Ian Fell Into the Pond

"I'd drain that pond," said my father-in-law, whose mother's house the husband and I own and live in and try to repair and in many ways endure because it's an old place. A project always in need of doing or cleaning up from. Right now, the backyard is a bit of a wreck.

"I think I'm going to cover it," said the husband. Ian was either in my womb or on my breast. I can't recall because this conversation occurred more than once.

"You could put one of those cage covers over it," I said. "The ones they have at the fish nurseries to keep out raccoons."

The pond in question is stone, about 20 inches deep, a lovely oval thing, about the size of two jacuzzis, with a stone bridge going across it at the narrowest point. Big stones jut up around it on the border; it's quite good masonry. When we first moved in, I wanted to get rid of it because what the hell do I know about maintaining a pond? Fortunately, I've discovered, I have no interest whatsoever in yard work of any kind anyway. The husband and I have also discovered that for whatever reason we don't have to do much to it at all. It's full of mosquito fish (raccoons got all the goldfish we tried to keep in there) and large, lush patches of lily. We just infrequently remove algae with a net and that's it. It's actually a great thing to have, primarily because children like sitting on the bridge, hanging out there, looking over the iron railings. It looks very large to them, like a big, big thing. When I was a child I thought that the hill outside our house was huge and steep. I thought that the lilac bush outside my bedroom window was not huge but MASSIVE. I thought my father's arm muscles were the largest around. I remember going home for the first time in years when I was in my mid-twenties, and the hill was not steep but low and rolling, practically no more than an incline. The lilac bush was merely tall. I didn't need to observe my father's arm muscles because by then I knew my father. There was no substance or remarkable strength to any muscle in his body.

So when Ian fell into the pond, he probably thought he was in an ocean. He couldn't stand because the silt is too thick and the bottom is too slippery and because he's two and fell into his parent's pond and was of course in great shock and does not know how to swim. (We've tried to teach him to make a bubble, but he just drinks a gulp of bathwater and says, "Bubbles.")
I was at my computer, the desk of which faces a giant window and a sliding-glass door that leads into our backyard. I was typing something of absolutely no importance. It was about 5pm.

"Ian! Ian!" I heard the husband yell. I heard a splash and a cry, and I looked out the glass and saw Ian in the pond, head and shoulder above the surface, one arm reaching up. I opened the door and stood on the deck and the husband was holding our saturated son up out of the water. He was bent in an up-side-down "V" over the pond, looking at me, not sure what to do next. Ian was crying. He was also probably cold.

I think I was breathing. I'm not sure. "I'll get a towel," I said, and I did, and I wrapped the child into it and held him, took him in and dried him off. He smelled like pond water. He might have had a mosquito fish in his pants. I've no idea. I rubbed his toes to warm them off and he laughed up at me, his hair wet and slicked over one side of his head, like a comb-over you might see on an old man.

Ian Fell Off The Changing Table

Wham! 28 pounds of baby boy was on the floor. Then silence, as Ian was immersed in those few seconds between what happened and crying.

Where was I? Across the room, of course, with my back turned, right where I should have been. Duh. Where do you think I was? I had made it a habit to leave him on the changing table, just for 3 or 4 seconds, while I zipped across his room (about ten feet) to his dresser and pulled out a pair of pants for him, or a shirt. I didn't see him fall--I heard the wham and ran over and scooped him up while he howled and howled and I hope somewhere in his mind cursed his mother for being such an idiot.

"It was all my fault, Ian," I said, sitting with him in one of the ancient chairs in our living room. I bent his arms and legs and wiggled his wrists and checked his head, his mouth. Nothing. Not a scratch except for that enormous fear and shock and discovery of gravity that kept him howling for minutes. He could have broken a bone, split his head open. Split his lip and needed stiches and Novocaine injections and antibiotics and then therapy. He'll probably still need therapy. My god.

"I'm so sorry," I told him, his head on my shoulder, his cries moving into low whines. "It was all my fault, and it will never happen again. Never, ever, ever."

He'd been a little fussy when I made my usual move across the room to fetch his clothes, refusing to let me take off his shirt or something. So when I went to his dresser, I was a little annoyed with him. This didn't make me feel any better.

