Out of nowhere, Essie says two word sentences to us. This helps us meet her needs and wants, until she runs out of the correct words. Then we’re back to sign language and grunts. We’re also seeing the advent of frustration, whose development I find interesting yet a little sad. This little girl who before would sit and try to do something over and over, showing perseverance but no frustration, will now get immensely frustrated over her inability to do something, typically something physically intricate.
The upside to this is that we get to begin our role as teachers. We get to try to help Ess become a person who responds with patience to frustration, empathy to pain, courage to peril. As I read about the television show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”, I find that betterment is the core message. That there is a person in you with intrinsic worth, who has all kinds of feelings and needs, and your truest self comes out when commit to the most human, least animalistic actions: compassion, generosity, patience, kindness. A real mensch.
Not too long ago, while Mykala was driving us to Ikea, I was watching spring out the window of the car. For the first time, while admiring the buds, I caught myself thinking about the autumn coming later this year. Caught me off-guard, and I felt old. A poem seemed appropriate. So, more bad poetry, a blessedly rare occurrence here:
We all had the stomach flu for the entire long weekend. I didn’t get healthy as fast as I expected, and the lingering aches made my health feel mutable in a way it never has.
So we drove the few hours, through a dark morning up to Duluth, Ess sleeping in the backseat after a few miles of sleepy babble. We were bound for a dance competition for mama’s work, and like she always does on long trips, Ess woke up just as we were turning into the slow roads between freeway and competition. Once there, Ess received a little ladybug from Robin. Meant to be good-luck disposable hand-outs for the dancers, our daughter took her particular ladybug to be rather different than that.
Now these ladybugs are, I suppose, about five times larger than a real ladybug, albino in coloring (since they glow in the dark) with red spots. This large bug brings about a sense of creepy-crawliness in the observer, but as if to remind you it is harmless, bounces when thrown. This was one of the first things Ess found out about her bug. With the staccato wind-up and pitch of a toddler’s throw, she would throw the bug repeatedly, to watch the random bounces.
That was nearly two weeks ago, and Ess has decided her bug (“bugg-ah” as she says) should always be with her. Frequently, she’ll have clutched it so tightly in her little hand that if we try to see if she has it, we can barely tell she’s holding it. Buggah is a friend, a talisman, a toy, and now bears the marks of life with a toddler. Since insect-styled, chemiluminescent, thermoplastic trinkets aren’t really engineered with durability in mind, buggah is down to two of her original six legs. Her antennae are gone. And a soup dinner at Nannie’s has permanently colored her once-white body in a stew-colored muted orange.
Mykala devised a bed for buggah on my bedside table, so Ess can put her to bed positioned just-so on her Little Pea book. This is the only way to separate them without tears: to put the bug to bed for the night. Upon waking up, buggah is the first thing Ess asks to see. Together, they go on walks, in the car, through the house, through meals.
Ess took blocks over at Nannie’s and built what my dad called BuggahTown, a place to walk and “op-op-op” (hop) around, if you are five times the size of a lady bug, and not far from the color of the wood blocks around you.
In Ess’s toddler actions, I see budding empathy: dedication and caring and love.
In March 1889, a German naval force invaded a village on
Samoa, and by doing so destroyed some American property.
Three American warships then entered the Apia harbor and
prepared to engage three German warships found there.
Before guns were fired, a typhoon wrecked both the
American and German ships. A compulsory armistice was
called because of the lack of warships.
I’ve had this file, 20111229_fa_02.mp3 sitting on my desktop for a while. It’s Terry Gross’s final interview with Maurice Sendak, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bumble-Ardy. I knew that, in 2011, it made me think when I heard it, but I had forgotten what it was: a creative human, successful in his time, looking back with his hand lightly brushing old scars and lamenting the accretion of new cuts as he watches, unable to affect the marching-on of time:
…the fragility of life, the irrationality of life, the
COMEDY of life. My tears flow because two great, great
friends died close together, a husband and a wife, who
meant everything to me and I am having to deal with that.
And it is very, very hard.
And on art and seeing:
There’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging: that I am
in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak
together, out my window in my studio: I see my trees,
my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years
old. They’re there, they’re beautiful. And, you see, I can
see how beautiful they are, I can take time to see how
beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old, it is a blessing
to find the time to do the things to read the books to
listen to the music.
And:
I have nothing but praise now, really, for my life. I
mean, I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people.
I cry a lot because they die and I can’t stop them. They
leave me, and I love them more. And I’m in a very soft
mood, as you can gather, because new people have died, and
they were not that old.
…
Oh, god, there are so many
beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave
when I die. But, I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.
You really should listen to this, because the tone and inflection deliver at least as much as the words when Sendak speaks. There’s a difference between talking of the past, on his troubles with his parents, and talking of the present, on losing those he loves.
“Dada, hi!” and then a pause. “Dada… hi.” Essie had just turned to see what I was doing at the edge of the bedroom, and while she has been uttering expressive morphemes in response to me and my actions for a while, her greeting marked one of her first definite sentences at me. The thrill! Burbles and gurgles of infancy have so quickly become expressions of thought and opinion and frustration and love.
When Mykala was just three months pregnant with Ess, one of the challenges I anticipated was a sick kid at home. How difficult it must be to watch your little one run down by aches, a runny nose, a tight cough and tired lungs. It has been about two years since that thought, and through a combination of luck and hand sanitizer, our family has threaded the contagion needle through birthday parties, sick relatives, and an entire cold and flu season. Then there was last week. Ess was down, down, down. The primary prodrome was her tendency to sit on our laps for extended periods, paging through a book, resting her head on our encircling arms. Kid must be fighting something, we guessed.
But the thing I hadn’t considered was when you have a sick kid, you’re pretty likely to be sick yourself. And so we were. All of last Monday, Mykala could not even move she was so nauseous. Eating or drinking were suspended indefinitely. And that night, Ess was up about every two hours, feeling awful. After Mykala went to bed I began tablespoons of water, separated by decreasing intervals, trying to get some liquid in her and keep it there. Feeling just a little achy and a little coughy myself, I thought I had dodged the sickening. My immunological hubris was quickly corrected during the the next few days, which I zombied through, performing my work and father duties while looking through the dirty fogged lens of illness. Each phase of it rolled in and lingered since there is no true down day of recovery when you have a toddler. Through this my mom helped us every time she could: taking Essie so Mykala could nap and convalesce, watching Ess while I fought cabin fever with some exercise, supporting us at each stage. How helpful it is to have one healthy person with whom to share duties!
Slowly, slowly we have been recuperating. Essie recently had her first normal-kid morning again and only then did Mykala and I realize how stressful it had been to watch her hurting and coughing and fitfully sleeping. Delivered from the illness crucible, we found joy in little daily activities: feeding Ess in her high chair, chasing her around the house, coloring, cooking, grocery shopping, reading. As the quote goes, having a child is “[deciding] forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
If Essie doesn’t know or can’t say the word for something, it is always always ‘dahVEE’. “Can you say ‘refrigerator’?” we ask. Then, with utter confidence comes the response: dahVEE. “What’s that?” we query, pointing to something new. It’s a dahVEE. Obviously.
