1)
I: "Mommy, how do people who celebrate Hanukkah keep Santa Claus from coming to their houses?"
K: "Well, I think Santa just knows, Isaac."
I: "Yeah, prob-ally he just looks into the house and sees all those candles."
2)
(Decorating the door for Christmas.)
K: "This is going to be so cool, Iz, it's not even funny."
I: "OF COURSE it's fun, Mama! What are you TALKING about??!"
You've seen them. If you spend any time at all in antique stores or thrift shops, you've seen them. Other people's old family pictures. Some with frames interesting enough to warrant a second look. And you feel sorry for those people. All done up in buttons and corsets, or newer faces smiling unwittingly while their loved ones haven't even had the decency to remove them before chucking the frame they're in into the trash bag of other junk -- candle holders still clinging to their drippy stubs, jeans that never really fit them in the first place, a decorative plate stamped with the name of some foreign city they've never been to personally, that someone (who??) will buy for 50 cents, though they too have failed to stroll the streets of the named city.
Those discarded family members are proof of perhaps the most blatant of evils committed in the name of spring cleaning, but there are others – subtler to be sure, but still reeking of severed ties and desecrated memories.
And that's where my husband comes in.
He runs. Jogs. Whatever you call that odd pastime where you become sweaty for no good reason apparent to me. As part of this activity, he likes to have brightly-colored teeshirts. I suppose it's a good idea for the Hummers and Expeditions to have their attention called to something human as they drive by him hoofing it on the side of the road. Or, should his broken body have to be recovered from a trail somewhere, the Coast Guard helicopters would hopefully see a smudge of orange in the brush before it cost them too much money.
Every once in a while Mike goes searching for new shirts.
Plain, solid-colored teeshirts are few and far between, and he's come home with some interesting ones. Like the green one printed for the Bautista family reunion. A yellow tree snaking up it, its branches are labeled with related surnames, its roots hailing the patriarchs and matriarchs of a proud line. This is almost as bad as the pictures in the frames. Some Bautista, embittered, perhaps, indifferent, maybe, has dumped off this tangible piece of a celebration of his ancestry. And Mike is willing to parade around in it, in essence, wearing a lie.
Additionally, if you peeked in my husband's dresser, you might think him one of the most charitable and social men around. He apparently volunteers for fundraisers involving research on any number of diseases. And while Isaac and I weren't looking, he's attended numerous festivities culminating in a souvenir shirt – clearly, hard won, of course.
“I like to live vicariously through my clothes,” he tells me when I question the ethics of his wardrobe.
“The irony of the name 'Goodwill' is not lost on me, either, honey. – You, my friend, are no ambassador. Oh no.”
Recently, he was lamenting having to give away his family reunion shirt, his shoulders, he decided, a bit broader than most of his kinsmen, it seems. Once again, I confronted him. “May I just remind you, you are NOT part of the Bautista family, dude! Nor were you on 'STAFF' at the Juvenile Diabetes Walk for the Cure!”
“Maybe not,” he shrugs smugly. “But I sure did have a great time volunteering at that beach festival in Santa Cruz!”
“Shameless.”
I had searched and searched, straightening the house as I went. Pretty much nothing short of a visit from the in-laws could have gotten me to clean the place these days. That, and the tearful pleading of my son.
Hannah had not been seen for days, and although Banyan Bunny was much loved, I was getting the feeling that her substitution days were coming to a close. I'd position the 3-inch blue stuffed rabbit on Isaac's pillow at night and watch him pause, just for a second, before lifting her to his face and proclaiming his love for her. Last night, the pause lengthened until it was replaced with a long, low wail.
“Where's Hannahhhhhhh?”
The truth, something that involves much tact and trouble on average anyway, becomes a virtual land mine while parenting a young child. What is God? Why do people throw trash on the ground? What are you eating, Mama? Where do babies come from? Why do people die? Is there really a Santa Claus?
Recently, a friend was admiring one of Isaac's small wooden cars that run on his wooden car track. “Did someone you know make this?” she asked. Before I could answer, Isaac chimed in with “The elves made it, Silly!” It was charming and sweet and I loved him for saying it. I also walked away with the tiniest of lumps knotted in my stomach. Maybe it's my memory of an assignment I once gave my college freshmen – to write about a family myth, or something to that effect. One particularly apathetic boy who most classes enjoyed spending discussion time showing off his new piercings wrote a passionate piece on how angry he still was that his parents told him when he was 7 that his dead dog “went to live with another family.” It was the best thing he wrote all year. I had a mentor once who claimed that all writing was persuasive writing...
