Tag Archives: Family

Child Portrait #4: Surviving Daycare

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

Child Portrait #3: Baby at the Wheel

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.

“What Am I Thinking of?

My little brother recently came home from eight months in Australia with a new game. It’s called “What Am I Thinking of?” and it seems poised on the brink of bridging the tragic divide between human skulls. With this game you can finally penetrate the consciousness of your fellow man. It’s the most exhilarating science I’ve seen in years. The game goes like this:

Player 1: What am I thinking of?

Player 2: Seahorses.

Player 1: No, Roman columns.

Player 2: Shit.

Normally I hate games, but I had fun with this one because it was so easy to sabotage. “What Am I Thinking of?” is the sort of game that breaks down when you can’t trust your partner to tell you honestly what he’s thinking of. It also thrives on creativity and randomness, which is why the following exchanges were so enjoyable:

Me: What am I thinking of? (eating bacon)

Brother: Genghis Khan.

Me: No, bacon.

&

Me: What am I thinking of? (holding my brother’s face in my hands)

Brother: All Quiet on the Western Front.

Me: No, your face.

Brother: You suck at this game.

Keep in mind that we played “What am I thinking of?” en famille on Christmas morning, so what I was actually thinking was “I am so goddamn lonely” and “My entire life is an exercise in shame and futility.” But joke’s on them because I’m also a cheater!

My brother says the closest he’s ever come to winning this game is when he guessed “London” when his friend was thinking “Dublin.” Evidently some sort of Jungian collective unconscious was in play here. Or the boys were simultaneously reading a map of the United Kingdom. In any case I’m encouraged that two people can read each other’s minds even to this dyslexic degree. They were trying to know each other, and it’s the effort—not the science—that counts.

Me: What am I thinking of? (porn porn Roy Orbison porn dogs champagne)

You: How dark and inaccessible you are.

Me: Congratulations, you win. Game over.