growing
It's cold. It's raining. And we've been inside for what seems like forever. What to do? Go to the children's museum.
We haven't take the Boy, and the Girl, while she went with her class last year, went with us when she was only a little older the Boy. And the result? What fun!
E has wanted Mater from Cars for so long that he grew desperate: he began calling any of his cars that looked vaguely like a tow truck "Mater." And he found a car to substitute for Ramon as well.
But as of tonight, he no longer has to pretend. He's got the real thing. And when he received it, he showed once again a sweet peculiarity in his personality: no child I've ever seen shows joy and gratitude as unreservedly as the Boy.
"Oh thank you!" he gushed. "It's wonderful!"
We played hide and seek for a bit this evening -- historically a simple game with the Girl. Always so easily frightened, she would hide in the same places, places that felt safe and relatively near people, again and again, and it was never really all that difficult to find her. It was even easier when she was a toddler and would reply to the standard "Ready or not, here I come!" with a confirmation: "I'm ready!"
Today, playing with the Boy, we couldn't find her. I directed the Boy to look in all the usual places, but she was in none of the usual places.
"Could she have dared to go downstairs?" I asked the Boy rhetorically, for his standard answer these days is "Yep."
But we kept looking, adding a few new places. In her closet. Under K's and my bed. Under the Boy's bed. Finally, it was time for dinner, and we gave up. But I knew one trick to get her out: turn off all the upstairs lights.
And as I headed downstairs, there she was, in the hall closet, where she'd never hidden before. Where I would have never thought to look because imagining her closing herself in a tight dark space was simply unimaginable.
An eight-year-old is braver than a seven-year-old, it seems. A second-grader is able to keep quiet for a lot longer than a first-grader, it seems.
Long gone are the days when she was the first to wake up, probably because the days she was the first to go to bed are equally long gone. Nine, nine-thirty has been her wake-up time the last few days.
She built patiently, planning each move, checking, pulling apart, rebuilding. She had a vision — at least an evolving one — and she worked to fulfill it. In her typical fashion, she took a break from building to organize all available components, presumably because she was tired of the try-and-search method. She made the structure as symmetrical as the available components would allow.
And it was another example of what amazes me about our daughter: she can be so incredibly hyper that you’d think she couldn’t focus on anything for more than two seconds. Yet she brings home perfect grades from school, can sit and read for hours, loves to lose herself in painting, and has developed a recent fascination with building (more Legos are high on her Christmas wish list).
The Boy, on the other hand, had only one thing in mind: knocking it all down. In fact, he joyfully did just that to the Girl’s first attempt, causing much consternation on her part (read: a minor breakdown) and much laughter on his part, until, the sensitive soul that he is, he realized that he’d hurt L.
Yet he did it again. It’s what being two is all about. But it cost him: his newest car went into time out, causing him much consternation (read: complete breakdown).
Finally, he got the car back, L had the structure rebuilt, and after a quick photo session — that the Girl herself requested — it was time.
Before E came alone, we warned L that, although she would certainly love him to death, there would be times that little brother would be positively infuriating. “You’ll make something,” we explained as an example, “and he’ll come along and destroy it.” Occasionally, though, it’s just what they both want.
First there was the tea party. The prototypical cliche little girl game, the tea party has never really been a frequent occurrence in our house. I'm not sure why it made an appearance today. But there they were, all sipping tea.
Then there was the homework. Reading comprehension. "Go back to the text," I reminded L time and time again. "Go back to the text. Don't try to answer the question from memory." And so as the Girl progresses through school, the things I say in the classroom start popping up during the homework sessions.
Finally, the kids in bed, K and I turn to cooking. "We haven't had rosół in a while," K said some time ago, and so tonight we cook that Polish favorite that's really an international soup. After all, what is pho in essence but chicken noodle soup, which is exactly what rosół is. Sort of.
F. Boyle, in his homily during the vigil Mass yesterday, spoke of being haunted by our former selves, of casting a backward glance over our shoulders at our younger selves and feeling shame, feeling disgust, or framed positively, feeling we'd grown. It reminded me of my own past, in more than one way. Just this week I was glancing through old journal entries, thinking to myself, "My my, how could anyone put of with my arrogance?"
It was around that time when I first read Bill Brown's "Strangers." I'd worked as an intern at a poetry review just before graduating college, and one snowy afternoon in Poland a couple of years later, I received a package of recent publications from the editors. Among them was The Art of Dying.
Strangers
Seventeen split my tongue
like a pet crow's, shrill,
mimicking, irreverent,
ignorant, and shamed.My glances were foul
balls, my hopes were
shooting stars, I was
batting zero.I ate spaghetti
with a pitchfork, picked my teeth
with an ax, wrecked more cars
than a test dummy.I measured out love
with tweezers, was as humble
as a chainsaw, and when my sincerity
was challenged,cracked open my heart
like a coconut, the pure
sweet insides for all
to taste and marvel.My hands were foxes,
my thoughts shot blanks,
my smile was as sweet
as plastic grapes. My dreams were strangers
who stood on a dark bridge
hiding their eyes from
the sun.I was angry at my dead
father, I was hunting
Jesus on the cover
of record albums.And one of the strangers
on the bridge? It was just
me three years older, tongue
sewed together,mouth clamped shut,
army-mummed, staring down
on seventeen, wonder where
the hell I'd come from.