The truth was I had no clue where Hannah, Isaac's prized baby doll, had gotten to. Like the rest of the household, I was beginning to think she was quite lost. Slightly bigger than your outstretched hand, Hannah, whose name until recently when Isaac took seriously to naming things, was “Baby” and for one brief inexplicable period “Nacho,” was a $4.99 job from Target. Only the best for my kid. On the day we brought her home and for months afterwards, Isaac had ignored her heartily in favor of any truck with a scoop, but lately she'd become irreplaceable for bedtime and would often join us at the table for meals.
“I think she's missingggg!” Isaac says the tears streaming in fast little rivulets down his cheeks. “Where is sheeee?” I talk him down with much time and effort, reminding him that we don't know for sure if Hannah is actually lost and promising to scour the house for her in the morning.
“If we can't find her, wi-wi-wi-will you buy my another baby doll? Ju-ju-just like her? Little, s-s-s-so her clothes fit?”
“Of course,” I soothe. “Of course, I will.”
And then the WCS – Worst Case Scenario, proving once again that he is truly my son his brain spins out the ultimate in sorrowful outcomes: “Wha-what if...What if.. we took her somewhere and w-w-we dropped her on the streeeeeeettttt?” While you and I can think of all the terrible things that might befall a young doll on the street, for Isaac, I'm pretty certain the terror in his eyes had everything to do with the possibility of Hannah being raised by ANOTHER CHILD. The cooing and calming have to start anew.
I left Isaac's room well after 10, when he had finally fallen asleep and wrote “Hannah” at the top of my to do list for the morning.
And so, there I was cleaning my house in the hopes of locating Hannah. I had pretty much given up when my eyes landed on the radio flyer rocket ship my niece had bought Isaac the Christmas he turned one. Suddenly, I was moved to flip up the seat – and there she was, naked but for a Bandaid covering her left arm – Baby “Nacho” Hannah. With my clothes hung up, my rug vacuumed, the puzzles in the puzzle drawer, and just the two of us face to face, all I could think to say to her was, “Thanks.”
"Can you skip like THIS?"
"Like THIS?"
"No, that's not it, Mama. Like THIS!"
"How's this?"
"No."
"Hmm."
"Anyway, I've been practicing my skip since I was one. Maybe when you're all done and you start again, you can start trying it when you are one and then you'll get it."
"Are you saying that maybe I'll learn to skip like you in my next life?"
"Uh-huh." (Skipping away across the park.)
"Gee thanks, Iz."
"Hot Cross Sponge, Hot Cross Sponge, One-a-Penny, Two-a-Penny, Hot Cross Sponge."
Me: "Isaac! Tomorrow is the day 8 years ago that Daddy and Mama got married and decided to be together forever!"
The Kid: "And it's dinosaur week at school!!!"
...
Remember all those programs that made teenagers go home with an egg for a week pretending it was their baby, trying not to break it? Or baby dolls with timers hidden in their plastic bellies to send them crying in the middle of the night? The idea was to try to show kids how difficult it is to be a parent. Unfortunately, they had it all wrong.
Here's what you need to be ready to do:
Walking on the hiking trail with our son, he stops us for the 2 billionth time. “Daddy! Daddy! A hole!” he trills.
My husband turns without the first hint of bitterness, and walks back 500 feet to where Isaac is standing. He looks down, the man who biked through Wales and Ireland, stood on the equator of the earth, programs robots that drive along the floor of the Pacific Ocean, and with passionate enthusiasm says, “Wow! A hole in the ground!”
Forget lost sleep, the years of weighty responsibility. If you are wondering if parenthood is for you, think instead of this.
Always prepared and ready to have fun at a moment's notice, Mike and I usually start our dates - when we're not pumping up the tires of his 16-year-old Honda, at the gas station filling it up. Gas prices are rising again and California is, as usual, above average. Just add it to the list of fan-fabulous things about my state like how the Supreme Court in their mighty and grand evolutionary retardation just -somehow - upheld prop. 8. Reminds me of a Lewis Black routine about Starbucks - "It's expensive, but at least the lines are long!"
