Nobody wanted to go to the mall yesterday (“No, tay home” said Ess), but it was one of those necessarily unpleasant trips you make to get ready to go to a wedding (this Friday, Mykala’s very good friend from Forest Lake, Jenni Kling, gets married). Anyway, whenever we’d walk into any store, Ess would immediately ask to leave to walk around one of the Mall of America’s many, gigantic concourses. Said she wanted to “see-a people.” But then, she became entranced by the escalators, a word she can kind of pronounce, such that you can understand her if you know what you’re listening for. Ess stood on the stairs for one ride, and was utterly hooked.
I actually had to convince her that a good alternative to standing on the escalators was going to get a pretzel at Wetzel’s Pretzels. (Also, my god, how do they make those things? Double fried or something? Pillowy, salty, cheesy, umami. Not food, but anything that pushes that many taste buttons at the same time rarely is.)
We went home empty-handed, but Ess sat in the back and regaled us with a narrative about how good each sip of her fruit smoothie was:
I sat next to her in the back seat, making sure that her enthusiasm for her delicious drink didn’t make it explode into a sugary flood of disappointment.
Feeling like I had a rare opportunity, a time where she can articulate things, but isn’t far from being an infant, I asked something:
“Do you remember being in mama’s tummy?”
“Yeah-ph.” (She’s getting better at her S sounds, but ‘yes’ still sounds like this.)
She said yes! From a neuron-based, physiology perspective, I’d no idea if this was possible, but Ess continued:
“And in the mama tummy. Baby Katerina grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and GROW!”
Shocked at this, and quickly querying my mental list of books Ess had read to see if she was parroting something back or synthesizing de novo, I thought maybe, perhaps, Ess was accurately describing what babies do in uteruses by just thinking about it. Oh, also, Katerina Kitty Cat is what Ess calls herself. And since she doesn’t understand pronouns, she also requests (well, demands) that we call her Katerina and not “she” or “you” (or “Ess”, for that matter).
“Oh you did grow! You really did. And could you hear mama’s heartbeat?”
“Yeah-ph.”
“Did sound like bumBUM, bumBUM, bumBUM?”
“Bumbumbumbum. Nonono. No. Mama-mama-mama-mama-mama-mama”
“Haha! Oh, I see! It sounded like mamamamamama. Well, then… did your heartbeat sound like peeowsh-peeowsh-peeowsh-peeowsh?” I asked, mimicking the sound of her little heart on the doppler monitor at the OB/GYN, a sound I’ll never forget.
Ess didn’t even hesitate:
“And baby heart—and baby heart go baby-baby-baby-baby-BABY”
Mykala and I have a steadily-growing list of movies we would like to watch, but there are so many other things we’d rather do (usually, rather read) once Ess goes to bed that we watch very few movies. At this rate, I expect to miss most excellent new films and all of the new mediocre ones for years to come, because soon Ess will want to watch with us. We are prepared and excited for that.
Most important, at the point when all the merchandise, freebies, tie-ins, and commercials point us at Disney junction, we expect to take an intentional detour so we can instead watch the entire Miyazaki canon first. This is 90% due to his superb, realistic, empowering depiction of woman protagonists and 10% to the extraordinary artistry of the films. It is so so SO important to Mykala and I that we do everything we can to show Ess (not tell, tell doesn’t work) the deep biases and xenophobia against women and any ethnicity/culture/norm outside mainstream-America. In order to do this, Ess first needs to be instilled with a fiery core of steel, her options limitless, her potential vast, her autonomy paramount. If we help her stoke this fire early on, we hope she can then learn to counter institutional biases against women, thereby pointing the prow of her ship into the waves, tacking rather than capsizing.
There is much much more to say about this in the years to come. If you are interested, start by following Everyday Sexism on Twitter.
Saturday night, Mykala and I watched the Imitation Game, which meant we were up way past our usual 11pm bedtime. Lying down to sleep afterwards, perhaps due to my brain out of practice at inhabiting the narrative structure of a life not my own, I found myself shocked to realize with crystal-clear certainty that my last bike ride with Ess on the handlebars would happen, and fairly soon. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and as I wiped them away in the dark, I told Mykala what I was thinking. Sharing it seemed to somehow make it worse, give it more power.
A happy accident, though: missing something before it is gone helps you enjoy it more than you would. A gift of adulthood, perhaps.
Sunday evening found us driving home from Forest Lake, a bit after Essie’s bedtime. She still tells me “bach seat, Dada” if she wants some company on these longer drives, but this time she seemed just fine with Mykala and me in the front, and her in the twilight in the backseat. Now, Ess talks a lot lately, most of it narrating or monologuing about what she is doing and what she is imagining as she plays. A lot of diapers changed (“put onna keem”), a lot of tucking in and napping. More recently, she plays mama and baby (pig/giraffe/monkey/spoons/pair of shoes), and one of them says “I love you” and gives a kiss. But during the drive, she wasn’t playing with anything in particular, so instead, we hear this:
Up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down
People on the bus go up and down up and down
I felt a feeling of accomplishment (hers, ours, mostly hers) where two years ago she could barely move, had no teeth, couldn’t understand us. And now she’s singing “Wheels on the Bus” as we drive home. We are not yet at a stage where her learning and changing are any source of melancholy for a passing phase we’ll never see again. Instead, her transformation from helpless to thoughtful and willful produce unalloyed joy in her parents.
We’ve been teaching Ess that people have more than one name. For example, her grandpa Bop’s name is Michael. “I know a Michael, I know a Michael!” she explains, riffing off her book I Know a Monkey. So, my nickname for Mykala is Bun, which we told Ess kind of in passing, not intending to or even trying really to teach it to her.
