How the cautious child rolls

If we needed any more proof — and we didn’t — that Mara’s modus operandi in the face of new challenges and developmental steps is to observe for a long long time and then suddenly just do it, we got it this past summer.

We had already learned this about her. In walking, potty training, and other major milestones, Mara waited so long that we thought maybe she would never get going on it, and then one day she just did these things. She did not spend the time in cruising (walking while holding on to furniture) that most toddlers do before walking on their own; at a reception after a funeral in St. Louis for Angela’s brother-in-law, Mara left the security of my leg, which she’d been clutching, and set off across a room full of people to investigate a fake bird that had caught her eye in a floral arrangement. And she basically went from diapers to no diapers in a day, but only after we had begun to think she would wear diapers well after her third birthday.

What we learned was that while it seemed to the untrained eye that Mara was undriven, she was really watching adults and other children to see how things were done, and perfecting her plan mentally before taking the plunge. But when she did go, she always surprised us with her level of competence. It was as if she didn’t want to try something until she had worked in out in her mind and thought she could do it perfectly on the first try.

Mara had had a bicycle with training wheels for a long time, but for several reasons she never learned to ride it. Mostly it idled in the garage. The reasons are these: 1) we live on a steep hill that people bomb down in excess of posted speed limits on their way through to the freeway, and our driveway, while wide, is short and steep, so that the only paved, level, safe place for her to ride is a 3-foot wide concrete walkway at the side of the house which is bisected by a fence gate; 2) the only level spot in the neighborhood, the playground of the elementary school just up the hill from us, was fenced off and torn up for construction for the past several years; 3) the one time I drove her and her little bike to a school parking lot to help her get up to speed, it was an unpleasant experience for everyone; her bike had no place for me to put my hand to run along behind her and push by, and so I had to run fast while bending over and reaching underneath her seat to hold onto it; and she kept braking suddenly, which action had the results you might expect if you were paying any attention at all in your college physics survey course. Mass, momentum, velocity…you get the picture.

The problem with training wheels, of course, is that they don’t train kids how to balance a bike, they train kids to pedal very slowly while leaning severely to one side, as though they were on a sailboat on a tack. At turns or at unexpected jostling the bike’s frame jibes, throwing its weight onto the other training wheel, and the kid quickly has to lean the other way. They make small bikes for toddlers now that have no training wheels and no pedals — the youngsters merely sit on them and balance and push with their legs, like Fred Flintstone. At some point, they begin coasting, and once this balance is achieved they are ready to advance to a pedal bike, without ever having gone through this goofy leaning stage.

But Mara didn’t have a balance bike. Her bike was a cute little pedal bike. Pink. I had taken the training wheels off of it for her at one point and we had tried again on the walkway beside the house, she trying to balance and I running along holding her seat, wrenching my back. But the fence and gate made it impossible for me to stay with her for more than fifteen feet.

Meanwhile, Mara had bought a Razor, one of those metal scooters, with ten bucks of her own money at a yard sale a few years back. She had seen other kids with them and thought she wanted one. She was able to balance on the scooter almost immediately, but after the initial thrill she didn’t use it a lot.

Until this spring.

We started going up to the finished playground every evening after dinner earlier this year, Millie to practice her climbing on the play structures in the wood-chip-covered areas (more about that anon) and Mara to scoot around the pavement. I started to realize that she was becoming something of a speed demon on the scooter. She would crouch down and bend the onboard leg so that she could make the most of every thrust of the motor leg. Her hair, which is of a very thick, heavy warp, rose up behind her and began to flutter like a banner in the wind she created, and she began to lean into her turns as confidently as an Olympic skater.

The new bike.

One summer day I was standing out in front of the garage in the driveway, maybe sweeping it or something. Mara, with bike helmet on, had been scooting briskly back and forth in the cramped space and Millie was toddling around. Mara mentioned her old bike, which was now hideously small for her, and it occurred to me that now that she’d mastered balance so well on the scooter, she just might stand a better chance of learning to ride the bike. I said as much.