So as Fr. Boyle spoke, I thought of that poem, thought of the "I" who first read them, how much more like strangers I was compared to him than Brown's speaker could ever be as a twenty-year-old looking back at his seventeen-year-old self. So many changes that I'm almost embarrassed to meet myself in my journal entries. So full of myself, so sure I was so painfully intelligent, so superior to so many.
And then, out of the blue, I thought of a band that I'd once had a flickering interest in, a band that I bought one single album by and decided instantly that I didn't really like them at all, began wondering why I even bought the album as the band -- the Sugarcubes -- never really received much airplay. A little research and I found the "hit" from the album I bought was a little number called "Regina."
A few clicks on Spotify and I was listening to it again, wondering why in the world I'd bought an album that, as far as I could tell, didn't have a single redeeming song on it, an album that is to me today a laughable piece of trash. Undoubtedly one of the worst albums ever recorded. But when it came out in '88 or '89, I thought it was decent. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it. Part of that was, I guess, not wanting to have the feeling that I wasted money on a CD that I'd never listen to again.
All these things were tumbling around in my head this afternoon when we went out to the park after essentially an entire weekend in the house. A sick mother, a semi-sick daughter, a recovering father, and a boy with a seemingly endlessly running nose simply need to stay inside and rest, but that is ironically tiring. So off we went this afternoon for a little time in a new park. I found myself wondering how I'd view my forty-year-old self in another twenty-five or so years. Would I see myself as I see my late-teen self? My early-twenties self? It seems both likely and impossible.
Sometimes it seems life with the Boy and the Girl is on fast forward. This is especially true of the Boy, now that he’s talking and giving us more than the mere glimpses we used to get into his developing intelligence and personality. This morning, as I was preparing coffee to take to work, I hear,
“Daddy, can I try it?”
It’s a common refrain: the Boy wants to try everything. In that sense, he’s the polar opposite of L, who hates to try anything new.
“No, little man, this is coffee. It’s hot, and it’s got caffeine. You’re too young to drink it.”
He thought for a little while, then asked hesitatingly, as he often does when he’s turning something over in his thoughts as he speak, “But when I’m bigger?”
Fast forward to the post-dinner cleanup. K was talking to the Boy and for some reason — some of those little conversations start so harmlessly insignificantly that it’s difficult to recreate them in the evening — said something like “B, as in bottle, as in big, as in…” At which point the Boy took over, with boy, baby, and a few others.
With me heading back to school for another year on the more difficult side of the desk, E has had to return to daycare. He’s not happy about it. These first two days have been tough on K as she takes him, for he cries when arrives, and today he began the tears even before we left. He’ll get over it, for sure: he’s sociable, and all the teachers say he’s been interacting with the kids well, playing, sharing.
There’s always a bit of guilt we as parents feel as we drop off our child to be cared for by strangers. Yes, E knows them; yes, E loves at least one of them silly. But they’re still strangers. We would not know these people were we not paying them to take care of E while we’re at work. The irony of the modern world: we have all these time saving devices, but we end up just working more. Were it not for our desire — no, our need — to head back to Poland on a regular basis, our desire to make sure our children stay connected to their roots, would K continue working? I know where her heart is.
And yet, doesn’t some good come from this? After all, the Boy is going to have to head to school at some point. This is good preparation for that. L went through the same program and entered kindergarten solidly prepared.
There must be a balance somewhere.
L is a picky eater -- no doubt about it. Certainly she has some odd tastes, odd by the average American girl standards, I think. Still she can throw us a curve ball, protesting something that seems so logical for her to life. Soup is always a hit with her, but K's tomato soup from yesterday wasn't a hit. Not sure why: it used to be a big hit. But it wasn't. And it wasn't any better tonight when we finished up the leftovers. She basically ate next to nothing, leaving almost a whole bowl of soup. Granted, she got nothing else for the evening with the understanding that she would have to finish the soup before she could have anything else. Nothing.
Tonight, during prayers, we reached "Give us this day our daily bread," and I pointed out to L that she would get that soup back at breakfast. "We're not going to waste food, especially when it's something that you used to like and eat willingly. She fussed, predictably, but then, thinking about reading the news and the horrors occurring in Syria and Iraq as ISIS sweeps through and imposes strict Islamic law, committing their own brand of ethnic cleansing, I decided to give the Girl a little perspective.
"L, there are children in a country called Iraq now who are literally dying because they don't get food or water."
"Why?"
Brief overview appropriate for a seven-year-old, includes terms like "bad people" and oversimplification.
"So these children are so hungry, L, that you could spill that soup on the floor, and they would willingly lap it up like they were animals."
Silence. Wide eyes.
"You're lucky: you fuss about being given something you don't want to eat. These children, if they had the energy to fuss, would fuss about not having anything to eat. At all."
We'll see tomorrow what happens. I'm hopeful, but I know how stubborn L is. Besides, that "kids starving in [insert country]" argument seems rarely to work.