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Sophie and I had a too-busy weekend. Aquarium, Hullabaloo concert, birthday party, playgrounds… On top of all that rushing about to kids’ activities, Sophie didn’t sleep well at night. She was up for two-hour stretches at a time, every night for the last three nights. If there were 2 parents around, the one who did the night-time parenting could at least sleep in, each morning. But there’s only me and I am exhausted.
I went walking on the beach by myself on Sunday morning, taking a much-needed sanity-break while our neighbor watched Sophie — and I looked so sad that a total stranger told me she would pray for me.
Ben will be home in 10 days, and then we’ll have the new adventure of re-adjusting to life together, after this latest 2-month absence. Ben has missed a total of 5 months of Sophie’s life, since she’s been born, for his various adventurous trips. I am starting to get very very angry about this.
Sophie is obsessed with Hullabaloo, a kids’ band that she calls “Hello Balloon.”
Whenever we get in the car, she wants to hear Hullabaloo. Not even their whole CD: just the first five songs, again and again. Whenever I play a CD at home, she wants it to be Hullabaloo. And whenever I turn on the computer, this is what she wants to see:
So I face every parent’s dilemma: do I feed this obsession, or starve it?
This morning she asked me to get down her ukulele so she could play along with Hullabaloo man. How could I not encourage that? So I looked up their next local concert (yes, they’re a local band), and took her to it. It was their new CD release party, in downtown San Diego, and while she was there she got a signed poster that is now going to be hanging above her bed.
I could conceivably take her to 3 Hullabaloo Concerts this week. But I don’t think I’m that obsessed, at least not yet. Still, I can’t get these songs out of my head.
There was a creature in my backyard, hissing at my cat. It was the size of an extra-big housecat, but it had a rat-like-tail, evil-raccoon-like-hands, and the mouth of a tiny crocodile, full of frighteningly pointed teeth. From the way it was gnashing those pointy teeth at my one remaining cat, I think this creature might have been Stripey’s killer.
It didn’t flinch when I threw Sophie’s biggest ball at it, a four-foot-wide purple plastic ball.
It didn’t flinch when I nudged it with a broomstick. In fact, while I went to get a shovel, this teeth-gnashing creature slinked ever closer to the patio where Sophie was sitting. I had put my cat inside, but it hadn’t occurred to me to also put my toddler inside.
Sophie said, “I’m scared. It scares me in my bellybutton.”
What kind of creature comes out in broad daylight and doesn’t flee from a shouting, ball-throwing, broom-wielding Momma? I scooped this nasty thing up with the garden shovel, and it wriggled off, but it did finally take a step or two away. Then it stopped again. Stupid crazy probably-rabid creature. Eventually, I got it on the shovel and pitched it over our fence, out of our backyard. Then I placed stones below the fence, vainly trying to seal up the many gaps that any creature can crawl through. Then I moved Sophie and her dinner inside.
From my shovel-throw, the creature had landed in the ice-plant outside our backyard fence. It lay there a while, maybe dazed, maybe injured. Maybe just playing possum. Because when I checked google images, that’s what it turns out this aggressive creature was: an opossum.
When I checked out front again, twenty minutes later, the possum had creeped across our front grass, heading towards the front door.
So I tried the good-liberal method: I phoned San Diego county animal control. I got a long recorded message: “If you are calling about a rattlesnake, press 1. If you are calling about a dangerous mountain-lion encounter, press 2. If you are calling about a non-dangerous mountain-lion encounter…” By the time the recorded message informed me that I should call the county trapper, I had gotten the clear impression that no one is open at 5:35 pm, and, anyway, no one cares about any measly possum.
A brief google-search informed me that possums are easy to trap. But then what do you do with them?
So I did what the movies have taught me to do. I walked up behind it with the shovel and hit it over the head till it stopped squirming.
I think that is the first non-insect creature that I have deliberately killed.
It scares me in my bellybutton, indeed.
And now I have to figure out what to do with the dead possum that is lying under the pepper-tree in my front-yard.
UPDATE: Handy information to know, just in case you, too, ever murder a probably-rabid possum: the thing to do is to shovel it into the street, because the public authorities will only pick up dead animals if it’s on public property. Fortunately, my local parks department is fabulous. They actually left me a phone message, encouraging me to just kick the carcass a few feet over, so they could pick it up. And now it’s gone.