She disappeared for a moment into the garage, and while I was imagining the bruises and pulled muscles I would have to endure in the course of a revived Bike Riding Education Program, and wondering how long it would actually take, and whether it would be worth all the effort — my cajoling and her fearful declining, and the arguing, and my ego-driven frustration at having a daughter that still wouldn’t be able to ride a bike on her graduation day — I looked up and saw her careening out of the garage on her bike, wobbling through the narrow space between the car and a wall of storage boxes, and — once she cleared this canyon — pedaling up the few feet of steep driveway before putting her feet down to stop.

She had just ridden her bike. Just like that. Without any practice, without further trips with the bike to a schoolyard. Without coaching. Without the “don’t let go dad” at full speed down the middle of the street, when dad has already let go and is standing back at the house waving. Without any of that. She just got on the thing and started pedaling.

That’s our Mara.

I dropped the broom and ran into the house to fetch Angela, and Mara repeated her feat. And then we took the bike up to the playground, laughing and verbally reliving the amazement. She looked ridiculous on that bike. It had gotten so small over the years that she had to ride bowlegged just to keep her knees from getting fouled by the handlebars, and the back wheel was so close to the edge of her skirts that it pulled at them and smudged them. But she didn’t care. She was riding a bike, and she immediately took it to top speed. Within a few times around the playground she had the hang of the turns — which, as I recall, was the most terrifying part about learning to ride a bike — and pretty soon was racing in happy circles as though she had known how to ride for months.

We took her to get a new bike at the first opportunity, and as the summer waned we took her new ride up the hill every evening after supper and she rode like mad (and Millie rode a three-wheeled scooter we’d gotten her to satisfy her desire to go fast like her sister). Watching Mara, I thought about how worried I had been that she would never get it, that I would never be able to teach her, that there was no place with enough runway around here. And suddenly she was on the other side of that leap. A few days ago the world had been shaped in one way, and now it was shaped a different way.

A wise friend of mine is always saying to me about life, “don’t miss it!” Well, with Mara, we gotta keep our eyes open. The changes are sudden and unheralded. That’s how she rolls.

Glancing back forward

These are the good old days.”

–Carly Simon

A week or so ago, Emilia and I were outside in the early morning and that early morning sunlight was filling up the world around us as I watered the garden on the east side of the house. I grew up here, just across Lake Washington, and mornings like this touch a spot in my deep memory and feel very familiar, more familiar than the interminable cloudy cold days, so while I was watching Emilia give the plants an extra drink with her little yellow watering can I became a little lost in time.

What’s in a memory?

I can call up a goodly number of memories of just such mornings as this one from the mid to late ’60s, most of them not of discrete, specific moments but more like mosaics of moments similar enough in some aspect — maybe in the time of day or the time of year, or in emotional association, or in their events — that they have fused over time, the details having been extracted and perhaps sealed up in vaults that lie yet deeper in my memory (or discarded, who knows?) so that all that is left is an impression of light mixed with a feeling, and maybe the feeling is safety or contentment or wonder or perhaps even that unanguished boredom that kids get sometimes after doing everything they can think of and just before a burst of creativity that expands their world of play and exploration.

It occurred to me, standing there looking at Millie, that she was having an experience at that moment that may someday inform a similar kind of collage in her memory. Like Cindy Lou Who she is “not more than two”, and according to my understanding she is not yet forming the kinds of memories that will facilitate conscious recall of these specific, quiet moments, but some of the colors and tones and moods are making some imprints and might one day be enlisted in the assembly of some early, vaguely drawn memories of life outside in the garden at her first house.

And even if this moment does become a specific, tagged memory that she can recall in her minds eye, it will not look to her then the way it looks to her now, and certainly not the way it looks to me now. My mind observing her in this moment is full of the whole world of my experience, five decades in which I have been alive and doing things, feeling things, learning things, and not five decades worth of individual impressive moments connected backward through history, like postcards on a string receding in my memory, but fifty nonstop years of a continuum of existence, one moment blending into the next, my position in space and time always preceded so closely by my last position in space and time, my activity part of such an even flow of movement and being, that there can not really be said to be individual moments at all, nothing that you could tweeze out from other moments without pulling the whole fifty year string along with it, everything connected both fore and aft of it. My whole being and experience and who-ness, speaking of Whos, is here in this moment. But in Emilia’s memory none of all that will show in the frame — my worries, my satisfactions, my disappointments, my hopes yet for the future, my idea of myself, my idea of her. In fact I myself will only be hazily represented, if at all. I’ll just be this parental presence standing nearby, blank except for whatever good or ill associations she has so far formed of me — dadness — and my individual self in this particular moment may in fact be replaced by a similar memory of Angela, so that the picture evolves and morphs and becomes like the pictures I have in my own memory. Kaleidoscopes.