So, of course I always prompt Ess with “say goodnight to Mama” when I am carrying her to bed, but tonight she goes “Goonight Bun! … I love you, Bun!”
Mykala accidentally dyed her hair orange today, which kind of sidetracked our movie plans. (After some corrections, it’s currently more of a henna shade.) So, Ess and I headed over to my parents for a visit. She was unusually quiet in her carseat, watching the big drops hit her window. At my parent’s, I got to see how Ess is trying to figure out how to go to the bathroom not in her diaper; she’d tell use she wanted to sit on her potty chair, and then absolutely nothing would happen. The stages of connecting the urge to the action to the result are interesting — like the animal and human parts of the brain are learning to communicate for the first time.
We drove home in the dark, the rain still steadily falling. Pulled into the garage and I gently lifted Ess out of the car, pecking her on the cheek as I did so. “Love you Dada” I heard her say unprompted, for the first time she ever has. Then, she immediately began commenting on the color of the lid of our trash can.
“Wait, what did you say?”
“Green top onna trash can.”
“No no, before that.”
“Trash can.”
“Oh, Ess.”
Paul McCartney, 1965: “Yesterday came suddenly.” I don’t know what that means, but if I squint, it looks like he’s saying time passes quickly.
So, yesterday: I got done with work and went to my parent’s to pick up Ess. She now knows how to put her little shoes on. They look like this:
So she showed us that. It was cool out, in the 50s, and Ess told us all she’d like to go outside. She ran off to find her sweatshirt, and Nannie zipped it up for her. (Later that evening Ess told me: “Dada has a zipper. Baby has a zipper. Mama has a zipper. … Everybody has a zipper!”) Then, we went outside to see the neighbor’s painted rocks. And the wildflowers. And the birdbath. And the carved bear in the corner of the yard. And the plane in the sky.
Ess wants to be picked up (“uppa dee, Dada”) or very much not: “No, own-baby walk.” She wants someone special to feed her (Mama) or her highchair to be in a very precise spot. When she tripped over and displaced the picnic blanket last week, I told Mykala “she’s going to put that back now.” But I underestimated her care and patience in placing it precisely how she wanted it to lay. Her mind is filled with thoughts and we get to hear them; this is a source of boundless joy. We’ve waited so anxiously and impatiently to hear those thoughts!
So I brought Ess home through the cool, slightly rainy early fall evening. We watered the plants. She ran inside. Took off her own shoes. I turned on my auto-generated iTunes playlist of 2,028 songs I have played ≥5 times since 2005. And in that random collection I heard, while we were feeding George, Ingrid Michaelson’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Try to listen to that song with your child and do anything other than cry. I remember it clearly, Ess had requested I “ohpee up” the closet door, and just as she was reaching her tiny hand into the big cat food bag, and as I reached to help her find the scoop, big tears jumped out of my eyes.
And Mama came home: “MAMA!” Ess squealed running toward the back door and throwing her arms around the middle of Mykala’s thigh, smiling big as she squeezed tightly. Ess watched Mykala cook, and ran around, reading Make Way for Ducklings while we ate. I worried aloud if us eating at the table and her running about was a bad precedent, but watching Ess run out of the kitchen and throw herself onto the couch and then run back to us with her update from the living room was just too good to interrupt.
As we read nighttime stories like Dinosaurumpus and I Know a Monkey to Ess, the cool air made the blankets of our bed more comfortable. Her big compliment right now: “good book.” Then, once we had put her in her crib for the night and turned the monitor on, a little voice sang over the speaker: “Baby Beluga in the deep blue sheee. Oh!”
Mykala and I were lucky enough to see another little sliver of Essie’s personality recently, and it started with a cookie. I was in the kitchen, Mykala was in the living room, and Ess was running back and forth between the two. I’d hand her cookie pieces: one for her and one for mama. She would then propel herself with a little bouncy toddler run into the living room where she and Mykala would eat their cookies. A few minutes later, Ess would reappear, requesting I fill her hands again. After a while, though, the routine was broken: Mykala watched Ess absentmindedly begin to eat some cookie, which caused Mykala to comment: “Oh, Ess, you ate my cookie piece.” It was merely a statement of what had transpired: no judgment or shaming could I detect in Mykala’s voice. But the effect (doubly unexpected given our toddler’s barely two years), was profound. Essie’s face immediately crumpled and her chewing slowed, when she realized that she could not un-chew what had been chewed. She could not, though her motions suggested she considered it, remove the cookie, dry it off, and put it into her mama’s unsuspecting hand. Realizing a decision gate had slammed behind her and lamenting Mykala’s loss, Ess began to cry, loudly. She cried and cried and cried until her eyes were bright red, holding Mykala as she did; a reaction totally disproportionate to what we had expected, yet only explainable by our daughter’s sadness at her mama’s loss. Small loss, big reaction.
The case is made difficult not because the principles of
its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is
our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the
Constitution with no fear that freedom to be
intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary
will disintegrate the social organization. To believe
that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies
are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory
routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal
of our institutions to free minds. We can have
intellectual individualism and the rich cultural
diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the
price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes.
When they are so harmless to others or to the State as
those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But
freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not
matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The
test of its substance is the right to differ as to things
that touch the heart of the existing order.
If there is
any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is
that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall
be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other
matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word
or act their faith therein. If there are any
circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now
occur to us.
Think about how large World War II must have loomed in the minds of those deliberating, making, and contesting this case. When I imagine the historical context and see that the Right decision was still made, I have hope that the logic of freedom articulated in poetic prose above can move from government (where the stresses and strife of plebeian living is, however compassionately, imagined), to become the bedrock of the national conscience; not as a trickle-down but rather a river with many tributaries.