I can't believe how easy it is for something to happen to your child. I realize this realization is coming a little late, since Ian is almost two, but it's shocking how quickly they can hurt themselves and how clearly it is the parent's fault when they do. Yesterday he was gripping the oven door handle and the refrigerator door handle at the same time, a practice neither myself nor the husband have objected to. And why would we? The oven wasn't on, there is no potential for electric shock from either source. Ian is just exploring the kitchen. So we let him. How were we to know that he might want to hang on the oven door, or perhaps use the oven handle to climb the stove? What are we, parents? Human beings? Stupid? Attributing adult levels of judgment to our toddler? Fortunately, as soon as he made the monkey move and started to pull open the oven door, I grabbed him and made him cry for telling him no. So he was still scratch-free but for the wound to his desire.

Things

My mother has used the same purse for over 30 years. It started out as dark chocolate brown, long rather than wide, with a single buckle strap holding the flap over the purse itself. It contains no inside pockets or zippers. As a teenager, it was one of the few things she owned that didn't embarrass me, not because I liked it but because it was so simple and unremarkable, unlike the JAR of water she carried with her everywhere, often in a plastic Metamucil container that she carried up to eateries in the mall so she could ask the folks behind the counter to take it to their sink and refill it.

But back to the purse. My mother is an environmentalist in nearly every way you can imagine. She doesn't buy things, ever, and reuses to almost an absurd degree (although given the state of our environment, no measures can really be considered absurd). So in her house is the same cookie sheet she's had for the last 30 years, the same towels--despite their bristly texture--the same sheets. Darned socks. Patched underwear. And the same visor--a sort of straw giant thing that extends nearly half a foot out from her forehead; she lines it with strips of cloth to prevent rubbing of the skin. And of course she uses the same purse. It is unevenly striped with wrinkles and cracks and its color is now a pale brown. The shoulder strap deteriorated long ago, so she now carries it under her arm. I asked her a long time ago why she didn't get a new purse.

"I don't really need one," she said. "And I like this one."

I admire my mother very, very much--she is the walk and the talk. She is rich with integrity and character. I didn't always admire her or like her, but I do now because I have thank god matured in many ways. And I was chatting with her today about depression, which she suffers from but treats very successfully; she's also quite knowledgable about how it works--symptoms and the like. I was telling my mother today that I have recently contracted ANOTHER cold that is wiping my ass out and filling my sinuses with what feels like cement.

"I went through a period in my life," she said, "when I got sick a lot. And I remember that I was worrying all the time. Do you worry?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. You do? That's lowering your resistance." She went on to describe the nature of her worries during that period of her life, and in two sentences about herself she stated exactly how I feel all of the time. I cried, but it was a cry of relief, really, because now I have sort of an answer, a source of what's the matter, and I can do something about it. My mother did, after all.

During our conversation, I was looking at my own purse, flopped over the wooden crate we use as a coffee table in the TV room. I've had it about five years. Longer than it is wide, with an adustable shoulder strap. It started out as dark, dark red. It's getting worn; the seams that hold the purse together, that curve around its shape, are getting whitish. It's quite wrinkled, especially in the fold of the flap. About two years ago, the strap started ripping, and I went shopping for a new purse. Nothing worked. The purses in the department store didn't hang against me the right way; I couldn't adjust the length, and they were all bulky and they felt strange and foreign--nothing felt like the place where I wanted to store the things I use all the time. So I took my old purse to a shoe shop and had it repaired and polished. It's doing fine. I can't imagine using anything else.

Flowers

The other day, walking along the park with Ian, I pointed out flowers for the first time.

"These are flowers, Ian," I said, gently bending a hibiscus into the baby jogger so he could smell it. "It's pink."

He looked up at me. "Fow-ers."

"Right! Flowers. Let's look for them. You'll see them everywhere. Want to smell?" I demonstrated, holding the dogs by their leashes with my other hand and then holding a hibiscus to his nose. He grinned and pressed his lips together and sniffed hard and deep, tilting his head and chest back in a little heave.