That was when I felt myself splintering into fractals, into tiny particles of light and shade and mood, whatever can be remembered finally to paint a memory with. It felt strange to look forward in time and back to this moment, seeing myself virtually disappearing into the future past, realizing that the clarity with which I am experiencing this instant — I am fully here with all of me — will be gone when Millie gets around to calling it back up as memory. It will all be so different, and yet, someday, what she remembers of this moment is all there will be.

The way this moment may look someday.

It made me think of all the memories I have now of days like this in my childhood. They seem such hazy, thin scenes so disconnected from other memories, but to the adults who shared those moments — my father holding my hand while I toddled or my mother keeping a watchful eye from the kitchen window while I played in the backyard — those moments were all part of their continuum. I ran right off the wharf at the Anacortes ferry terminal when I was very small. I myself have no recollection of the actual moment when my running back and forth ended in my shooting between the balusters and falling the few feet to the rocky beach just below (if it really was the wharf itself it must have been a part that was well back from the tideline). That part of the story I remember only as a story, one I’ve been told all my life. I do, however, have an image of a wooden deck awash in bright Pacific Northwest morning sunshine, and attached to this mental picture is a feeling of expectancy and excitement. I don’t know if it is an actual memory of the Anacortes wharf — it may be a memory of someplace that popped into my mind when I was first told the story and appended itself to the memory. In any case, my parents — who were as a rule very cautious and whose hearts leaped into their throats when they turned around after just a couple of seconds to discover that I was completely gone — brought the fullness of their histories to that moment in time, and none of that made any impression on the clear but very spartan memory that formed in my mind.

So it is now. I stand watching Millie with a brain absolutely stuffed with cellular networks representing arrangements of all the data I’ve taken in over my life, any combination of which could be assigned to the moment at hand as handles for me to make sense of it and give meaning to it, as I’m doing now. But none of it will become metadata for this image in her mind, which will over time simplify and merge with other images and probably lose some of its sharp edges, until it looks like an impressionist painting. In Millie’s experience, it’s just a sunny morning somewhere in time.

A momentary grammar

Our youngest daughter has been very vocal for the past couple of months and I’ve been meaning to write about it because she’s doing something that is, if not downright unusual, at least very interesting to me. She has developed her own method of saying two-syllable words.

I started noticing this with the words and names that she was very familiar with, like “cracker” and “apple” and “Togy” (our male cat), the words she was hearing all the time. But now she is doing it with any old word that reaches her ears on the wind, the very first time she hears it.

What’s fascinating to me is not simply the fact that Emilia is speaking words in a unique way — I guess every kid does at first — but that the simple grammatical rule she applies to the pronunciation of each word is so consistent. It’s such a reliable grammar that we can, when she says something we don’t understand, pause and reverse-engineer the word in our minds by applying her rule backwards.

Here’s the rule: say the first syllable twice and end with the most interesting consonant. In this grammar, “apple” becomes “ah-ahp”, “cracker” becomes “cah-cahk”, “Grandma” becomes “ga-gam”, “carrot” becomes “cah-cad”, “Togy” becomes “toh-toge”, “waffle” becomes “wah-waff” and my friend Jeremy is called “Je-jem”. “Mah-mok” is Millie’s word for “marker”, “teh-teb” is her word for “table”, and “be-beth” is how she refers to Jeremy’s wife Bethany.

A sunny morning brings new opportunities for saying exactly what she means.

Emilian grammar has a fine point or two. Her first syllable is always very simple even if the input is not. She does not pronounce the first ‘r’ in cracker or Grandma, and Jeremy and Bethany’s daughter Gwyneth is referred to as “gi-geth”, not “gwi-geth”. Angela notes that if she says “horse”, Millie will say “horse” too, but if she says “horsie” Millie says “hoh-horse”. The letter ‘l’ is altered; she does not pronounce our other cat Tillie’s name “ti-til” as you might expect, but simply “ti-di”. Also, the rule applies to the occasional three-syllable word, such as “ah-aff” for “elephant”.

