It turns out that if you play the 1999 hit song “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child to Ess while driving in the car, she’ll listen to it, and then ask you to play “Fooba Nane” again please. Then she’ll listen to it a few times in a row, and when the chorus says “Say ‘baby I love you’” she’ll go “no I LOVEYOU, Mama!” and it’ll become part of driving.
But then, in the dark, when Ess is falling asleep in her crib, just before Mykala is going to close the door for the night, Ess will ask her to “sing Fooba Nane.” And Mykala will oblige. And then, over the months, it will become a staple of Essie’s bedtime routine.
Mykala will be asked to change the lyrics to incorporate penguins brushing their teeth (with mama-dada toothpaste), exceptionally high-pitched bird chirping sounds, turtles, dogs, and cats — all singing their own lyrics to the original tune.
And that brings us to today. I look forward to hearing Mykala’s songs each night. I hope this phase lasts for a while.
I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:
Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:
“Does Pete worry?”
“Goodness, no!”
And as long as she’s not distracted putting a stuffed animal to sleep, or wrapping one monkey’s arms around another so they can be hugged all night, Ess will pipe up: “Goodness, no!”
It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.
There’s a speed bump before the fork in the road, but if I can maneuver to the alternate route, I end up in a mindset where I’m thinking about trying to participate with Ess. It isn’t obvious in the moment, but stepping back I realize the bill-paying and cleaning will be there long after Ess grows up. So the three of us have played Zingo (though at this age it devolves into Ess doing “let’s pitch all the pieces around”) and we read of course, but I’ve recently found something worth practicing. I was helping to get Ess out of the car the other day, and instead of thinking about getting her inside, so she could have a bath and get ready for bed, I tried to short-circuit my adult tasklist. I just stopped. And I looked at what Ess was doing. I mean, we are always looking at what Ess is doing (and Mykala is frequently cleaning up after what Ess was doing during the long days while I am at work), but this time I really tried to see.
Perhaps sensing this, Ess immediately began chattering away, narrating what she was imagining, what the two little play bugs she had were doing, going in and out of their house, where were they cold, where were they warm, can I hold this one, see how this one is clean and this one is dirty, and look how the antennae on this one are gone. (I’ve added a picture of what they look like when they’re new.)
Essie’s imagination, the world she’s in, has a richness that surpasses my own. Almost everything is new, and everything is interesting. Her excitement is contagious, her narration frequently hilarious, and her desire to share it all is easy for me, stumbling through the smokescreens of adulthood, to miss.
In her introduction, Romm, who is in her early forties,
writes about her sense, as a young woman, that “striving
and achieving had to be approached delicately or you
risked the negative judgment of others.” She felt a pull
between the hardness of her ambition and the softness of
her socialization, and calls this “the double bind of the
gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and
retreat.”
And Elisa Albert’s essay in it sounds like the best one:
Maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from
engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I’m
worth compared to anyone else.
When the music ends, since it is usually playing from a music library or a streaming radio station, Ess expects another piece to begin playing:
“‘nother hong coming!”
She says it to Mykala, she says it to me. It’s very sweet. I do not recall her once getting upset when we couldn’t make another song start playing. It might be the only thing Ess feels particularly patient about right now. Our very toddlery toddler.
If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:
Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire
department, why are you owed clean water or electricity,
why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through
patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy
through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably
better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?
I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve
decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can
not individually afford but whose existence we recognize,
serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and
more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by
medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe
streets and food. My life is better when the next
generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of
this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we
give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to
enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the
height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic
society and act as if it never existed before you showed
up.
I’ve no idea who wrote that, it is from some screenshot someone took and then posted to Twitter.