She can turn a somersault now.
She has invented her own break-dance moves and isn’t afraid to dance in public.
And, tonight, she went poop in the potty for the very first time.
I gave Sophie her first-ever watercolor paints today. She’s at that age when I can hardly resist getting her presents, because she’s adorably interested in exploring her world. She’s fascinated by string instruments, so I got her a ukulele which she actually plays to her Baby Doll, just strumming and plucking, of course, not playing tunes or anything crazy-prodigy-like, just playing with her ukulele, and it’s gorgeous to watch. I also got her a CD of the brilliant Yo Yo Ma / Mark O’Connor / Edgar Meyer collaboration “Appalachia Waltz,” which is now becoming the soundtrack to our house. How can I resist buying her things, when her wants are just so wonderfully simple & artistic & creative & world-discovering?
So I got her watercolors today, and she loved them.
But she didn’t love me hovering over her, praising her every brush-stroke, then nagging her to use less water and keep each of the paint colors separated in their container. “Momma,” she said, “go cook. Cook.”
When it became clear that I was absolutely done cooking, she switched to, “Momma, go play with my baby-doll.” Her Baby-Doll was in the room farthest from her new paints, and she knew it. She doesn’t yet know the phrase, “Leave me alone,” but she does know how to try to get me to leave her alone. She wanted to explore those paints without me.
So I tried to stay out of her way, just peeking around every now & then, offering her new blank white pages to paint on each time she soaked through the last page. Her paints are all brown now, with all the colors hopelessly intermingled. She’s already used up all the light pink and pale green.
And I am one proud Momma.
Maybe it’s because just an hour after trying to get rid of me, she was giggling uproariously with me when I squirted water at her in her bath. Or maybe it’s because for every time she said, “Momma, go cook, cook” she also, later at bedtime, said, “Momma, hug me, hug.” She’s not too independent, yet.
But I think it’s also because I am truly proud of her independence, paradoxically proud that she doesn’t need me as much as she used to.
My mother used to declare that the goal of all mothers, teachers, and utopian Communist bureaucrats is a particularly strange goal: it is to make ourselves unnecessary. As a teacher, this rings true. It’s not self-annihilation that I work to achieve, it’s closer to self-replication. I want my students to be able to do historic research on their own, without me at their side all the time. But “replication” is actually the wrong term, because I also want my students to think thoughts that haven’t yet occured to me. When they surprise me, when they work independently, that’s when I know I am truly succeeding — and becoming less necessary to them. All my years of teaching didn’t prepare me for the first few months of motherhood, but it is coming in more handy now.
Although I’m still tempted to clean the brown, muddy mess out of her watercolor paint box.
Apparently, people want to know. People keep asking me. So here’s the promised update:
Four pee-pees in the toilet so far. No poops in the potty yet. But we’ve crossed the biggest bridge: now Sophie seems to actually want to learn to use the toilet. Today, she asked to sit on the toilet at the supermarket, the public park, and our friend D’s house. Nothing happened, at any of those times, but having Sophie voluntarily asking to try different toilets is enough to impress me.
Sophie managed to wedge a piece of cheese up her nose this weekend. I had given her some roughly-grated cheese as an appetizer to keep her occupied while I cooked the broccoli, rice, and fish for dinner — so I wasn’t watching her eagle-eyed, and I didn’t see the cheese enter her nose. Worse, when she told me, “My nose hurts,” I didn’t actually notice the cheese. I offered her a kleenex, but didn’t fret when she didn’t really blow, just only told her it would feel better soon. That frighteningly large lump of cheese fell out by itself a few minutes later.
So I thought of making a blog-post that would sort this whole weekend under Bad Mom (cheese up her nose) versus Good Mom (but she loves broccoli! and I took her to the zoo!). It was amusing, to me, to notice that I was telling myself “But I took her to the zoo!” as if that somehow mitigates her nearly injuring herself with cheese. I was making these mental lists of all the ways I’d neglected her this weekend: while I was in the shower, she painted herself and the floor with green metallic marker. While I was cooking lunch, she somehow managed to pee on her favorite Baby Doll. The list goes on. I forgot to turn off the stove under some banana pancakes, and burned them badly. I yelled at Sophie on Friday night, letting her two-year-old-ness anger me, unnecessarily. I did a whole lot of good things, too, and was trying to weigh out in my mind whether the healthy meals, outdoor adventures, lovely friends, laughing moments, etcetera all balance out the few dangerous moments and many lapses of perfection.