Tonight we were watching a movie as a family and at one point I commented on the action, “here comes trouble”. Millie wasn’t even watching, she was playing on the floor and looking the other way but she absentmindedly and automatically applied her grammar to the last thing she heard. “Tuh-tub”.

The first word I noticed Millie’s grammar on was “coffee”, which of course came over as “cah-caff”. I heard it every morning when I sipped my joe and then started realizing that she used similar repetition with other words.

bunny = “buh-bun”
sippy = “si-sip”
diaper = “dah-dap”
pencil = “peh-pes”
tower = “tah-tow”

We have used this grammar to decode dozens of Emilia’s words, and it follows that you can even anticipate how she will say words of a certain kind. She would say “hah-ham” for “hammer”, I’m sure. The grammar also applies in the new two-word and three-word sentences she’s practicing. Yesterday we took the girls to Ravenna Park to play in the playground, and afterwards we set off up the trail that borders the restored creek running through the ravine. Angela cheerily announced “here we go on our nature walk!” and as Millie trotted after her I heard her say “neh-netch…wahk”.

The thought has crossed my mind to worry that this very durable grammar might be a kind of dyslexia, but I don’t really have any reason to believe that and I know how hyperactive my imagination can be when running in the shadows.

In any case, I find it not only adorable but also very helpful. If we hadn’t noticed this rule I’m sure we’d be missing a lot of what she’s saying. I don’t remember Mara using any such consistent rules, though she certainly had her own interesting turns of phrase and she used a wider vocabulary of signs before she had verbal language than did Millie, who still uses a few signs but never took to signing with the same enthusiasm.

Millie about to set out on a neh-netch walk.

This usage will vanish soon, which is why I wanted to write it down. Someday it will seem impossible, we will remember only the fact of it, not the actual sound of it in our ears, even though we will tell Millie years from now that she used to speak this way. Mara does not remember saying “paahtu” for “pasta”. She didn’t believe it until we showed her a movie clip of her as a toddler in which we asked her what her favorite food was.

To me there’s a sadness in this. There are so many things now that we ask Mara whether she remembers, things she used to do every day or things we used to do with her, how we used to play a chasing game we called Hunting Dog and how, when she was only three, she would study Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever in bed at night and fall asleep with the huge book over her head like a tent. When the answer is no, she doesn’t remember, we feel a little sting of melancholy, as though we had thought she were there with us and she wasn’t.

She has only our word that things really were that way, and that word is what is passed on, that’s what she’ll remember. For our daughters these things that we cherish from their earliest days become legends rather than memories. They become the family stories we tell, like a collection of shells on the mantel — no longer inhabited by the things that made them and gave them their original shapes, but imbued with a later, oral, assigned and handed-down magic and charged with the task of constituting and holding together our history as a family.

Close call and silver linings

This morning I lifted Millie out of her crib in the room she shares with Mara and carried her out into the living room so that I could lay her on the sofa to remove her from her sleep sack. As I lowered her and unzipped the fleece cocoon and her puffy, red, warm-from-bed face drew open with a smile a thought came to me that I remember often having when Mara was still a babe in arms, a sense of amazement that this little bundle was not only alive, but alive as a complete human being. She will develop more bone and muscle tissue and she lacks experience, but in the most important ways she is already all here. And the most amazing part is, she is the person Emilia, as differentiated as you or I from all other human beings.

Reflecting on a rough week over her morning milk.

I suppose my mind was turned in this direction because we had a pretty scary week last week where Millie was concerned. She’d just finished a round of antibiotics for an ear infection that came with a bad cold. We thought she was doing a lot better, but the next night she was throwing up multiple times, and the night after that she wouldn’t sleep. We took turns rocking her in the rocking chair all night. Mara had had a nightmare deep in the night on Monday night, so with the upchucking Tuesday night and the all-night vigil on Wednesday, we were zombies by Thursday, which is when Millie’s breathing became extremely labored and she started wheezing horribly and her temperature rose to 104. We ended up at Children’s Hospital overnight Thursday night. I dropped Mara off at her friend Logan’s house for an emergency sleepover, which Mara loved because Logan gets to stay up until eleven or whenever he gets tired.

