All the World's A Stage

Yesterday, the squeaker caught a frog. It was a teeny, tiny brown frog, and he was holding it when I got home from work. The pipsqueak did not like it one bit (“Scared!”), but the squeaker was ecstatic. I told him to release it into the woods, and I hoped it wasn’t too squashed. It’s important to me that my boys both love and respect the natural world and the living things in it, but I also don’t want to be draconian about that when good intentions are present.

The squeaker spent the rest of the afternoon as a frog, leaping around and looking for bugs to eat. The pipsqueak enjoyed telling the tale of the frog (“Froggie. Awww!”) but he left out the part about being scared.

We’ve been thinking a lot about things the squeaker can do – music lessons, foreign language classes, art classes, martial arts classes, and so on. He takes swim lessons and enjoys them, and swimming seems like a good activity for a child as uncoordinated as he is. His papa also got him a bike recently and we’ve been pleased to see that he can actually pedal it. Steering while pedaling still seems to be a challenge (we spend a lot of time watching him and yelling “Turn! Turn!”, and he did run over the pipsqueak once), but he is working on it.

I don’t really want to enroll my kids in a gazillion activities, but as long as whatever he does is meant to be fun and not too serious, I think some activities would be a good idea. However, he has absolutely no interest in music lessons (and virtually no interest in music, despite a family pedigree that would suggest otherwise). He is mildly interested in painting or drawing monsters, but art holds little appeal outside of that. I don’t think he’s quite ready for martial arts, though we will probably eventually do that because he is so very tiny (only 30 pounds) and some physical confidence would be a very good thing.

So lately we’ve been musing about enrolling him in some kind of drama program. It would seem to be a good fit for a child who is always pretending to be something or somebody else. I just don’t want to spoil his games of the imagination with too much structure...or self-consciousness. But I think he might like acting, and it would be nice for him to meet some other kids whose imaginations are such a prominent part of their lives. There is a little theatre program in the city near us, so I’m thinking that I might look into it.

Literary Pipsqueak and his Swashbuckler Brother

The pipsqueak is warming up to books. Last night, he wanted to read Does a Kangaroo have a Mother Too? over and over and over again....I think we read it six times. But he points to the cover and says “Kangeroo again?” in the cutest voice, so I could not possibly say no. Then we read Goodnight Moon, which we read most nights. Sometimes he really enjoys it, but other times he’s anxious for us to finish up so that we can snuggle and nurse. When he’s in a hurry, he’ll say, “Close it, close it,” to which I’ll say, “But we’re not finished yet!” Then he’ll whisper, “Everywhere!” This is because the last line of the book is “Good night noises everywhere,” the last word of which I deliver in a whisper, or so I realized after he started whispering the word while we were reading. I guess he figures that if he gets the last word in, we’ll be done reading, and he can nurse.

When he’s more patient, he’ll offer some commentary throughout the book. The cow jumping over the moon is “kicking,” so we pause while the pipsqueak kicks his own feet. The pipsqueak notices that the little toyhouse has a light on, and that is always worthy of comment. And he corrects me every time I refer to the kittens – “Cats,” he’ll say firmly. I am not sure why he is so resistant to having them called kittens, but he never misses a reference to them. He also likes the clocks in the books and will point them out, and I always pause for him to fill in what the old lady is whispering – “Hush!”

The squeaker has been reading the Spiderwick Chronicles with his papa. This means that there is a lot of discussion in our household about hobgoblins and griffins and swordfighting. He says he’s not scared, but I’ve noticed that he does routinely take his foam sword with him when he has to go upstairs alone for something.

Thinking about Loss

When I returned to work after the squeaker was born, I remember feeling heartbroken. I missed the warm, snuggly feel of the squeaker, his little round limbs, his smooth baby skin. My arms felt so empty – and my breasts uncomfortably full in a way that reminded me all day long of my baby. I worked with many women who had young children, and quite a few of them stopped by my office to see how I was doing and to let me know that while returning to work was so hard, it would get easier. I pumped milk three times a day, sometimes crying the whole time, and I rushed home every afternoon to hold my tiny baby boy close. I left for work in the darkness of early morning, desperate to return home by mid-afternoon.

One day, I remember sitting in the office of one of my colleagues; she was a few years older than I, and she had two daughters, the younger of whom was three years older than the squeaker. I told her that I found it wrenching to leave my baby every day and that I missed him so very much, and a funny look crossed her face. She seemed surprised that I felt such sadness and loss, and then she said, “I think having a baby feels a lot like falling in love. It’s so intense. But that feeling does go away.” And she said that last part as if it was a good thing, and I remember thinking how awful that sounded. How could I lose this love for my baby? What kind of mother would say such a thing?

