When did i get like this.., p.16
When Did I Get Like This?, page 16
DESMOND’S MOMMY: I’m so ready for it to be spring.
SAMSON’S MOMMY: I know. Everyone’s sick. Did I tell you? I went to the doctor’s office and the nurse goes to weigh Samson, and I’m like, did you Purell?
DESMOND’S MOMMY: Did she?
SAMSON’S MOMMY: Well, who knows? At least, she does it then. But then I’m thinking, she used the Purell, but she had to touch the Purell in order to use it. And who knows what germs are on the pump?
DESMOND’S MOMMY: In a doctor’s office? Ugh.
SAMSON’S MOMMY: I was so grossed out I was like, don’t touch my baby, I’ll weigh him myself.
I was between them, rolling up the yoga mat, avoiding eye contact, pretty sure there was a hidden camera somewhere. Just then, another mother piped in.
ZAID’S MOMMY: You know what you could do?
I thought she was going to say “Refuse all medical attention.” Or “Get a grip.”
ZAID’S MOMMY: You could tell her to use the Purell like this.
Zaid’s mommy demonstrated using her elbow to push down on the top of the pump.
DESMOND’S MOMMY: Oh my gosh, yes!
SAMSON’S MOMMY: I’m totally going to do that. Thanks.
At that point I was very glad I’d kept my mouth shut. After all, I’d brought Maggie there on the bus, and after I held on to the filthy communal pole, I wiped her runny nose on my mitten.
You cannot go home again. Mommy and Me classes are strictly the purview of the first-time parent, the mother for whom such exclusivity of focus is still possible. It would have done no good for me to attempt to inject some common sense into this conversation. These mommies would have taken one look at me and thought, We’re supposed to listen to you? You let your baby suck on your keys. If I told them I was speaking from the experience of a mother of three, they would have been all the more horrified that my slack parenting skills had been visited upon so many. Even if I told them I once had a diaper bag well-stocked enough to compete with the best, who was I to try to introduce perspective into their lives, to rush the process of a first-time mom getting a clue? After all, no one had rushed mine.
Maggie and I did not return to postnatal yoga. Since then, for all three of my children, “Mommy and Me” time is a thing of shreds and patches. Mommy’s taking you to the dentist to get two cavities filled! Just you and Mommy! Mommy is taking you to sit in the hallway during your brother’s CCD class! Just you and Mommy! I sell these moments hard. My boys, knowing it’s all they’re likely to get, are not ungrateful for them. And after a typically chaotic afternoon of two school pickups and a playdate and karate and a doctor’s appointment, I finally get home for good just in time for the babysitter to leave, her coat already on while she scrapes Maggie’s dinner dishes. Maggie runs to me with mad abandon. “Mommy! Mommy home! You—you hold me?” she stammers. I pick her up, to give my baby thirty seconds of my undivided attention, and notice, with a start, that she looks different. She has perceptibly grown while my attention was not on her that afternoon, proof I have missed another day of her little life. When this happens I mostly feel sorry for myself; she is my last baby, and I know too well how quickly this all will go. But I feel sorry for Maggie too, and I wonder if it is wrong to sell her short. With two older brothers doing handsprings every time she learns a new word, she gets tons of attention. It’s just that a lot of it is not from me. It’s better for me that I no longer spend all my time in a “Mommy and Me” world. I’m not sure it’s better for her.
I signed Maggie up for a “pre-nursery school” this fall. The only difference between it and a regular nursery school is that the grown-ups do not leave after drop-off, since the children are so young. Maggie loves it; every Tuesday morning, off she goes with the babysitter. “Mommy come too?” Maggie always asks, while Shelly buttons her coat. “Maybe next week,” I say, and then, as soon as the front door closes, sit down to write in the rapturous two-hour silence.
But last week, I told Shelly to come in late. “I’ll take Maggie to Mini Muffins for a change,” I said. “It’ll be fun.” And it was. Maggie showed me her favorite pots and pans in the play kitchen and where she sat for snack time. I sang all the songs, I waved the multicolored scarves, and I was able to focus on my daughter, without distractions, for two hours. I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t something I did every day.
