Mediocre Parenting (2)

 Is that chocolate on his forehead???

Isabella has been staying with her grandparents all week, and it has taken me a few days to realize that life without her is difficult for a variety of reasons. Here I was, looking forward to a week with only one child, which surely would cause me to only have to do 50% of my normal parenting, which in turn would leave me with oceans of time to do other stuff. But, as it turns out, without Isabella to beat him into submission from time to time, Mendel acts like a circus freak. He denies food, play, or anything else I suggest; he exclaims the word “no” with the vehemence of a high-class hooker confronted with a shabbily clad customer, and altogether refuses to enjoy himself. Today was particularly heinous, and the phrase: “Are you insane?” is no longer empty rhetoric; this time I actually mean it.

It’s late June, and it’s so muggy outside, people are practically dropping dead if they so much as venture out to their mailboxes, so I suggest the pool. He looks at me as if that’s the stupidest idea he has ever heard. “No, mommy, I don’t want to go TO THE POOL!” he shrieks; well excuse me, I thought the pool was safe, since he has liked it all the 5,673 times he’s been there before, and where did he pick up that haughty voice tone? By one o’clock I’m starting to realize that all he has on his agenda is sitting on the couch and screaming at me, so I put him in his bed and very firmly tell him to stay there.

Surprisingly, he does, which is nice for now but will lead to new anxiety later, since we have an event to go to. The plan was to make Mendel super tired by playing with him and refusing him a nap; he would fall asleep in the car on the way to the Library, and be no trouble during the lecture. Now he will sleep for a few hours and awake refreshed, just in time to experience another mood swing and scream his head off in public, causing complete strangers to throw us dirty looks and wonder a little too loud why “some people think they can bring their children to just anything.”

Why didn’t we get a babysitter? Oh, yes, that’s right; the babysitter costs money. The minute I think about her, I hear that sound they play on the slot machines, coins falling into a large, empty abyss, a sound I can ill afford right now, and yet I seem to be hearing it every day. Well, to hell with it; we’ll just take him.

Once there, he behaves like an angel. People even look at him with admiration, words like “adorable” and “lovely” reach my ears; certainly this is not the same child that kicked me in the stomach earlier when I tried to change his diaper? On any other day, I would bask in the false glory of being deemed a good parent with a perfect child, but today I’m just irritated. Why can’t he act like this at home? What the hell?

Of course, he makes it through the evening really well, even at the supermarket afterwards he doesn’t act out. By the time he goes to bed, he is the sweet, loving child I remember giving birth to; I kiss him goodnight and sigh with relief: it’s only 10:45, I can still get some work done. Actual work, which does not involve giving in to my online Spongebob Collapse addiction. The Sponge is a bit of a problem, since all I’m capable of lately is clicking on brightly colored blocks (Current high score: 1,613,295).

Mendel only wanders downstairs two more times; once to get a drink, and the second time to kiss me goodnight one last time. It’s a real goodnight kiss, not one of those pretend ones where he opens his mouth at the last moment to deposit a day’s worth of saliva in my face. I’m pleasantly surprised; most days I base my parenting choices on the “always expect the worst” adage. This overall feeling of doom is not limited to naughty behavior and spitting; it unfortunately extends to accidents and certain death. If Mendel plays outside, I watch him to make sure he doesn’t climb the tree, falls, and crashes on the rocks; when he walks down the stairs I imagine him lying at the bottom bleeding to death from a nasty head wound. When he has a cold I call the doctor’s office to ask how long a child can have a 103 temperature before he has to be rushed to the hospital (at least three days, they tell me) and I check on him at night to make sure he doesn’t spontaneously stop breathing. John Irving once wrote that you don’t know what fear is until you become a parent (Garp, I think) and I’ve taken that notion to the extreme: for a child, there are a million ways to die, and I’ve imagined them all. Of course, when faced with the daily bumps and bruises that all children are privy to, I lie through my teeth: “It’s nothing,” I tell them, “It’s not the end of the world, and you definitely don’t need a Princess band-aid; now go play”. I don’t possess an excess of sympathy, just cold hard fear. However, I am nothing if not practical; passing this unreasonable fear on to my children is the last thing I want, and besides, they are always getting hurt.

            From the moment she was nine months old and learned to walk, Isabella has been accident-prone.  I don’t know why she walked so early; I myself was 14 months before I took my first steps, my brother waited until he was 16 months old.  Speed doesn’t run in the family; I guess she was in a hurry to fall off of things.  I vividly remember the first time she hurt herself. She was sitting on my husband’s lap, and decided to take one of those strange upper body dives. Her forehead slammed against the edge of the dining room table, which made for a seriously interesting bruise.  Little did we know that it was merely the beginning of many years of falling, hitting, and stumbling.  Since then, she has burned her hand on an iron, fallen off my in-laws porch (4 stitches!) and had more bruises then I care to count.  We’ve had summer days when –in spite of triple digit weather- I’ve refused to dress her in shorts.  One time I counted 13 bruises on her legs, potentially sending the wrong message to nosy neighbors.

The truth is, my daughter walks into a room as if she is the queen, and the furniture her loyal subjects.  The dresser that’s been here for as long as she can remember?  Of course it will move of its own accord, doesn’t it see her coming? And why would the toys not put themselves away? It’s not her fault she trips; it’s the eternal onslaught of things, which don’t clean up their act when they should.  She finds her salvation in grammar: “The bed made me fall” as opposed to “I fell over the bed.”

When we found out she badly needed glasses, we were relieved. All of a sudden things made sense. Of course she was stumbling all over the place; she couldn’t see where she was going! We bought her some very cute glasses, and looked forward to a bruise-free existence.  I fantasized about all the skirts she could wear, without showing a purple map of South America on her legs. From now on, we reasoned, she could see where the furniture was, and she would walk around it; we could stop stocking up on band-aids.  How wrong we were.  Just like before, she kept bumping into things; just like before, weird loud noises would come from her room.  We still found ourselves yelling upstairs: “What on earth are you doing?” approximately five times a day.  We finally had to admit: her ‘accidents’ had nothing to do with poor eyesight. Our daughter is simply a natural born Klutz. Mendel, on the other hand, seeks danger in all the usual places; from climbing to the top of the fridge to eating the soap crumbs from the dishwasher; if you can think of it, he’s already tried it out; what’s worse, he has motivated Isabella to new heights when it comes to “teaching her brother how to behave”. After all, she is the older and wiser sister, and therefore it is essential that she use things like hammers and baseball bats to keep him in line. If my children make it to adulthood in one piece, it will be a miracle.