The other day we were pulling away from a station when Mike commented, "Gas stations are ahead of their time. If you don't want a receipt, they don't print one."
Along with a list of other failed projects I'll spare you from hearing the details of that I've been engaged with in the last several months, I've been tracking receipts. Yes, receipts. No, I haven't come to my senses and made a budget. I mean the literal receipts. In the 2009 world of "reduce, reuse, recycle," receipts are quietly, steadily slaying acre after acre of forest. Have you happened to notice just how large they are getting? The current leader in my collection is a Rite Aid receipt I obtained somewhere in New Jersey which measures just over 3 inches wide and 17 3/4 inches long. That's a foot and a half of receipt!!! Item(s) purchased? Lip balm.
Here's the anti-rant (there has to be one once in a while).
More reasons my kid is so very cool (I figure since I bitch I also get to brag).
1) His favorite color is brown – because that's what you get when you mix all the colors together.
2) When I recently mentioned I had artichokes I needed to cook, Isaac shouted, “Artichokes! Yummy!” and after demolishing the whole thing told me it was better than ice cream.
3) Unsolicited he informed me that a friend of his thinks bad guys are just bad, but he believes that “they're people who haven't learned stuff yet.”
Did someone give this one magical pills this month?
I. Eyes on the Prize
Back in March, while visiting my family in south Jersey, we made a trip to the local zoo. It was a windy, cold day and before we left we spent considerable time in the amphibian house where temperatures were more suitably toasty.
We were watching some frogs, or maybe they were toads – I admit, I don't know the difference, have no immediate plans to figure it out, and let's not even go into hedgehogs and porcupines – and I innocently glanced up at the description sign above them. It said (and I paraphrase): “Like all frogs, this species uses its eyeballs to help push their food into their stomachs, moving them down the sockets to squash the food into the body.”
Now, I've already admitted I don't know a heck of a lot about frog-toads, but you can't tell me this shit is common knowledge. I mean, what's with the casual turn of phrase “like all frogs?” This isn't “As you know, most watermelon are pink inside.” or “You're probably aware that many trees lose their leaves in winter.” Even Mike, who seems to me to know just about everything there is to know in the universe except how to play racquetball well, balks. He laughs out of nervousness, then takes a step backwards toward the turtle tank where what appear at first to be limbed stones serenely paddle.
Nature: amazing and disgusting – all in one, shall we say, swallow.
I have a theory on the reason this digestion scenario grosses us out (and, forgive me, I'm presuming you're on my side here). It is completely alien and freaking bizarre while still something we can't entirely divorce ourselves from. After all, it was only a short evolutionary what? millennium? ago that our ancestors crawled out of the pond and grew legs and lungs. We could safely still refer to ourselves, and some do, as fish with legs. In other words, whose to say one of us doesn't have an Uncle Bubba somewhere who shows off his special talents at Thanksgiving dinner, jamming canned cranberry sauce down the hatch with the help of those baby blues.
II. Blood Brothers & Foreshadowing
Over Easter weekend we spent 3 lovely days at an organic farm and wilderness preserve outside of Palo Alto, California. While we were there, we went for a hike and spotted a horned toad. Here's where I get to wow you with my knowledge of nature, momentarily at least. As you may already know, a horned toad is not, in fact a toad, but a lizard. (See, and even if you didn't already know that, you wouldn't be so surprised/horrified that you'd want to sprint away and wretch. Careful use of language, people, is key.)
As we'd begun our trek, we'd passed a group of people coming down the hill. One of the men called out to us. “Watch out for the squirrels!”
We were still taking this odd warning in when another man passed. “Forget the squirrels, watch out for the ticks! - It's high season. Don't touch the grass. Two percent Lyme disease.”
“But don't worry about that,” he'd continued making an extraordinary leap in evolutionary thought within seconds, “The important thing is the hike. Do the hike.” Fins to legs, just like that.
Our heads spinning with all kinds of dubiously helpful advice, we'd trod on until at last we found ourselves within a camera's reach of the aforementioned horned toad at which point I splayed out, belly down and shimmied through the leaves to take its picture.