"Did you smell them, Ian?"

"Yah."

We started moving again. I pointed out a cluster of rose bushes. "Here's some more flowers, Ian."

"Yah." A dog stopped to pee in a patch of ivy. Ahead of us was a tall butterfly bush about the size of a small tree.

"Fowers! Fowers!" He pointed.

When we finished the walk, I set him up in his booster and gave him some raisins and crackers and went into the backyard. Despite our luck at owning a large lot of land, we're lazy landscapers and the only pickable flowers we have are lilies, bulbs planted everywhere long ago by the husband's grandmother. Lilies grow around this ailing stone well (a non-functional barbecue) and along the side of the house, next to patches of dirt that our cats use as a bathroom and sprouting their way through matted yellow grass and Virginia Creeper that has spread up our fence in a narrow column, getting wider and thicker every day. I clipped three pale pink lillies and brought them inside to Ian, who was dropping his Sesame Street crackers into a plastic cup of milk to see what would happen.

"Look, Ian."

"Fowers!"

I put them in a slim vase with water and put the vase on the kitchen table. Ian reached for them.

"Want to smell the flowers, honey? Want to smell the flowers?"

"Yah! Yah! Fowers!"

I held the vase for him. Big sniff. A smile. "Aahhh," he said. "Fowers."

Dinosaurs

Ian doesn't like being kissed, for the most part. Whenever I ask him for a kiss, he usually continues looking at or playing with whatever he happens to be looking at or playing with--a book, coffee-cup sized plastic dinosaur, a fire truck, a wooden puzzle piece--and says, "No, no." At bedtime, when he's in the husband's lap, ready to read some books, and I lean down for a goodnight kiss, he always holds up his arm to my mouth and says, "Arm." (As in, Arm Only, Mommy.) And I go on with whatever it is I'm doing--watching Ian, marveling at how wonderful he is and how much I love him, at how he lately responds to "What's your name?" with "Hap-py." (Seriously. It's kind of beautiful, kind of ironic, kind of ridiculously cute.)

What Ian does like is to make his things kiss, stuffed animal or not--a white monkey and a penguin, a penguin and a bear, a plastic dragon and a toy block, a toy block and a froggie finger puppet. He's coming I think to the end of a phase where he brought me and the husband his things to kiss.

Holding up a white-puppy puppet: "Kiss, kiss."

"You want me to kiss the puppy?"

"Yah. Yah."

"Okay. Mmmwwa!" Big smack on dusty head of puppet.

Holding up a wooden a helicopter puzzle piece: "Kiss, kiss."

"You want me to kiss the helicopter?"

"Yah. Yah."

"Mmmwaa!" Smack on blade of propeller.

The other day, the husband tried to engage Ian in some fun, violent playtime with the plastic dinosaurs. Gnarling sounds, roars, wounds. Brontosaurus knocking Tyrannosaurus off the top of the block tower. Growling. Pretend fighting, pretend tearing of the pretend flesh like on the cover of Ian's National Geographic book, Dinosaurs.

Result: failure. Ian prefers his dinosaurs to kiss, for the flesh-eaters not to prey on the herbivores, for no blood to be drawn. This kind of makes me wonder about "human nature," that bogus term. It makes me wonder about a lot of things. I'm certain an interest in violence is on its way, and it's not as if Ian never gets angry. He throws things, he howls when he might not get his way. But dinosaurs, despite the pictures he's viewed so often in his National Geographic book, are in his mind a peace-loving breed of thing. They kiss a lot. They enjoy hugs. They are conflict free.