As I buckled Maggie into her stroller, the instructor touched my elbow. “Thanks for coming, Maggie’s mommy! I could see how happy she was you were here,” she said.
“Me too,” I answered.
“It’s special. Right, Maggie? Wouldn’t you like your mommy to come to Mini Muffins more often?”
“Mommy come too?” Maggie echoed.
“Yes, honey,” I said. “I sure will. One of these days.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Disequilibrium
As a mother, one of the most taboo acts you can commit is admitting to having a favorite child. On the Bad Mommy continuum, it is somewhere just shy of abandoning your babe on a rocky hillside. I have never met a mother in real life who confessed to harboring a favorite among her brood, although in a recent study of British mothers, one in six of them (under cover of anonymity) admitted to having one. In all honesty, I cannot say I have a favorite child. But I have, at times, had a Least Favorite, a child who was driving me absofrackinglutely up the wall. The bright side to this is that my Least Favorite has changed easily and often, as my children share the claim to that title with one another.
People often talk about the ups and downs of a marital relationship and the tough-it-out periods all marriages must weather. There is good and inevitable bad whenever two people live under the same roof, but in all honesty, my marriage has been quite smooth compared to the patches I have gone through with each of my boys. They are, at this writing, only four and six years old, so I think that is more a reflection of how relatively calm my conjugal waters are than how rough the parenting-a-preschooler seas. Still, I have lived through tempestuous seasons with each of my boys, due to their phases of “acting out” (as misbehavior must today be called, as if the terrible twos are merely a sort of extended pantomime). Though I understood rationally that my difficult child of the moment was really crying for more of my attention, giving that to him was a challenge when everything he did seemed expressly meant to push me farther away.
But I have never heard the subject of the Child Who Makes You Want to Run Screaming from the House even mentioned in polite company, let alone a poll reflecting what percentage of parents have one. So I have always kept these feelings to myself, certain it was only my own children who baffled their mother with their ping-ponging between terrific and downright impossible. Then, in a used-book store one day, I found a parenting book from the early 1980s, the work of a child development study center called the Gesell Institute. This book asserted that most children alternate between stages of equilibrium and disequilibrium as they grow, every six months or so. When they are in a state of disequilibrium at, say, three-and-a-half, they will test the limits of their parents’ patience on a daily basis. Six months later, at four, they will have matured into a state of equilibrium, and the problems of just a few months ago will be forgotten—until they mature another six months to four and a half years of age and return to their disequilibrial selves.
Here is the book’s illustration of what this all looks like:
Figure 1
Alternation of Ages of Equilibrium and Disequilibrium
© 1976 by The Gesell Institute of Child Development, Frances L. Ilg, and Louise Bates Ames. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.
This chart was so comforting I bought the book. For the first time, I had an inkling that my children’s multiple personalities were not only not imaginary, but actually normal. My children, however, tend to make more immediate, Jekyll-and-Hyde switches between their bright and dark sides than the gradual, sproingy spirals reflected above.
When Seamus was a baby, David and I called him “Easy Shea,” which is hard for me to believe sometimes, but I have it on video. While baby Connor cried incessantly, Seamus rarely shed a tear. He ate eagerly, took lengthy naps, and if someone wanted to hold him that was cool, but really he was just as happy to spend an uninterrupted hour with the pattern on his crib bumper, memorizing its whorls with his unblinking dark eyes. Easy Shea’s older brother was an almost-two-year-old tyrant who threw unbelievable daily tantrums about scratchy tags in shirts, and plates on which ketchup dared touch peas, and bedtime stories read in the improper order. Connor was, I hesitate not to say, incorrigible, and although I knew this behavior was probably my fault (for having dared give him a usurping sibling), I more than once considered packing his bags for two-year-old reform school and leaving him out front until they came to get him.