We saw some ticks on the hike, but none of them bothered us, though my sweater was banished outdoors for the night to be safe.
Shortly after returning home from that visit, we received the new issue of Isaac's kid magazine which featured some common and not-so-common ways that various animals protect themselves. And that's how we learned about the horned toad. As you know, they squirt blood from their eyes to frighten away enemies.
Yeah, it might work, ya think?? Like when some poor hungry coyote gets a face full of blood. He may not even be scared so much as unequivocally offended. As in, “Dude, that's just WRONG.”
III. Flying with Flu
Just this past weekend we were in Massachusetts visiting Mike's family, staying at his parents' house.
Before we could get there though, there was the proverbial delay on the San Francisco to Boston leg complete with all the Bostonians storming the desk, blackberries blazing, getting their east coast in an uproar as if that would fix our broken plane, so eager were they to be in an unsanitary enclosed area with strangers from around the world.
When we did board, two hours late, there was an older Asian couple with no English in our seats. Mike adeptly motioned that they were perhaps meant to be on the other side of the aisle and they quickly moved. It took a bit to notice that the gentleman seemed unwell. Several sneezes into our 5 ½-hour pleasure trip, I turn to Mike.
“So glad Captain Swine Flu was sitting here before he was sitting there. Not that it matters, we're all infected now.”
“He sneezed like twice,” my husband replies.
“It was more than that.”
“Four times?”
“That's enough.”
“That lady's cute,” Mike says.
“Huh?”
(Mike points to the man's wife sleeping curled into a ball across the aisle.)
“Oh, you mean Mrs. Swine Flu? Adorable.”
This partner of mine is easily charmed. Could explain how he ended up with me.
IV. Progress Goes Tick, Tock
Our stay at my in-laws (or, as I like to call it, the Church of Our Mother-in-Law of Perpetual Motion) included a trip to Northampton, of course, an afternoon in the new kids' museum in their town, much time delving into Grandma's basement for Isaac, a ride in the wheelbarrow driven by Grandpa, a raucous game of cards, and, naturally, the extended family gathering. This one wasn't as extended as some of them can get. It was mellow, with cousins to chase and bocce ball to try out. Then, at some point, someone, I'm gonna say it was my darling son, suggested a walk in the woods.
It was a brief, uneventful encounter, marching through oak leaves and pine needles trying not to step on the ladyslipper orchids. Just enough time for Mike and his sister to lament the way the trees have been thinned over the years, more and more houses visible.
We soon returned to the g-parents' sun room and the feeding frenzy. Sometime after the dips and veggies and before the pineapple upsidedown cake, Mike's sister discovered a tick on her neck. Ew. In 20 years in those woods, Mike claims, never a tick. Things evolve and, when you least expect it, changes snap into place. Still, somehow, we think evolution only happens to the other guy.
V. Continental Drift & Making Evolutionary History
Despite delays on the Mass Pike due to construction (thanks for the advanced warning, not!), we made it to the airport with a healthy amount of time to spare, but not so much that we'd be sitting around the gate forever.
We were happily planted on the shuttle bus from the rental car place to the terminal, when I began to wonder why my sunburn of a week ago was beginning to hurt all over again...
(Inward Scream) ... “Mike, I have a tick!”
“Okay. We'll take care of it.”
He's supposed to say that. He has no idea if we can “take care of it.” How? Where? Ew. Ew. EW. It's been there a day. I'll die of Lyme disease. I want Isaac to know I tried. There's a bug eating my side!!! I need a hospital, not a plane. But anyway, we'll crash and a tick will be the least of my problems, except that my body, amazingly preserved, discovered after the human race has evolved into furry robots, will be examined and I'll be on the front cover of National Geographic with a tick in my side and they'll discuss – through the computers implanted in what used to be their knees – the quaint nature of ancient parasitic organisms. I HAVE A TICK SUCKING MY BLOOD AND I WANT TO VOMIT!!!!!
There it is again – that evolution of thought. Quick as lightning. Don't be left behind.
We go to the newsstand and ask where we can buy tweezers. We can't buy tweezers, they won't pass security.
We go to the nail salon and ask if we can borrow tweezers. (Try this; people REALLY like you when you do.)
We go to information and ask where the medical center is for the airport. Really far. Our plane leaves in an hour.