But now I know what she meant, and I understand that it wasn’t a terrible thing to say at all. Once, I ached when I was separated from the squeaker all day. Now I miss him, and I am glad to be at home at the end of the day, but I don’t feel that acute, even painful longing for him. There’s a kind of synergy between a young baby and his mother that creates a feeling of oneness between the two of them; with the pipsqueak, I sometimes find it hard to remember where his pudgy little limbs end and mine begin. At night, his warm little feet brush against me, his fingertips rest against my arm, and sometimes in the middle of the night I wake to find his little nose nearly touching mine. I can stroke his soft dark hair, rub his tiny little feet, place a hand on his chest to feel it rise and fall.

The squeaker was even more snuggly. For the first four months of his life, he slept every single night on my chest. He was so small. I would hold him all night long. When he got bigger, I would roll him off so that he curled up right next to me instead. I remember how the squeaker would weave his tiny little hands in my hair, his little elbows and knees pressed against me, his tiny feet touching my knees even as we both slept.

Even in the daytime, mom and baby have a constant and interdependent rhythm, as meals are fed and diapers changed, with lots of hugs and kisses all day long and frequent breaks to nurse. A mother knows every inch of that baby’s skin, every curl of his hair, every quirk of motion. The pipsqueak is me and I am the pipsqueak, and when I pick him up and he rests his head on my chest, I feel complete.

I imagine that this is how it was for Maddie and her mom, and every day I read her mom Heather’s blog and I think about loss in the middle of that intensity between mom and baby. I look at my own baby’s smooth arms and round blue eyes, touch his warm soft skin, squeeze his little toes, and I think about that dark, unbearable, unfathomable grief.

I don’t think the pain of losing a child varies with that child’s age; each age must present its own unique kind of loss, its own special pain. I remember when one of my mother’s friends lost her teenage son to an allergic reaction to peanuts. He died in her arms, gasping for breath, while she frantically tried to open the packaging of his epinephrine shot. At his funeral, people whispered about when his mother might “get over it,” and they tried to comfort her by telling her she shouldn’t be sad because he was in heaven. I remember that such sentiments made my mother angry. “There is no other such sadness,” she said. “She’ll never be the same. It will hurt every day forever.” I had never thought before about how there are some losses from which we do not heal, and some hurts that we must somehow live with forever. We do not get over them, and they do not go away, though the nature of the pain may change over time.

Because the pipsqueak and Maddie were so close in age, I read about Heather’s grief and think about my own boy, my love for him, and the unique way that mom and baby are woven together at that stage of life. Because my colleague was right. A mother’s love for a baby has the intensity of a brand new relationship, the obsessiveness of infatuation, the delight and discovery of new love. As a mother, you see the future stretching out before your baby, full of possibilities and potential as this new person, this unknown personality, blossoms right in front of you. As the baby becomes mobile and language develops, each day you learn a little more about this new person. And as time passes, your baby begins to feel less like a part of you, and more like a separate person, an individual in his or her own right. Obsessive infatuation becomes the more comfortable love of knowing and appreciating this little person, this separate being. You can stand back and look at each other, and you both know and love deeply, but more quietly and evenly. More peacefully. That shift feels like a loss, because the intense love felt so good, but also a gain and a relief, because you discover the boundaries of yourself again and you learn to appreciate your little child’s own separate identity and personality which has been emerging all along, of course, but really takes off in the toddler years. It’s a revelation that underneath that intensity is a deep, steady love for your child that persists and grows even as the synergy that mom and baby have is changed by a toddler’s growing sense of independence and self-authorship.

Loss of a child at any stage would cause a unique kind of pain; when my mom’s friend lost her teenage son, I remember my mom feeling particularly sad for her because he’d been going through a rebellious phase and he’d been at odds with both his mom and his dad. If they’d had a little more time, said my mother, they would likely have worked through that, but because they hadn’t, the grief was compounded by a sense of unfinished business, the absence of reconciliation, the guilt of reprimands and hard line discipline in the midst of teenage angst. But a different stage of the parent/child relationship would only have presented its own unique grief, I think.