But then I realized that these aren’t Bad Mom examples. They’re just Mom examples. Every kid will eventually put something odd up her or his nose: I think it’s universal. Every parent will eventually lose his or her temper. That’s universal, too, and what matters is not that I did it, but that I quickly apologized and hugged her — and then arranged for a babysitter on Saturday afternoon, so that I could have two hours to myself, to see other adults, ride my bike without a toddler, and try to regain my equilibrium. Getting a babysitter might sound like a Bad Mom item, but I’m convinced it’s a Good Mom thing.
I don’t want to think in Bad Mom / Good Mom categories. Really, I don’t deserve much credit for Sophie loving broccoli OR for her nearly injuring herself with cheese. She’s a kid, after all: she makes some independent choices. Letting go of the illusion of control may be one way to let go of the pressure of feeling like a bad mom or a good mom. That doesn’t mean I’m not in charge of her safety, or that I’m entirely free of guilt or ego: just that I’m trying to avoid the worst of the second-guessing self-flagellation that is middle-class America’s version of modern motherhood.
We got Sophie a little potty when she was only a year old, because she liked to walk around naked and didn’t like to pee on herself. This let her work through the putting-the-potty-on-her-head stage, but it didn’t do much beyond that. We didn’t push it.
Then, one day when she had just turned 2, her two-and-a-half-year-old friend B came over and needed to use the potty. “I wanna potty too!” Sophie said. She sat on her potty and actually pooped. Peer pressure is an astounding thing.
Then we went to England for the summer and that never happened again. I didn’t push the potty-training, because a transcontinental move seemed like a big enough transition.
In England, one day I watched her taking each of her paper dolls to the toilet, holding them above the bowl, then carefully wiping their doll-butts with toilet paper. I got pretty excited by this sign of potty-readiness, so I took Sophie to the store for big-girl underwear. She liked her new underwear so much that she wouldn’t wear just one pair. Four pairs of underwear felt just about right, to her. I suspect that only one pair felt far too un-diaper-like. She was really happy with her four pairs of underwear, for about an hour, until she pooped in them.
Then I realized that we needed to have the rule, “No underwear until you can regularly pee and poop in the potty.” Oops. One of my friends tells me that at least I did manage to get her excited about underwear.
She was scared of our British toilet (it had a tippy seat), so I decided to wait till we got back to California anyway. Sophie, so far, is a child who is eager to do things on her own schedule, not at someone else’s urging.
Now we’re back in California, though, and I’m ready to stop filling our landfills with diapers.
Sophie, however, tells me that she wants me to change her diapers forever.
So I netflixed Elmo’s Potty Time, following the suggestion of a friend who just potty-trained her 3-year-old. Elmo has immense persuasive powers in our household. Elmo has persuaded Sophie to say “Hello” and “thank-you” and to put the tops back on markers. If anyone can get her on the potty, Elmo can. It’s a great video, too. But it features Elmo’s oh-so-awesome Dad, and Sophie spends most of the middle of the video asking for more scenes with that Dad. Sophie’s Dad-missing seems to take primacy over any potty-interest.
She is obsessesed with the video, though, and with a sweet little Potty book I got. She likes to read that book forwards, then backwards, then forwards again.
She has figured out (just as celochick predicted) that she can now postpone bedtime a whole half-an-hour by saying, “Pee-pee is coming!” and then getting to sit on her toilet. She is one smart kid. I have now stocked the bathroom with soothing bedtime books.
Then, Wednesday night, finally, the inevitable happened. During her long-potty-sit-to-postpone-bedtime, she happened to pee. I actually did a happy dance. She was pretty proud of herself. She agreed to sit on the potty again on Thursday morning — but then went off for her Thursday marathon-of-caregivers, who aren’t actually anxious to reinforce potty-training.
So now it’s Friday. I have a plot, for the weekend: I’m going to let her run around naked as much as possible. Living in a warm climate, in a house with stone-tiled floors, this is possible. And this may get her more interested in her potty.
We’ll see. As Baby Bear says on Elmo’s Potty Time, “I’ll let you know how it all comes out.”
