Tag Archives: Child Portraits

Child Portrait #4: Surviving Daycare

September 9, 2015 4:30 pm , 1 Comment ,

At home he liked playing with his trains, showing people his naked belly, dancing to Top 40 radio, pretending to trim the lawn, and running back and forth across the living room, yelling “Bumpus!” and then falling into hysterics. But eventually the boy’s mother had to rejoin her husband in the workforce. One morning she snapped her chatty son into his car seat and drove him to a daycare facility near the bowling alley north of town. The boy thought they were on the highway in order to identify big trucks together. “Biiiiig truck,” he’d say, lowering his voice to a manly decibel whenever he saw something more substantial than a pickup through his rear window. His mother was usually his equal in appreciating truck dramatics, so the boy did not understand why she pulled into a parking lot full of sedans and then tearfully delivered him into a padded room comprised of broken toys and a handful of other crestfallen children.

At first the boy tried to replicate the good times he had at home at his new daycare facility, but he was used to doing things a certain way. When he pooped his pants, for example, he expected to be able to continue playing for a few more minutes before a strange woman snatched him violently off the rug by his wrist and then detained him at the diaper station. When he was dumping air compost onto the floor from a plastic dump truck, he expected to be able to finish the whole load before the dump truck disappeared in a joy-killing vortex called “clean-up time,” which consisted of another strange woman kicking toys toward a crate in the corner as if dolls and Legos were so many plague rats. The boy was used to being able to share his thoughts freely, whether they pertained to weed wackers, cranes owned by the telephone company, or the relative merits of chicken fingers cut into pieces or left unscathed. He was accustomed to carousing outside with his peers, but these daycare children were depleted and dispirited, and they were not allowed to go outside unless the barometric pressure fell within an undisclosed five-millibar range. Thus the boy spent his daycare hours sitting by himself on the play rug that was always freshly tidied, waiting in contemplative silence, unsure of what to do with himself.

(Each of these hours was agony for the boy’s mother, who obsessively watched the daycare’s live video feed on her computer at work, and could read all the quiet bewilderment in her son’s small, stooped body as he sat there in his monster truck t-shirt while hired caretakers punted toys over him. Pretty soon she made the mistake of giving the feed’s online password to her mother-in-law, who didn’t have a job and could therefore surrender herself entirely to the addictive qualities of real-time, streaming daycare video. The women would call each other up whenever another child was jerked out of frame. “I can’t take it anymore,” said the boy’s mother. “I’m going to go get him.” And the boy’s grandmother would have to talk her down. Meanwhile they were both searching frantically for an alternative daycare situation that didn’t so closely mirror a totalitarian state.)

But the boy was resilient, and he did not permit his three weekly mornings in kinderhell to dampen his afternoon élan. After a month of daycare, his parents gave him a toy lawnmower because they were so ridden with guilt about the psychological torments they were subjecting their child to, and the boy found that he could process much of his angst through imaginative yard work. He was beginning to sense that the world could be a cruel caretaker, and he took refuge in the ordered routines of lawn maintenance. When he was at home, there were few hours when he could not be seen roving the property, making loud engine noises around the mulched flowerbeds. One afternoon the boy was taking a nap at his grandmother’s house while her neighbor was running a weed wacker. His grandmother thought she heard the boy’s voice on the baby monitor, so she went upstairs to check on him. He was lying on his back in the crib, wide awake and perfectly serene.

“What are you doing?” she said. He gave a blissful sigh and cocked his head toward the open window.

“Just listening to the trimming,” he said.

Trimmin‘

Posted in: more bullshit , Tagged: , , , ,

Child Portrait #3: Baby at the Wheel

August 17, 2015 3:51 pm , Leave a Comment ,

The baby was remarkable for his calm. Perhaps he knew that in order to survive he needed to distinguish himself from his older brother, a two-year-old bon vivant who commanded the attention of everyone in a room with a rotation of behaviors that included mania, exultation, violence, and hysteria. Thus the baby was content to recline passively in his mother’s arms, winning her over with his unflappable sweetness and tranquility. He was confident that his sibling’s charisma would eventually hoist him with his own petard, and then only the baby would be left standing, or lying down as the case may be.

But he knew that at first he risked being perceived as a “blob.” It was a testament to the baby’s imperturbability that he did not let these critical judgments upset him. If he was a blob, he thought, he was a Blob Triumphant, because look who was unilaterally soaking up Mama’s love on the shady park bench while the firstborn child wore out his father on the playground equipment with a series of taxing and repetitive demands that could not help but engender resentment over time. Meanwhile there was the baby, angelically faking sleep, with all the milk to himself.

