This morning I watched big big snowflakes fall down outside my office window, then float up when they came close to the building, then fall down again. I walked the skyways to the bank and stood over South 8th Street, watching the same thing, transfixed. I wasn’t fixated on avoiding any thoughts or solving any problems. I had no breakthroughs about my life. But I thought I wouldn’t mind sharing peace like this with my daughter.
Ess likes to watch a movie called Curious George Swings into Spring, but she asks for it by saying something like “watch… maow… ping… and balloons UP and UP” or some other kind of variation on her summary of the plot. To translate: her stuffed monkey’s name is Marge, nicknamed Mow, so monkeys get called Mows; there are hot air balloons in the movie in many shapes, and sometimes we have only the barest hint of a guess which movie she’s referring to. There’s also ‘Crinkas Pooh’ (Christmas Pooh), ‘Pump pump Mow’ (Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest), and ‘Ringinal Pooh’ (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which we sometimes call Original Pooh).
Anyway, there’s a part in Curious George Swings into Spring with a big musical number about wiener dogs and Ess LOVES to clap along. She holds up a duck or a cow to us, and then that’s our dance partner for the song. She gets so excited that she starts doing rollicking little skip-hops around the floor, kicking one leg forward as she jumps off her back leg, going back and forth like a rocking horse. Sometimes we start the movie and forget the song is coming, and Ess will rush in, clapping. If I’m really missing out, I’ll hear a little voice from the next room: “Clap peez, Dada. Clap peez, Dada.” On my way, little Ess.
“Help, help, Dada Owl! Help!”
Ess uses precisely the same tone of voice when peril is imagined or real. It is a perfect mimc of the higher-register you would use if you were reading a book to a two-year-old and conveying that someone is in trouble, but ultimately will be just fine. You know, low-budget playacting. Also:
“Help, help, Mama Meow! Help!”
These are the names Ess has for us. They’re also our Halloween costumes she has picked out for us. She is thinking of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, where Katerina Kitty Cat is a dancing cat who wears a tutu, her mom is a cat too, and X the Owl is O the Owl’s uncle.
So, imagined or real peril. If Ess is climbing the piano (no) and reaching for something out of reach (no), and can’t quite do it and might fall (nonono), you’ll hear her go “Help, help, Dada Owl! Help!” And it is crazy, because the inflection is PRECISELY the same she uses when she takes her tiny Essie-sized fork and perches it precariously on the edge of her high chair tray, and then plays from the perspective of the fork: “Help, help, Mama Fork! Help!” If you close your eyes, they sound exactly the same.
So, if I hear Ess go “Help, help, Dada Owl! Help!”, you better bet I’m running as fast as I can to get in there before someone sustains an injury, real or imaginary.
Ess-to-English translator, October, 2016 edition:
pump-pump — pumpkin
keem — diaper cream
carefiff — carrot
hot-dong — carefiff dogs made by Mykala by marinating carrots, served on a bun; (they are DELICIOUS)
frawberry — the fruit or her strawberry-flavored toothpaste
bunny noonas — Annie’s Mac & Cheese, which has noodles shaped like bunnies… pretty much any noodle covered in a yellow sauce will do (dairy or non, big noodle or small). Recently, Mykala got a box of Annie’s Mac & Cheese and one of the shapes is trees: so you have to be ready to fulfill the TREENOONA, NO MAMA COOK-UP. NO, MAMA request.
And then there’s Friend, which is the name of a little Playmobil character, about two inches tall, who wears a green cardigan.
Friend doesn’t follow Ess around the way her stuffed monkey Marge does, but it is such a generic but also intimate, charming name for a figure, that we always find ourself smiling if Friend is being tucked in, or going to visit other animals in Essie’s world.
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.
Up. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Down. Up. Down. Up. Up. Down. Down. Up. Down.
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:
“Baby drink pink drink.
Ho yummy. Pink drink go… inna baby tummy.
MMMM. Pink drink!”
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”
Yes, yes it did, sweetheart.
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.”
But I know I heard it for real.
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