Then one morning Connor climbed out of his crib, and when I handed him his morning sippy cup of juice, instead of throwing it, he said, “Sank you, Mommy.” I did a double take, as did Easy Shea, who was hanging out on my hip gnawing on some zwieback toast. We both stared at Connor, the reborn angel, humming as he stood at his easel scribbling with broken crayons. The fiend that possessed him had been cast out overnight, and he was returned to me as the content and joyful little boy I once knew.
As soon as the rough patches are past, they are, like childbirth, the dimmest of memories. A year or so after Connor’s transfiguration, I found a book I had bought during the dark times called When Your Kids Push Your Buttons, and while I could recall that I once had buttons that were repeatedly pushed by Connor, I could not remember where they were, or how. Perhaps I had matured as a mother, grown in patience. I breathed a sigh of relief: since I had evidently outgrown my buttons, I would not be needing this book for short-tempered mothers any longer.
And then, one morning last June, Easy Shea awoke as a kicking, screaming, recalcitrant, barely four-year-old stranger. His personal demonic possession manifested itself as a bound duty to disobey anything remotely resembling a direct order. He brought multiple babysitters to the edge of tears. He would battle me to the death over putting on his pajamas or going to the bathroom, even when he had to go so badly his teeth chattered from the effort of holding it in. All communication with Seamus had to occur in a sort of logistical pig Latin, in that I had to twist around anything that I asked of him to seem like the exact opposite of my actual wishes:
ME: Seamus! Mommy is going to be really angry if you open your mouth wide enough for me to brush your back teeth!
If he had an inkling it might please the person asking, he would not cooperate. Any attempts to discipline this child from the Bizarro world were futile, for he could always outwit with his line of opposite reasoning:
ME: You are in time-out, mister!
SEAMUS: I don’t care. I fink time-outs are gweat. And I don’t wike ice cweam. Or TV soes.
Seamus had found a whole new set of buttons on me that Connor had never considered pushing. The more I berated him, the more stubborn he became. He would get a time-out for sticking his fingers into baby Maggie’s nostrils, serve his time, then head right back for another go at it. His behavior changed so absolutely and so quickly that David and I were sure something was wrong. He underwent a battery of blood tests at the pediatrician’s. Nothing. We journaled his eating and sleeping and pooping habits. Seemed fine. We saw a psychiatrist, who was unimpressed by our Tales of the Hellion. “He’s acting out his negative feelings about his sister being born,” the doctor explained.
“But that was eight months ago!” I answered. The good doctor informed me that there was no statute of limitations on sibling rivalry, particularly for a middle child as squeezed as Seamus was on both sides. “Give your son one-on-one, positive attention,” the psychiatrist suggested, and I began picking Seamus up early from school so he could have me to himself while Maggie napped. At those times, he would be sort of weepy, but the psychiatrist was right—he would not act out! At least until the very millisecond one of his siblings reappeared.
This continued for an entire year, during which Maggie was the Amazing Smiling Baby and Connor was an absolute gem. There was a tacit understanding between Connor and me that I needed him to have his act together, and so he always did, with such aplomb that I sometimes forgot to mention it, even as I was heaping praise on his younger brother for not trying to stab baby Maggie with his fork for one entire dinnertime. Connor would tap me on the arm and say, “But what about me? Aren’t I being good?”
“Well, of course you are good,” I’d say, forgetting entirely that there was ever a time that was not the case.
I believe that mothering multiple children is only possible because they have this uncanny tag-team ability. While at all times one of your children is being impossible, it is usually not more than one at the same time. If the disequilibrium chart really held true, and children alternated between agreeable and challenging every six months or so, then Connor and Seamus, at eighteen months apart, would always be on opposite ends. There would also presumably be times when everyone met somewhere in the middle, and peace would reign for a while. But my children seem to stick either to the Very, Very Good or Horrid ends of the spectrum, as if on a carnival ride pinning them to either extreme by sheer dint of centrifugal force. Furthermore, they stay on one side or the other for what seems like much longer than six months. And so I believe that my children are all in on this together, holding whispered conferences in their pop-up play tent.
CONNOR: You know, Seamus, you’ve been unmanageable for a good while now. I’m glad to take it from here.
SEAMUS: Geez, that’d be gweat, ’cause I gotta tell you, I’m exhausted.