The baby had to admit, however, that his brother had his moments. For instance the elder son could identify every kind of truck on the road with feverish joy: dump truck, trash truck, moving truck, etc. The baby was also interested in trucks, so he always paid attention when they were the topic of discussion. He was not above learning what he could from his brother before disposing of him. It did irritate the baby, however, that his sibling was able to charm his way behind the wheels of cars and tractors so easily. “May I please ride on your Gator?” he’d ask their uncle the farmer, and sure enough their uncle would pull the boy onto his lap and let him vroom around for half an hour. The baby also coveted rides on the Gator, but he had to remind himself that he was playing a long game. Did he want to ride on the Gator now, or did he want to ride on the Gator everyday, into perpetuity, just as soon as he could convince his parents that he was their only child worth keeping? It was merely a matter of time, he decided, and doubled down on his show of serenity.

Sometimes the baby wondered if he’d originally made a strategic error and if he should have joined forces with his hyper, high-maintenance sibling instead of trying to divide and conquer. His brother certainly seemed to have a lot of fun. When they were at the pool, the baby had to sit quietly on the sidelines while his parents took turns launching their eldest into the water again and again. The boy would soar through the air in his floaties and swim diaper, sink nearly to the bottom of the pool, then come up sputtering and choking with both delight and chlorine. “More dat,” he would say, and of course their parents complied because they found his derring-do hilarious. The baby would like to go swimming as well, but at this point everyone would be alarmed if he started crying, and he’d probably end up at the pediatrician’s.

The baby was ashamed to admit that once or twice his brother had threatened to win him over as well. The most memorable incident involved trucks. The baby was still strapped into his car seat on the kitchen floor (though his onesie was pasted to his back with sweat, he hadn’t complained about it, thus no one had thought to remove him), when his older brother—naked except for the Hawaiian lei around his neck—approached him cautiously with a small box of raisins. The baby watched in horror as his brother stood at his chubby toes, staring down at him intently while trying to extract single raisins from the rectangular clump. Was his brother on to him? Had he finally figured out that his baby sibling harbored ulterior motives for being so chill, and that all those motives led directly to the elder son’s demise? The baby’s sudden terror was almost enough to expel the binkie from his mouth.

But to his great astonishment, his older brother addressed him personally. “Do you like trucks?” he said. “Do you want to share my trucks?” The baby didn’t know what sound from his small repertoire to make in response. Pretty soon half a dozen toy trucks had materialized in his big brother’s hands, and he was running them up and down the baby’s tremendous belly, making truck noises and explaining earnestly to the baby how the vehicles operated and what their purpose was, and the turning wheels tickled the baby’s arms and legs, and the baby started laughing even though he’d made a pledge to himself never to lose his cool with his brother, and then his brother also started laughing as he made the trucks go faster and faster in their chaotic circuits around the baby’s body, and for a moment the baby saw an alternate reality, one in which he and his brother could be allies, and they could own a Gator together, and take turns riding it, and putting gas in it, and changing the tires when the tires were low. And maybe there were enough parental resources to go around after all, and maybe it was okay to cry sometimes, and maybe if he didn’t like the Raffi song that was playing on the car stereo, he could just vocalize that dislike, and not worry so much about being put up for adoption.

Then again, the baby thought as his brother continued to use his belly as a racetrack, consider how amazing it would be if I had all those sweet trucks to myself.

Posted in: more bullshit , Tagged: , ,

Child Portrait #2: Pica Like a Boss

August 16, 2015 12:05 pm , Leave a Comment ,

The toddler had only been mobile for six months, but she had already consumed three times her weight in sand, dirt, rocks, and dog food. Her unorthodox appetite baffled her parents. It certainly wasn’t that she was malnourished. Her typical breakfast consisted of three eggs, two slices of toast, and a mountain of fruit. And yet if her parents left her unsupervised in the house for over a minute they’d inevitably find her squatting over the doggie bowl, shoveling kibble into her mouth as fast as she could. Then she’d smile up at her parents, trying to charm her way out of trouble, but her infraction was always betrayed by the thick brown paste sticking to her virgin white baby teeth.

It didn’t help that the toddler was so independent. From the time she’d mastered crawling, she was filled with steely purpose. It was as if she woke up every morning with a long list of tasks that she needed to complete that day at maximum speed and efficiency. She must roll her grandmother’s desk chair across the living room and back. She must remove every magnet from the face of the refrigerator. She must flee the supervisory perimeter of all the grown-ups and ascend the most treacherous stairway. She must make haste to the garage in order to handle every power tool in turn. She must consume three cups of dirt. And if her parents ever tried to thwart one of her clear objectives, she would be furious. Didn’t they know how busy she was? Did they not comprehend the value of her time? Did the mayor of New York have to take naps every afternoon?

The toddler’s voracity for life and between-meal snacking was most evident during visits to her grandmother’s house. Not only did Nana have a dog that needed to be fed and watered everyday, she also had several jars of delicious loose change, a pile of compost, a kiddie pool she’d converted into a sandbox, and a gravel driveway that was basically heaven on earth. The toddler marched around the house and grounds with a demeanor that suggested she was the most competent person there. Before she began her peregrinations, she liked to seize some object that she would only part with upon pain of death, something like a sharp stick or one of her grandmother’s heirloom necklaces.