We go to the gate and ask if they have a first aid kit...uh, tweezers...a tick. “I'll check the plane,” she says. Finally, hope. “I'd be wigging out too, if I were you.” Compassion.
She returns with the dullest pair of plastic tweezers I've ever seen, and an alcohol wipe. “Thank you.” (I'm going to die.)
Mike and Isaac are buying a sandwich. I walk in circles while people speed past me, onward to a future I'll never know.
“Did you get it?” It's not my husband's voice. It's an unfamiliar voice behind me. Again, “Did you get it?” I turn and see the crew from the plane – the ones who must have procured the plasto-tweezers. “Yes.” I smile. “Did it work?' “I haven't tried yet.” “Well, good luck!”
Mike and Isaac return with my last meal. We retreat as a family into the 3x5 baby changing room, conveniently located near our gate. We are armed with 1) Neosporin 2) three packs of travel Advil 3) one alcohol wipe 4) dull plastic tweezers 5) one child's fork 6) a Bandaid
“Isaac, why don't you tell Mama a story? You're a good story teller.”
“Like what kind of story? I don't really know any stories.”
Mike is digging around in my side with the tweezers.
“Isaac, TELL Mama a STORY.”
“...”
This is the child who could keep his preschool class enraptured with tales since before he turned 3, who would create scenarios that regularly fooled his teacher and even made me believe I might have forgotten that in fact we did ride inside a giant spinning wheel.
“Isaac, honey, maybe you could sing me a song.”
“Yeah!”
“How about the continents song.”
“Okay! I'll sing it over and over again.”
“Per- OW!-fect.”
“Nort-America, Sout-America,... uh...What's dat odder continent?”
“Europe, Isaac, Europe!”
It was about this time that Mike began scurrying frantically around shouting, “I need the fork! I need the fork!”
David Sedaris has an essay called “Old Faithful.” It's a story about the love of his life. It's also a story about lancing a boil. Well, Mr. Sedaris. I see you one puss-filled lump on your tailbone, cured in the bathroom of your hotel room, and I raise you one embedded tick, gouged out in an airport baby changing room with a kiddie fork! Let's just see who the famous writer is NOW!
“That's the best I can do,” Mike sighs. “The pinchers are still in there.”
“This is so disgusting.”
“You'll be fine.”
“You don't know that.”
“I do.”
“Use the insurance money to send Isaac to a good Montessori, will you?”
VI. La Vita Dulce
The whole plane ride, my side is killing me. The next morning we drop Isaac off at school as if everything were normal, and there wasn't a foreign body lodged in my skin. Then we drive to Doctors on Duty.
I've sat in that waiting room a handful of times before including one Christmas Eve when Mike's calves swelled up like beach balls, red with poison oak. It's been six years since I was there myself. I know this because that's what the woman at the desk tells me after a brief look at her computer. I don't remember the cause, but I do remember the doctor. An affable Italian whose name, it turns out, is the very one slotted into the “on duty” space this morning as well.
When I'm called, I make Mike come with me.
If I didn't already know this doctor, I might suspect he'd pull a Monterey Police Department move and go all woozy when he read the “reason for visit” on my chart. Back when we first moved to the West Coast, Mike was out of town for work and my mom was visiting. Around 3 in the morning, we heard a scratching noise coming from the extra bedroom. I entered to find a young possum attempting to get the hell out through the closed window. Long story short, the police came and when I told the tall, solid, uniformed gentleman standing with a frown at my door the problem, he lost all sense of stoic professionalism, literally crumbled, and began to whine. “Awwww, maaaaaaan! I hate those things!”
But this aging 5-foot nothing doctor was not afraid of a tick, nor, I suspect, a possum. We talked about hiking, ticks, Italy. After extracting the pinchers with real metal tweezers, that didn't hurt nearly as much as Mike's operation (go figure!), he ordered a tetanus shot and a couple pills he said I “didn't really need.”
The tetanus shot (which STILL HURTS) was probably the best idea yet – though we never 'fessed up to the fork.
Isn't modern medicine wonderful? We've come so far.
We're deplaning in San Francisco from our Monterey puddle jumper and a woman with a foreign accent and shocking red hair approaches my husband.
"Do you swim at the Sports Center?"
"Yes."
"Friday nights?"