Thinking about loss – which I think must lurk in the back of every mother’s mind – throws the best parts of motherhood into high relief, and it makes the most mundane moments sublime. Life could be so different next year, next week, 10 minutes from now. There is a last day of your life, and most of us won’t know when that is. A last morning that you wake up. A last time that you get the mail. A last hot shower. A last time that you make love. A last time that you kiss the top of your child’s head. A last time that you see a fabulous sunset. It comes for all of us, sooner or later. And I don’t think keeping that in mind is necessarily depressing or morbid or dark. It just is. Knowing that gives the good moments a special sweetness. And I like to think that keeping that in mind gives the dark moments their place, which they will take regardless of our willingness. Somehow, acknowledging the dark moments seems to make them a little less scary.

Boys on Vacation

The squeaker wants to know why we don’t fall off the earth. He’s asked a lot of questions lately about why the moon changes, what makes day and night, and why the sun sets and rises. I’ve tried to explain, but I can tell it’s all very abstract to him. He’s seen globes, so the concept of a spherical earth is not completely unfamiliar to him, but he is struggling to make sense of it. Still, I thought his question was great, even if “gravity” is an unsatisfyingly mysterious answer. I will have to find a good model of the solar system for him.

Meanwhile, The pipsqueak is making great strides in the art of persuasion. He’ll ask for something – “Cookies?” “Nurse?” – and then he’ll add “please” in the cutest little baby voice if he senses any resistance at all. If the answer is still no, he’ll hold up one little finger and say, “Minute?” This could have many slightly different meanings – a cookie in one minute? Nursing for just one minute? But the general sense is clear – just a little bit, pretty please???? If he doesn’t get what he seeks, his little face just crumples, and he runs away, tears streaming, to throw himself down on the floor and sob, while crying “Sad! Sad!” Ever the expressive one, the pipsqueak has already labeled many of his emotions – sad, scared, mad – and he apparently feels each acutely. He is such a contrast to his reserved big brother.

We’ve been on vacation for the last week, and we spent some time at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. The location is very pretty, but so empty. I sometimes tell people we live in the middle of nowhere, but now that I’ve really been to the middle of nowhere, I am not so sure I’ll describe our area that way. The lakes were beautiful, but I kept longing for the beach. We stayed with my husband’s sister and her family in a cabin they rented and generously offered to share with us. She has a son who is just 3 months older than the squeaker. However, our boys didn’t really get along. They are different in just about every possible way. Their entire family watches a lot of television – as in they leave TVs on in their bedrooms 24/7. I could hear their TVs droning at 4 a.m. I don’t know how they could sleep! Perhaps because of TV, the squeaker’s cousins are more...I don’t know how to describe it...fractured, maybe? They jump from task to task frequently, and they have trouble focusing on any one thing. For example, neither of the cousins could sit through a full-length movie on a DVD. After a while, it didn’t hold their interest. It’s as if they aren’t used to actually focusing on what is on the TV because it provides a kind of perpetual background noise; periodically, they watch what is on the screen, and then they drift away to do something else while the TV drones on, and then their attention will eventually turn back to the TV. And they do this over and over again, day and night.

The squeaker generally entertains himself by becoming involved in some game of the imagination – he’s a T-rex, or a crocodile, or a bear. But his cousin found this kind of playing strange and dull. He kept saying that the squeaker played “baby games.” And the more the squeaker persisted in trying to get his cousin to play, the more his cousin pushed him away. The squeaker was puzzled and sad, which worries me a bit because maybe that’s how most kids will respond to his games. I am hoping that his cousin is an anomaly, but the squeaker is very naïve. We shall see, I guess.

Bathing & Books

We have a bath time ritual in our house every night before bed. I know many parents of young children do this, but we didn’t do it with the squeaker. He just took baths whenever we thought he needed one. But I started bathing the pipsqueak every night when he was about four months old because his eczema was so itchy, and a bath followed by a good slathering of aquaphor seemed to make a big difference. It turned out that both of us really liked the routine. It signaled to him that bedtime was on the way, so I didn’t end up plunking him in bed out of nowhere, and it meant that I got to take a freshly scrubbed, sweet –smelling baby to bed, instead of a baby with oatmeal in his hair and dirt-smudged knees.

In those early months, I would put the pipsqueak in his plastic baby tub and rinse him off. Now it seems so long ago that he was that tiny and helpless. He sits (and sometimes stands) in the tub on his own now, often joined by big brother, and the two of them will play together or separately. He’s usually quite happy in the tub, but he doesn’t like getting out and being dried off. As soon as I get him out, he starts shrieking “Escape! Escape!” because he wants to run around the upstairs, naked and giggling. The squeaker thinks the whole thing is hilarious – he calls it “the show” and runs around with the pipsqueak making loud “whooping” noises. I have to chase, pounce on, and dress the pipsqueak pretty quickly or else he’ll pee on the floor (accompanied by a mournful little voice saying “Pee...pee...”). In the middle of this chaos, I am left wondering why I thought this routine was conducive to settling down for bed.