Angela and Millie and I stayed in a room by ourselves “in isolation”, which meant that every doctor and nurse and aide that came into the room had to suit up outside first with mask, gloves and smock, which they then dumped in a laundry bin before going back out. Besides a massive ear infection, Millie had RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), a common enough virus but one that is extremely hard on children under two, and apparently very contagious.

A silver lining. Mara, Logan and Pixie sleeping in.

We are grateful to have Children’s so close by. People bring their children from all over the world to be seen by doctors there. By midnight Millie’s temperature was normal, and she slept off and on all night. I stayed up until three so Angela could sleep on the fold-out bed, then napped next to her between visits by the nurse, which were frequent. At six, Angela got up for a shift and I crashed into a deep sleep for about two hours. Millie continued to improve throughout the day and the nurse talked about us being able to check out by midday, but you know how it goes…we were there until four in the afternoon.

By that time, Angela and I were coming down with the virus. It’s now almost a week later and we’ve been coughing and hacking all week. Our President’s Day was a bust, not the usual raucous day of celebrating past helmsmen of the Executive Branch (kidding, we usually do nothing like most Americans). Millie visited her doctor again that day and we were dismayed to learn that the two doses of high-powered antibiotic she got at the hospital didn’t get rid of her ear infection, in fact she now has them in both ears. Mara has the cough now too. I tell you true, I do not recall having a worse cold in my adult life. It’s like someone’s driven railroad spikes into my throat and pumped Silly Putty up my nostrils, and no cough drops or cold medicine or tea with honey or sleep or hot shower or anything seems to help.

Doctor Mara. Sometimes all you can do is be there for them.

The hospital staff. You're in good hands.

There are silver linings, though. Millie still has an earache (she keeps pointing to her ears and saying “hitz” for “hurts”) but her wheezing is gone and she’s happy again and sleeping through the night. Mara and Logan had a fabulous time and fell asleep side by side in Logan’s top bunk. Because everything in the hospital room would have to be thrown away when we left, the nurses told us to take stuff — diapers, boxes of tissues, whatever was there. We took the smock Millie had been in and a larger one for Mara, and several masks and our parent ID badges and a measuring tape and some colorful bandage wrap. The girls have been using all of it to play hospital.

Yesterday Mara and I were feeling better during the midday and I had a library book due, so we rode the bus downtown and I showed her around the Central Branch of the Seattle Public Library, which she’s never seen. We watched the elevators working through the glass walls, and we rode the escalators and took short cuts across the famous “books spiral”, we watched for teens in the teen section (saw one) and we looked down from the “highest viewpoint” up on the tenth floor. Then we went back down and ensconced ourselves in the children’s section, where Mara flipped through books in her very complex process of selection.

The top of the library. I doubt we were still contagious, but if Seattle is wiped out by RSV, it's our fault. Sorry.

All things considered we’re doing well. Many others have it so much worse, and any danger to any child is a fright to his or her parents so I know I’m not saying anything profound or new here, but I haven’t posted for ages and I felt like writing. I know how fortunate we are and I’m content to be grateful, though I will be even more grateful when the pain in my throat finally goes away.

A new tradition emerges

Almost every weekday I get off the bus and walk home, a matter of some ten or eleven blocks. I use this time to shift gears from a pragmatic, goal oriented, get-stuff-done mindset to an emotionally connective mindset and to center down and prepare for the draining of my last reserves of mental energy. Most days, Angela will be making dinner, and will need me to draw the barbarians away from their siege of the kitchen, where until I get there she often does her work moving one leg between the oven, the sink, and the refrigerator while pivoting on the one Millie’s hanging on.

Last May. The prospect of the fortunate man as he approaches his castle.

For the past year or two it has been my habit to call the house a few blocks before I turn the corner at the bottom of our hill and let Angela know that she can send Mara out. Mara runs out of the house, often without shoes or a coat no matter what it’s doing out, and runs down the hill to meet me. The rule is, she has to wait until she sees me turn the corner before she can come down the street.