"Yes."
"THAT'S where I know you from! I kept saying to myself, 'Where have I seen that man before with no clothes on?'"
Once, in a previous rental, we had to have some plumbing done. My landlady was a rather suspicious person. And a little crazy. She lived half a continent away from our place, thank god, but insisted we call her and have her on the phone while the work was being done. I dutifully phoned when the workman arrived. “Does he look smart?” she asked. I held the receiver away from my ear and folded my hand over my face, my head hung, then returned it to the crook of my neck. “Very,” I told her. Perhaps she thought I could peer into the bathroom and spot the hint of a diploma tucked into the crack above his jeans. Or maybe she kept one of those ancient metal instruments in the shed that measured the size of a skull. I had just never noticed it there next to our box of Halloween lights and my upstairs neighbor's hibachi.
There was no doubt she was a nut case, with more than a small margin of elitist thrown in. At least, that was my view at the time. Then today happened. And the washing machine repairman happened, who arrived an hour earlier than we'd agreed interrupting my jet-lagged son's attempt at a nap and stared into the tub of grey water standing in my washer to ask, “It won't drain?” and her question seemed pretty relevant.
I could surely win the crazy landlord contest. But this time, we lucked out. The couple that owns our house seem normal, pleasant even. We send each other Christmas cards. Things are good. So when Simon told me his buddy didn't have time to come until Monday, I was okay with that. And then when he told me, no, wait, he can make it after all, at 4:00, I said great.
I had just finished reading Isaac a nice relaxing tale of fast-running meat-eating dinosaurs, when the banging began. The religious peddlers have nothing on this guy – pounding on the door like the place was on fire. I could have easily ignored him. Denial is something we carefully cultivate in my family. But then Isaac got all whiny-ass on me, “Mama, I don't like that noise!” What noise? The sound of a forest of logs being repeatedly pummeled into the castle door? So I was forced to get up and let him in.
I showed him to the culprit in question and informed him I needed to return to my child. That's when he came out with his brilliant statement about the lack of drainage at which point I confirmed for him the issue and promptly closed him in the garage. He called me out again, twice. The first time to inform me that before he could do anything we'd have to get the water out and the second time to inform me that before he could do anything we'd have to get the water out. That second time would have been about when I stepped backwards in bare feet into a pile of fresh cat vomit. Nap was so far going well.
After we parted with the joy of knowing that Monday we'd see each other again, I miraculously managed to get Isaac to sleep with reassurances that on Monday he could watch the “worker guy” fix the bloody machine. Before drifting off, Isaac wanted to know how we'd get the water out. “With a bucket, (Dear Liza).” “Then we can water the plants with it!!” he announced. And I knew right away. I'm raising an optimist. He has his father to blame for this.
So there I was, wasting a perfectly good nap time scooping water into a bucket that, yes, had a hole in it as it turned out, and tossing it into the backyard which by now was decorated with my family's underwear since the wind had blown down the clothes hanger containing the load of laundry that had had the misfortune of getting stuck in the cycle that never ended. That never ended. Never ended. Never ended. Ended. Ended. Ended...
Here's a scene from my past:
“Time for another one,” my mother-in-law quipped as I strapped my 2-year-old in his carseat to head back to the airport and our home on the opposite coast.
“Oh, no,” I said firmly, disabusing her early of any idea of a swelling brood of new grandbabies populating any nest I was to be in charge of.
She gasped. “He's going to grow up ALL ALONE?”
“All alone,” I confirmed, kissing the wretched island of a boy on the forehead and shutting the door.
There is much talk and even more tacit agreement among parents and non-parents alike that one just isn't enough. They turn out selfish. C'mon, everybody knows that. Spoiled. Not to mention, they'll miss that close relationship with another sibling when they're older. This is just common knowledge. Right? I mean, word on the street is a sibling is the “greatest gift you can give your child.”
Yawn. Sorry. That was just me, tiring of the standard line of thinking, weary from continually pressing my face up against the glass of the Status Quo Shoppe. I'd like to propose something radical – the idea that just maybe, being or having an only child isn't so bad after all.
The duos and trios and foursomes have had their due, and clearly there are many advantages to these tribes. Now let's examine – a little differently – the singleton.