What Ben did this weekend:
Canyoneering in the Italian Alps. In case you don’t know what “canyoneering” is, it’s basically following a drop of water through some remote, nearly inaccessible area. Canyoneering usually involves using ropes to rappell down waterfalls, seeing sights that only a few hundred people have ever seen, and terrifying me.
What I did this weekend:
- Spent 80 minutes soothing Sophie to sleep. At each nap-time.
- Watched “Elmo’s Potty Time” twice a day, every day. And actually found it funny — that may be the surest sign that I need more adult companionship. But this particular episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter P and the number 2. Really.
- Circled the beach three times, seeking parking.
- Watched my good friend almost crying in frustration at her own daughter’s terrible twos, and felt impotent.
- Watched Sophie share her bike-trailer with another friend (“the bike couch!”), grinning and reading to each other from the little books I keep in the bike-trailer. This was so cute, it almost mitigates the mundanity of the rest of this list.
Ben says that when he returns, he’ll have to watch Sophie a bit so that I can go out for some grappa. He’s right. But it is almost four months of Sophie-watching that he owes me, now, much more than the bit of one grappa-outing.
I don’t actually want any grappa or even canyoneering. I would like, though, to be able to go swimming in the ocean that is a mile from my house. Just for fifteen minutes; maybe even ten — but I find it physically impossible to keep a toddler safe at the beach AND go swimming myself. I keep telling myself there’s only one more month of single-parenting left, only one more month.
Sophie whines, “Don’t wanna go to Sara’s!” Sara is her daycare teacher.
I say, “Sorry, honey, it’s Thursday. Thursday is a Sophie-Sara day.”
“Don’t wanna go to Sara’s! Don’t wanna go to Sara’s.”
“Sorry, you have to. I don’t want to go to work, either.” There will be time enough later on to explain to her that, although I hate leaving her, I actualky do love my job. Thursday morning didn’t seem like the proper place for that complexity. But, because it feels better to be honest with Sophie and to not leave her worrying when I will return, I did tell her, “You know what’s even worse? Thursdays, I have to work late. Thursdays, Raquel picks you up from Sara’s.” Raquel is the sitter who picks her up from daycare by 5pm, gives Sophie her dinner and a bath and a beginning of a bedtime, till I come home at 8pm for the final goodnight kiss. Thursdays are especially hard, long days for all of us.
“Don’t want Raquel!” Sophie exclaims, trembling, on the verge of a tear-soaked meltdown. “Don’t want Sara and don’t want Raquel!”
“I know, I know,” I tell Sophie. “Raquel is nice. Sara is nice. But they’re not Momma. I’m so sorry. Tomorrow is a Sophie-Momma Day, and the day after that, and the day after that too. But today is Thursday. Today you have to go to Sara’s and then see Raquel.”
Sophie trudged into her room, where she has been incessantly “packing” her baby-doll’s things lately, moving items around, preparing Baby-Doll to go to Europe to see her Daddy. It’s all very sad.
Then Sophie emerged from her room. She had reached her shoes on top her bookshelf, gotten them down and managed to put these complex mary-janes on her own feet. No easy feat for a 27-month old.
“I’m ready,” she told me. She sounded like a prisoner, resigned to the death-chair, ready to go, ready to get it over with. We didn’t even have to leave yet for Sophie’s Thursday-marathon-of-paid-caregivers. But, “I’m ready,” Sophie said again. She had her shoes on. She had the attitude of, “This is going to be painful and horrible, so let’s just start it now, maybe that will make it all end quicker.” So we got in the car and went to Sara’s.
And I wonder: am I the only parent of a two-year-old who worries about her being too obedient?
To me, her quietly resigned “I’m ready” was more heartbreaking than all her whining “Don’t wanna go to Sara’s.” I expect whining, I expect terrible-two tantrums. And, don’t get me wrong, I get to hear plenty of whining and sometimes tantrums. But, you know, that’s not surprising, that doesn’t merit a blog-post. It is Sophie’s obedience that scares me.
Friday at the doctors, she sat so still for her shots, so stoic, frighteningly stoic. All the doctors and nurses were over-the-top in their praise for her great behavior, and I couldn’t simply accept that praise. Instead, I worry what Sophie is repressing in her over-eagerness to be this good.