When she was a little younger she ran all the way, her hair flapping from side to side and her flip-flops or her bare feet or her sparkly princess dress-up shoes slapping the sidewalk, and hit me with all her force. I had to brace myself to absorb her momentum and lift her into a swinging circle. Then I would set her down and we would walk up the hill while she told me whatever it was that she could hardly wait to tell me all day; they had donuts, she had a playdate with Gwyneth or Lily; she started her swimming lessons; the lady at the store gave her a sticker; one of the cats got out or threw up. It has always been my favorite part of the day.

Over the past year Mara has gradually stopped running all the way. Sometimes she peters out a few yards in front of me, and sometimes a nice rock or a catkin or an autumn leaf on the sidewalk will arrest her downward career completely. For Millie’s part, ever since she learned to walk she is always in the living room waiting for us when Mara and I walk in, waiting with that full-faced smile. She hugs me or hands me something or points at something and says her word for it, and then having performed her welcoming routine she runs off at full throttle to the kitchen and Mommy.

The power of the forefinger discovered.

Lately a new thing is happening. On a few of those nicer days, Angela brought both girls out to meet me. Mara would be running ahead, and Millie would be on her own feet — she insists on walking, and by now she knows that I am out there somewhere, approaching. Daddy returns. Those few outings have engendered in Millie a dissatisfaction with simply waiting inside while Mara runs off out of sight of the big picture window. She now wants to come out, too, and she doesn’t want to come right back into the house. She wants to “mack”, which means walk.

As tired as I am and as eager as I am to get into the house and change into my playclothes and pour me a cuppa joe, I cannot resist Millie’s tugging on my arm. “Mack”, she says. “Mack”. So for the last couple of evenings, Angela has gone back inside to prepare dinner and make me a cuppa (taking my heavy backpack into the house with her, the dear), and I have let Millie drag Mara and me up to the top of our hill.

Tonight I called and Angela said Mara would be right out, but when I turned the corner I couldn’t see her as I usually do, standing on the steep sidewalk outside our house, craning to get a glimpse of me before shooting down the hill. I kept waiting as I walked but she didn’t come out. I stopped and talked briefly about the efficacy of various anti-mollusc tactics with neighbor Brian — out picking kale in his parking-strip garden for his family’s dinner. When I finally came within a few yards of our house I saw under the rhododendron canopy to where Mara’s rainboots and the lower hem of her yellow raincoat moved slowly along our front walk, and beside Mara’s feet tromped a smaller pair, also fluttered over by a yellow raincoat. Mara’s is a little small for her, Millie’s a bit large.

Sisters unwittingly establishing the family tradition of the pre-dinner walk.

My heart did one of those flippity flops I’ve been getting a lot of lately. Mara had actually waited for Millie and was leading her by the hand. She forgets that Millie’s stride is much shorter than her own and Millie biffed on the steps down to the sidewalk, but Mara picked her up and Millie’s excitement about being on an outing eclipsed any inclination she may have had to express alarm about it. I felt pride in my elder daughter at that moment and great hope, and for my younger I felt the thrill of boundaries breached, the expansiveness and vitality of the toddler on a jail-break.

As twice before, Millie grabbed my hand and started pulling and telling me she wanted to walk. So Mara and Millie and I walked up to the top of the hill. It had rained today and the ground was wet and the giant earthworms that sometimes emerge after long-awaited rain were stretched out from the edges of the sidewalks, their corrugated bodies glistening in the light of nearby streetlamps, their toes in their holes. We learned that if you touch them they zoom back into their dens — all the way back in, suddenly, the same way sea anemones retract their feelers instantly when you reach a finger to touch them. None of them had stretched so far that they were fully outside their hole, which I found remarkable. It made me wonder what they were doing, since they obviously weren’t going anywhere. Maybe they’re taking worm baths. Mara, who used to put slugs on her forearm while she hunted for more and did not know to be afraid of spiders, is now a bit more spooky about creepy and crawly things, and declined to touch them. But Millie was enthralled with the power that her forefinger exhibited, and touched every single earthworm that Mara found for her.

I guess it’s just a done deal now. For the foreseeable future I will be diverted from my front door every evening long enough to go on a short mack.