. But why do I feel that I have to be prepared for that – that I have to prepare her for that?

Why is it is so damn painful! How can something so soft be so damn hard!

It’s 10:20 now and still quiet. Can I go in yet and hug her?

I haven’t slept two nights in a row now. It’s like back in the newborn days, with one difference: Amie sleeps. But I don’t. What’s going on?

For over two years now we have been cosleepers (“sharers of the family bed”). Many time I have thought of writing a co-sleeping entry or article about how I love it, and how it is a privilege and a joy for all three of us. It is however such a complex, and emotional issue, that I never found the words for it.

Now, if I don’t hurry and write something about our it, I might never do so, because…

On Saturday we bought Amie a bed.

Well, a mattress, really, crib-sized, since an actual bed – even the smallest one – wouldn’t fit into our bedroom.

We had been talking about it, but not at all insisting. On occasion we asked Amie: “Do you want your own bed?”, like this or that friends of hers. She always said no, and we always let it go.

But on Saturday morning DH said: let’s go and have a look, it can’t hurt to have a look. So we drove to IKEA and roamed around the baby-toddler’s bed section. It was a propitious moment, because Amie got to witness at least two other girls, “much” older than she (5 and 6?), enthusiastically try out all the beds, voice their opinions and dreams, and choose one.

After her nap, we set up the mattress next to our own bed. We made a big deal about the sheet and the box with the books and the pillows and the blanket, and she was so excited.

“I am going to sleep in my own bed!” she kept insisting. “I have a big girl bed now.” “I am a big girl. I little bit big and a little bit small!”

Throughout the day she visits her bed – “I want to go see my own bed”. She sits down on it to read a book to her bear, or pretends to sleep  – “I woked up!” - or straightens the blanket.

We told her: “You can sleep in your own bed. And if ever you want to sleep in the big bed with Mama and Baba, that’s ok too.” We want her to know that.

But she’s all for it! She slept in it, that very evening! DH lay down next to her – it’s tiny but quite comfortable – and she went to sleep as usual. She even slept till 5 am, without waking up at all. Then I lay down next to her for 15 minutes and she was off again, till we got up.

Last night was a different story: a night terror and the fact that she had refused to take a nap in the afternoon ruined her night. When she woke up for the third time I didn’t get down but just patted her from my vantage point above her. She scootched over and patted the space next to her and said:

“Mama come down lie next to me. This is a big bed for you to sleep in too.”

I explained I wanted to sleep in my own bed, just like her. She was probably too tired to insist and went back to sleep.

But I haven’t slept at all. Our bed seems too big. There’s something missing. I keep expecting her to wake up, and she’s not within finger’s reach – she is within arm’s reach, but comparatively that is about ten times as far away than she’s used to. Than I’m used to.

Maybe writing about why I miss sharing our bed, now that it’s over - and why I think it’s a good idea right now, as long as she’s up for it – will help me sort out what I want to say about the issue…

• Thoreau’s gift to me 

Walking around “Walrus Pond” the other day, I had that great feeling of belonging. I haven’t gone there often (this was my third or fourth visit in the ten years that I live here), and perhaps that is why it is each time so special.

I’ve read Thoreau, of course, lots of it. He was the one who gave me a way to feel at home in this country, especially in this part of the country. I used to feel so homesick for the medieval cathedrals and the old Roman antiquity of Europe, but Thoreau gave me a wonderful alternative: nature, wildness. Walden Pond now exemplifies an America where I feel welcome, at home, wholesome.

• Amie investigates belonging

I noticed that Amie, at the beginning of two, is looking into “belonging” as well. When building towers with her blocks ( a relatively new development: she discovered the blocks box a couple of days ago and spontaneously started building)  she will ask, of a block: “Where does it live?”

She knows where she lives: “I live in Boston” or “I live in Brookline library”. And where some of her friends live, “in New York”, “in Washington DC” (all names she can pronounce without a problem), “and that is far away”.

In November we are getting on a plane to travel to exactly the other side of the globe to visit grandparents. I am so curious to see how much she will understand of distance, and family.

• A different kind of belonging

She is also working on a different sense of belonging  – though I would like to think about just how different they are.

When I was about to drink from DH’s glass – we share a glass during dinner; question of less dishes, and less loading and unloading dishes – she stopped me and said: “No, Mama! That’s Baba’s!” It was a great opportunity for a Spiel about sharing and “thank you” and “you’re welcome”.

She will also hold out a piece of food from her plate to me and say: “You want it, Mama? I’ll share it with you, I’ll give it to you.”

• Amie at Home

It is a great privilege to witness her forging a sense of place, finding words for home, and physical spaces, trying out different relationships, figuring out which people belong there, with her.

It is my job to make her feel at home and to show her that she can be at home in other places as well: to give her not one particular physical place, but an anchor.

A mobile anchor. 

This anchor is herself and her nearest family, and a feeling of home that she can take with her wherever we go.

Practically, I’m thinking of a feeling of safety. Routines are a key part of that now that she is a two-year-old with a growing sense of entitlement, expectation and time (it strikes me now that so much of place is really time).  We have sound bedtime and potty routines, we always have breakfast and dinner together, and we each have “jobs” that we do no matter what (Baba drop her off at daycare, she plays and has fun, and I pick her up).

Most of these routines we can take with us, wherever we go.

• A Family on the Move

When (and where) I grew up it wasn’t necessary for parents to take this issue under such conscious consideration. Home and place were unproblematic and often taken for granted. I moved once, as a child, and then only two kilometers from our old house.

But we are not that kind of family. We will always be traveling, if only to see our families scattered across the globe. Our jobs are not as secure as my parents’ jobs were. And who knows how much we’ll be on the move, given what the future will bring…

As you can see, Amie has been painting – you can also see her in action in my previous post.  And as promised, here is some of her artwork (my favorites):

I apologize for the terrible photographs. I’ve been waiting for a clear day to take pictures of them without a flash (they’re on large format, so I can’t scan them in), but the weather has been gray so down here in the basement it’s been even grayer.