Allow me to first err on the side of sanity. When I got pregnant, my first thought wasn't “Whew! Now I'll have two more hands to help on the farm!” Things moved more along the lines of “I only have two hands and no family close by and how am I going to raise this child without help?” Add subsequent human beings to this daily craze of isolation and death-defying speed? I chose no.
One child means if that child needs to nap, he gets to. And when one child is napping, mama can relax. One child is not hauled off to big sister's field hockey game or little brother's doctor's appointment, spinning along in the car from one thing to the next that's not about him.
I also firmly believe that single-child homes build social skills. You may think this counter-intuitive. However, one child, in the safety net of the home can successfully practice and see reflected back through modeling, manners, sharing, and other basic social interactions since they get to do these things with parents. No, no parent is a perfect model of any of these, but for those of us that are conscious parents, we at least have the chance to present what we want them to see on our better days.
Experimental play has greater possibilities for the only. I can let Isaac do things and carry his imaginative ideas further than I ever could if there were a younger sibling crawling around, for reasons of safety or just chaos control. We don't worry about small pieces, and I know that I can handle one child “cooking” with water, granola, and anything else I'll let him have at the kitchen table, let's say, but if it were two or three? I fear the mob.
There is great value in focused attention and uninterrupted solo play, as well. Celebrated writer John Updike, whom we lost just two months ago, said, "I'm sure that my capacity to fantasize and to make coherent fantasies, to have the patience to sit down day after day and to whittle a fantasy out of paper, all that relates to being an only child."
But I believe the greatest gift – if I can steal a phrase – gleaned from the social puzzle that the only child enjoys is bigger even than those pieces. He/she knows early on the necessity of reaching beyond our own home to people we have to work a little harder to know. Circumstances create the opportunity for them to reach out for connection. What could be a more important a skill for our world today? What could be more basic in terms of human need? Connecting with and appreciating connections with others is one of the most dire needs we have, something we will work toward all our lives. My kid has a jump start.
Remember that “wretched island of a boy?” Since he doesn't have to compete with anyone else for time, attention, food, or toys, our primary work is about hearing each other and connecting with other people.
I'm the first to admit that the young only child is a challenge for the parent who is asked to play on a continual basis – speaking hypothetically, of course (eh-hem...). And it's often at those times – when my boy is begging for a play date that can't happen, or I'm having to decide whether to sit down and play demolition blocks or try to have a moment with my own thoughts – that I question my wisdom. But I also know I'd not do anyone any favors if I went through the infant stage again with another baby. I was not good at it. I did not like it. I'm not supposed to admit that. Too bad. It sucked. And here we're right back in the sanity argument. I think my son deserves a mom who knows her limitations and can stay on the sunny side of them.
Besides, those fabulous siblings? You don't get to choose them. And despite parents' attempts to write a rule book on this, there are surely no guarantees about siblings becoming best buds as adults. All of us can think of multiple examples of siblings we know or we are that don't share this rumored unbendable bond.
I grew up the youngest of four. With eight years separating me and my closest sibling, however, to a large degree I experienced the situation of the only child. There is no doubt that I didn't always prefer it. I have memories of unwelcomed alone time and of times when I pleaded futilely with my oh-so-grown-up sisters and brother to play with me. And I also learned the value of reflection, solo play, and the immensity of inner worlds.
I entered the larger world with a better understanding of my own inner world. To this day, there is nothing I value higher than connecting with others.
Recently, we visited friends who have a single child – a daughter about six months older than my four-year-old. We hadn't seen them in three years and the kids didn't know each other at all. Immediately after walking in their house, our friend's daughter announced, “I have lots of toys!” She waited, wide eyes fixed on my Isaac. The tone of the statement was not gloating, nor was it that kind of arbitrary information that kids frequently offer. It was quite clearly an invitation. During our stay she shared readily, and when we said goodbye, presented Isaac with her largest teddy bear to borrow when he left.
Certainly every child has his or her own personality. Some might even say that this little girl's eagerness was a sign of loneliness. However, I have another take on it. What if even as children we regularly had to reach out to the larger world to find the kind of strong connections that sustain us?
In the end, of course, we deal with whatever we are handed.
But just here, just this once, may we hail the only, who thrives perhaps not despite his circumstances, but because of them.
It's a big world out there.
Stumble It!