Taking a Bath

Before Ian started walking, one of my favorite times with him was right after his bath. I lifted him from the tub while the water drained away, wrapped him in a towel, and stood up; as I did I watched his face, shadowed just a little from the towel flopped over his hairline. His round, blue eyes were wide open and happy, his mouth slightly open in a smile and his chin and cheeks free of all the food and dirt that had collected there all day. Then I pressed his head dry, his armpits, between his toes, the flesh-lined hollows in his neck. From there we'd read the grammar primers on the wall--these old 8x11 prints that belonged to Chris' mother that I put in some frames. They're fun jokes, since most of them contain grammatical errors in their definitions--of a noun or a verb or an adverb. But they became habit: as soon as I dried Ian off and stood with him again, he pointed to them and said, "Nown!" After we read them, I'd carry him into his room and get him into his pjs so the husband could come in, read to him, and put him to bed. It was all wonderful to me, but I especially liked those brief moments looking at his face as I stood with him in the towel. He looked so content and clean, as every child should feel, and I think he felt very safe. I felt safe; I think I found safety in caring for him so routinely and gingerly. I felt like I was doing something exactly right for him. Sometimes I lingered there a few seconds and pressed my cheek onto the top of his head while he pointed at the beads that hang over our medicine cabinet and said, "Bead. Bead."

Then came the walking. After a few weeks, he started saying, "Walk. Walk." instead of "Bead. Bead." He also started squirming and clearly not feeling content in my arms anymore. So I plunked him from the bath to the bathmat and dried him off while he stood there. Then he walked out of the bathroom and through the house to his room.

I was devastated. I cried. "I guess that's over," I said to the husband when he asked why I was crying.

The new routine continued; he held the edge of the tub while I dried him off. Then he started counting with me as I dried his toes.

"Waahaaan..." he said slowly and with great inflection. "Tooohoooh... Freeheeeh...."

Then he started leaning his head into my chest as I dried him off. I plunked him down, put the towel over his head like a hooded cape, and he leaned over and put his ear to my breastbone, held it there.

"You ready to walk to your room?"

"Yah." And off he went.

We've now developed the Soap Song.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

Me: And I'd wash your little heinie, and I'd make it really shiny.

Ian: Siney.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

About a week ago, when Ian started a bout of diarrhea (now finished, as well as his crib mattress, which we've had to replace), I lifted him from the tub and lowered him to the bathmat. He stared down at his feet, then up at me, and started to cry.

"What's wrong? What's the matter, sugar?" Next night, same thing--so I plunked him and wrapped him and picked him up and dried him off in my lap again.

"Bead! Bead!"

Last night, as I started to lower him to the bathmat, he stuck his legs straight out in front of him, a perfect 90 degree angle of child, so I didn't even plunk. I wrapped him and held him close and didn't let his feet touch the floor.

"Noun! Noun!"

So far in my life, I have been able to articulate very few beliefs. Only one, actually: Things are not supposed to stay the same. Not my body, not my mind, not my perspective, not my relationships, not my child. Not any child.

And I still believe this.

Walking and Will Part II

It's amazing to me--and I feel a bit ignorant for not seeing this connection before Ian started walking--how walking, how physically being able to move your own body, develops your personality. My god--who knew? Watching this process in a developing child--who knew how much the body and the mind were really connected?

If Ian wants to read a book, he brings it to you. He takes your hand and he places his book of choice INTO your hand. If he wants to get down from his booster seat, he says, Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. If he wants a drink of water, he goes into the kitchen and gets his sippy cup from the table. If he wants a door closed, he closes it. If he wants to go over to the park, he stands at the front door, puts his face to the glass window, and says, Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. If he wants his vintage Fisher Price telephone to be on top of his parents bed, he puts it there. If he wants a piece of bark to hold (he adores strips of bark that line some of the trails and sidewalks of the park across the street), he goes to pick one up; if he wants to drop one in the creek, he goes to the bridge, holds the bark out, and watches it lay itself on the water's surface. If he wants to sit in a dining room chair, or the lumpy-cushioned clawfoot chair that belonged to the husband's mother, he climbs into it. And if he wants to play while you're chopping onions or checking your email or wiping down the bathroom sink, he comes to find you. And you stop whatever you're doing. You give him the time he wants because time isn't the same as chocolate sauce or another plastic toy. It's much more limited.

With Walking Comes Will

When I call Ian to follow me, he now walks in rarely the direction I requested but in a direction of his choosing. I call him again, on the way home from the park, say, when he wants to go not across the street towards home but back toward the pool.

"Come on, Ian!" I shout. "Let's go this way! Don't you want to see your Dye-ah?" (his word for Daddy).