Then it’s time for a book, which the pipsqueak has mixed feelings about. Only in retrospect do I appreciate the squeaker’s deep and early love for books. At six months, he would rest quietly on our laps while we read to him; he listened carefully and studied the pictures. At age two, he listened to long chapters from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I didn’t try to read him the whole book, but he liked the chapter about the spiders. Because the squeaker is a very wiggly, high-energy kid, it did not occur to me that he had an unusual ability to absorb reading.

Now, maybe it’s the pipsqueak’s who’s unusual, but somehow, I don’t think so. He likes books OK. He’ll sit and page through them himself, and he’ll point out things in the pictures. But he doesn’t settle down to listen to a book in that uncanny way that the squeaker had. He thinks certain books are very funny, and he’ll be very engaged when you read those books to him – but briefly. Well before you get through the book, he’ll cheerfully say, “All done!” and try to close the book. Lately, we’ve been reading Goodnight Moon every night, and he does seem to enjoy the rhythm of the text. He likes the cow jumping over the moon and he really loves the clocks (the kid has a thing for clocks), but he is always very happy when the book is over and he gets to snuggle in, nurse, and sleep.

Like most parents of more than one child, I marvel at how very different my two little boys are. No one is the world is as genetically similar to the squeaker as the pipsqueak, and yet they are very different little people.

Car. Wash.

Though we don’t watch any TV, we do have a lot of DVDs. Some are movies; others are TV shows that ran on public television. The squeaker rarely saw anything on the TV before he was about two and a half. The pipsqueak gets more screen time because he’s around while the squeaker watches his favorite movies and shows.

The pipsqueak has been in the room while the squeaker has watched DVDs about predatory dinosaurs hunting and eating one another. He’s also played happily with his blocks near the TV while the squeaker cheered Steve Irwin on in his pursuit of dangerous crocodiles. He’s seen roaring Tyrannosaurus rexes, fierce (cartoon) battles, and various monsters. You’d think he’d be a fearless little thing.

Just don’t take him to the car wash.

This past weekend, we noticed that our minivan wasn’t quite the color it was when we bought it, so we decided it was time for a good wash. We took it to one of those car washes that you drive through while various hoses spray water and soap all over the car, power wash it, rinse it, and then dry it. The squeaker finds the experience mildly interesting. The pipsqueak, on the other hand, was petrified.

His already very round blue eyes grew even rounder as the machinery of the car wash started up, making all kinds of industrial noises and admittedly looking a bit menacing. When the loud spraying started, he panicked: “Hug! Hug! Mama!” So I had to get him out of his car seat and hold him, while he trembled on my lap the entire time.

But now he has a story to tell, and his limited narrative skills are apparently no barrier. Though he does not use phrases yet, he can string single words together without any grammatical glue in order to tell his story about the car wash: “Car. Wash. Loud. Scared! Seat. Mama. Hug.” And there it is: the whole event in just seven words. I couldn’t have told the tale any better myself.

Night of the Hermit Crabs

Lately, the squeaker has been carrying around the shell from his deceased hermit crab, Donald. (Donald was so named after my husband came home from the pet store after purchasing everything the two new crabs -- a gift from the grandparents -- needed. He exclaimed that with the price tag for their new home and new stuff, we might as well call them "Donald" and "Trump." The squeaker thought those names were perfect, so they stuck.)

I don't think the squeaker was deeply attached to his crabs. In fact, I'm not sure he's been entirely consistent about which crab passed on and which remained. Sometimes it was Donald who we found that evening, limp in his cage, and sometimes the squeaker says it was Trump. More than anything, I think he liked their shells, because the squeaker is a collector, and among his collected items are many shells (and bones...and shark teeth...but I digress).

Anyway, this weekend, the squeaker has been clutching the empty shell the deceased crab left behind. Curled up in bed last night with his papa, he said, "I really miss Donald. He was such a nice crab."

He gave a big sigh, and continued wistfully, "I just wish he was a zombie." The visual associated with that is just too delightful; I think my husband nearly choked in his effort not to laugh out loud. But the squeaker was deeply sincere.