MAGGIE: I haven’t even taken a turn yet, I’d be glad to—
CONNOR: No.
SEAMUS: Nah.
CONNOR: Seriously, it’s okay, Maggie, I got it.
SEAMUS: Once you hit two and a half, Mags, you’re going to be on duty for, wike, a year, so west up.
Call it paranoia if you will, but riddle me this: when I put Seamus to bed last Thursday night, it did not escape my notice that he climbed under the covers without any haranguing on my part. I paused at the door and said,
ME: Good night, sweetie.
and closed the door behind me. I could hear Seamus say something through the door, so I reopened it, steeled for one of his patented stalling tactics.
ME: What did you say?
SEAMUS: I said, “Good night, sweetie.” You call me “sweetie” so I call you “sweetie.” Night-night, sweetie!
That was weird. And then, the next morning:
ME: Get dressed, Connor.
CONNOR: But why?
Connor fell into no less than five sobbing rages that same day, over things like his brother bumping him with his arm as he fastened his seat belt, and my removing from the toy room a toy that he was not, at the time, playing with. We attended a friend’s barbecue and made a memorable exit, dragging Connor to our car as he thrashed, sobbing, “Why do we have to go ahh no one else is leaving and I will! not! leave! Ahhh-hahhhh…,” and I was feeling, even more than embarrassed, completely freaked out, because Seamus was walking calmly to the car holding my hand, and not two weeks ago we had to get off a city bus and walk the rest of the way home because of the way he was carrying on, while Connor was being a saint.
Now it seems that Connor, at six and a half, has entered a phase of indeterminate length in which everything is going to make him whine in a manner so raising of my hackles I will have a hard time restraining myself from strangling him.
ME: What kind of bagel would you like, Connor? We don’t have any raisin, but we have plain and sesame.
CONNOR: Why didn’t you get me raisin?
ME: They didn’t have any.
CONNOR: But I really wa-anteddd…rai-sinnnn…
ME: THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY.
CONNOR: (breaking down) Why couldn’t you—just get me—a—raisinnn—baa-aa-gell…I wanted—it—so—MUUUCHHH AHHHH…
This is the point where I bodily carry/drag him to any part of the house in which I cannot hear him, or at least will hear him only faintly, banging his fists on the wall and crying out to the gods that this “always happens to” him. I am not sure if ostracization is the correct disciplinary tactic here, but I am sure it is better than the Saying of Things Mommy Might Regret, or worse.
After a while, silence. Connor reemerges, sniffling, clearly attempting to function rationally. I, modeling coolheadedness, act as if nothing had happened.
ME: Hi, bud. Are you ready for breakfast now?
CONNOR: (lip quivering) I am. But, Mommy. Really. I just have to ask you one thing.
ME: Don’t do it.
CONNOR: Why didn’t you—
ME: I’m warning you.
CONNOR: —buy me a—
ME: I’m begging you.
CONNOR: —raa-hay-hay-zinnnn BAAAAA-GELLLL…
And back to the whining corner he will go.
Is there any sound more grating to a mother’s ears and more pleasant to a sibling’s? Seamus looks on, savoring his sesame bagel, smiling fondly as he chews.
SEAMUS: I wike to wisten when Connor whines. I twy to hear da words he’s saying. But sometimes it just sounds wike “Wahhhh…”
Maggie, looking up from her play kitchen in the next room, also weighs in—
MAGGIE: Con-Con kyin’.
—and then returns to her morning creation, a frittata of plastic strawberries and sporks.
Forty years ago, the child development specialist Jean Piaget suggested that phases of disequilibrium in a child’s life are caused by their attempts to assimilate new abilities and information. While a child is mastering a new ability, Piaget argued, his brain is thrown into disarray. Once the skill is acquired, equilibrium will return. I am wondering just what new skill Connor is acquiring this summer that is making his day-to-day existence so endlessly trying. Is it aiming Nerf darts directly between his younger sister’s eyes? Because he gave that a whirl the other day and then argued tearfully that I had never expressly forbidden it.