And then Ian, his lower back arching forward in that New Walker way, turns to me and drops his arms.

"Go way," he says, pointing to the park.

"We're going this way, sweetie!" I say excitedly. "Come on! Let's go eat!"

Sometimes he'll follow. Often he won't, and I walk over and pick him up.

"Ian," I say. "Let's go this way!" This time we're in the park, on a trail, and he wants to walk into a patch of Poison Oak.

"Go way." He points to the poison, his cheeks bright red with heat. He's been walking behind me for over a quarter mile. His steps, I have observed, are about three to every one of mine. When he gets tired, he sits down on the dirt or the grass or the concrete and lets me pick him up.

"We're going this way, sugar!" I clap. "Come on!"

I try never to say no--that is, I try to save no for important things, like no--you cannot have that candy bar, or no--you cannot play with the knife, or no--you cannot hit me with your plastic mallet. I feel like a baby's world is so often one no after another. I want to avoid them. For as long as I can swing it. Pretty soon of course he'll figure out that "come on" means no, and when I go to pick him up he'll scream and probably noodle himself to try and keep me from picking him up, or run from me if he's mad enough. I realize this. After reading much of Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting, and despite my impressionable nature (I tend often to enthusiastically support whatever I read unless its claims counter mine to an extreme), I really do think that I have to be as patient as possible with his resistance. I want an obedient child, sure, but I don't at all want my child to be an obedient person who doesn't reflect on things.

I especially want him, and all children, to question authority figures. There is nothing wrong with expecting an authority figure to justify his actions. To quote George Carlin: Respect is earned. How does Ian know that he should respect me at all times? I have to show him why this is true. And is it? What if I make a wrong decision, lash out? Parents aren't pillars of strength. What about his teachers? How does he know that he should respect his teachers? What if one of his teachers is unreliable? Assigns silly work with no purpose? Ian needs to question these things. He needs to be given the strength to develop his will.

I have a feeling that a lot of parents might not have time for this. One of the reasons that I can give Ian this space is because I don't work 8 to 5 five days a week and I have a fairly free schedule, especially in the summer. So I have time to be patient. Often, I can afford NOT to be in a hurry.

The problem here, though, is not with the "philosophy" or whatever it is I'm trying to articulate--it's with an economy and a culture that doesn't nurture time and space. Get to work. Get to day care. Get to the store. Get to the dishes. Get to the office. How about getting to your child instead? I hope this can become more possible for all of us.

Ian is Afoot

On Summer Solstice, Ian started walking. I wasn't present for his first good clomping; when I arrived home from wherever I'd been, the husband said that he was in the hallway talking on the telephone when he saw Ian walk by.

He really does sort of clomp, one tiny step at a time, arms raised with his elbows bent and his shoulders slouched and his wrists droopy and his fingers spread, a blend of tired crossing guard and gay-man stereotype. His grandmother was just here, and she said it was extremely cute. Everything Ian does, though, is extremely cute. He oozes cute, exudes adorable. The night of his first clomp, of his first bonafide move into ambulatory-ness, while I was giving him his before-bed bath, he kept standing up in his little plastic tub.

"Sit down, please, Ian," I said. He didn't; he squatted while looking up at me.

"Sit down in the tub please."

He stood up, gripped the rim of the tub, leaned forward, pressed his lips together tightly, jutted his chin out, and said, "Mmmm."

This meant it was time for a kiss. So I leaned over and kissed his tiny mouth, and he smiled and sat in the tub. Then he stood up for another kiss. "Mmmmm," he said. I gave him another kiss, and he smiled and sat down. I believe there are few things in the world more completely endearing, except for the way he grins and laughs and waves his little arms around as he now walks across the kitchen floor, carries his big plastic truck with one hand as he walks into his room, holds my hand as we walk from the swimming pool to the car. He takes such pleasure in his successes, in moving, in figuring things out for himself, in the way a cup makes a plop of a bubble when you hold it underwater, in the way you can drop a piece of bread into a glass of milk and watch it disintegrate. He is amazing. And if he is, so are we all, having started out so amazed at the world and all it has us to learn and understand.