But the toddler’s favorite companion on her dedicated tours of Nana’s property was a small trophy that her uncle had once won playing peewee soccer. The trophy featured a short metal man on the verge of kicking a ball, and for all intents and purposes, this man was the toddler’s abject servant. He came with his master when she inspected the swing-set ladder. He stood at attention on the tray table of her high chair when she devoured lunch. He faithfully oversaw her dips into the dog’s water bowl. But the metal man lived in fear that eventually his master would discover the one flaw that would nullify all his other acts of devotion: he was inedible.

Toddler and trophy grew apart before the former realized that she could not behead the latter. Or perhaps she’d known it all along and it was a sign of her maturation that she’d ever employed an individual she could not also eat. But whatever the cause of their estrangement, the trophy soon returned to the bookshelf and the toddler found a new slave to her various enterprises. His name was Batman, and he was a Pez dispenser. And if she gnawed on him at just the right angle, she could sometimes score a piece of his ear.

Posted in: more bullshit , Tagged: , ,

Child Portrait #1: Born to Crunch

August 15, 2015 5:14 pm , Leave a Comment ,

The newborn’s parents took their exercise routine as seriously as a heart attack that could only be staved off with kettleballs and ankle weights. Throughout the pregnancy, the mother- and father-to-be worked out daily. The mother’s fitness of choice was long-distance jogging, an activity that she didn’t relinquish until the 8-month mark. The father preferred doing video aerobics from the comfort of their condominium. He frequently joined his partner on the living room rug for two-hour sessions of prenatal yoga.

So it was no surprise when their baby emerged from her electrolyte-fed chrysalis with peak levels of cardiovascular endurance. Her lung capacity was in the 99th percentile. She relentlessly screamed her head off. And for the first few weeks of her life, her parents could not mitigate her despair no matter how tightly they swaddled her or how sweetly they sang over her crib. Their round-the-clock exertions were yielding no positive results whatsoever and the situation was becoming dire. The mother and father were not only sleep-deprived and quarrelsome, but they were losing muscle tone as well.

One afternoon when he hadn’t slept for 48 hours and his newborn was still howling on his chest with the strength of a thousand angry kittens, the father remembered something that a woman in spandex had once said on a workout video long, long ago. “Fitness,” she’d huffed between reps with her barbells, “knows no age limits.” Could it be that their baby was missing her parents’ workouts as much as they were?

He rose from the couch with his child in his arms, then executed his first deep squat since he’d became a father. The baby immediately quieted. Again, he lowered his butt to the floor, feeling the burn along the length of his weakened quadriceps. His daughter smiled up at him through her tears. “Honey,” he shouted to his wife, “you have to come see this!”

The mother roused herself from the toilet, where she had dozed off minutes before. She thought that something awful had happened because she couldn’t hear the baby crying. But her panic turned to joy when she entered the living room and saw her husband doing lunges while holding their elated child triumphantly over his head like a jungle cat in a Disney cartoon.

“It’s a fitness miracle,” she said.

From then on, the baby whipped her parents back into fighting form. They now recognized that their daughter would never be content to lie still on a blanket wearing an adorable onesie. She would not fall sleep unless calories were being aggressively burned. She would not be soothed until both her parents had reached their target heart rates. She was like a diminutive drill sergeant in a newborn boot camp. Soon her parents were in the best shape of their lives. They took turns doing crunches on the play mat, using their baby as a counter weight.

“They say it gets easier around three months,” said the mother, her nursing bra soaked through with sweat. She wondered if this was what Jackie Stallone had to endure with Sylvester. Her abs were on fire. “Subbing out,” she said. The father took the baby and immediately dropped into a warrior pose.

“I think she’s almost asleep,” he said. “One more set of side kicks and we’ll be home-free.”

“As much as I like squeezing into my pre-pregnancy blue jeans,” said his wife, “I think I’m going to take it easier on the second go-round. Like, just watch TV and drink milkshakes on the couch for nine months so we’ll have a less vigorous baby. Because this is really hard.”

The husband was torn between his inclination to be sympathetic to his wife and his passion for exceeding personal fitness milestones.

“What about if you just focused on the upper body with our second-born?” he said. “And maybe bounced on the exercise ball now and then?”

“Okay,” said his wife. That sounded like a good compromise. And at least they could start a college fund with the money they’d save on gym memberships and personal trainers. They’d already bought a treadmill for the nursery.

“I just never expected motherhood to be so…grueling,” she said. Her husband kissed her, suddenly overcome with love for his wife and child. Not only were they the two most amazing women in the world, after his mother and perhaps Michelle Obama, but they’d also helped him conquer his fitness plateau.

The baby whimpered and began to stir in his arms. “I know that cry,” he said. “It means that she’s ready for lateral lunges.”

“Let me,” said the mother, limping to her feet. And sure enough, the baby dozed off again, as her mother lunged her back and forth, back and forth, with her husband spotting them every step of the way.

Posted in: more bullshit , Tagged: , , ,