Oh dear. I didn't want to give in to the communal consensus that nakedness in a boy of three isn't done.
"I have an idea," Ambrose later ventured. "Why don't we come back to the marina with Geoffrey fully clothed, and me naked?"
I loved that idea; I thrilled to it and laughed. But in the end he chickened out, didn't he? Because he was a man who had been a boy when it just wasn't done.
"Here's the deal," I said to Geoffrey when I'd given it some thought. "I want you to wear underwear, because you're going to spill hot soup on that penis of yours or fall down and scrape it, and you need to protect yourself, okay?"
From a mother lode of fear about male sexuality, and those pryin' affronted eyes.
My Lousy Job
If, as a working parent, you wish to be stopped in your tracks for ten days, I highly recommend a lice infestation in your children's hair. There is simply nothing that even comes close to ruining your status as an efficient office worker like being unable to find the last one of eleven thousand seven hundred and twenty nits the size of dust molecules on a six-year-old's head.
In my case, the whole fiasco of lice began with me, myself, walking around with an itchy scalp for about two weeks, thinking that I really ought to do a hot oil treatment in this very dry weather. Given that I shampoo every day and wear fashion mousse, it never occurred to me that I had insects nesting on my head.
Instead, naturally, it was the schoolteacher who discovered the lice crawling through my daughter's ponytail because only schoolteachers can see lice. It's part of their training in teacher's college, to be able to spot minuscule species of insects from ten feet across the room and then cry out a special code blue that all of the other teachers hear and respond to.
If there has been sensitivity training around the whole issue of lice— they're not caused by Dickensian living conditions, Mother is not necessarily an alcoholic, etc.— I cannot vouchsafe that this training has worked. The school called me and commanded that I pick up my children AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, regardless of whether I was just then in the process of selling London's Daily Telegraph to the Barclay Brothers, or conducting surgery, so that none of the other, better-tended and hygienic children would get cooties.
Then when I arrived, out of breath and apologetic, the teacher reassured me that lice were really no big deal; a special shampoo would do the trick and everyone could get back to business. This left me with the false impression that I was contending with a mere twenty-four-hour emergency.
I collected the children and went directly to the pharmacy to find the special shampoo. When I went home and applied it, I discovered that it kills, maybe, one louse and has no impact whatsoever on the nits. It does not take twenty-four hours to remove that many nits from two little heads, because neither head will keep still for longer than thirty seconds unless they are clamped in an iron vise.
Use of a vise is not possible, given the interest it tends to attract from the Children's Aid Society. So I had to plead with my children, cajole them, yell at them, chase them around the house, threaten them with a total moratorium on toy purchases, bribe them with more toys than they could ever play with, and finally sit on them while they shook their heads wildly and wailed "We will never surrender!"
Unless you have dealt with nit capture, you have no idea how impossible it is to remove one nit if the host head moves more than one one-millionth of a centimeter in any direction before you have grasped it.
Clara eventually grew somewhat compliant for stretches of five or six minutes, but Geoffrey is a three-year-old. The merest whisper of a suggestion of obedience leads to freaked-out shrieks of countersuggestion, and it becomes a matter of psychologically developmental necessity for him to refuse to allow me to remove insects from his head. Nor would stealth work. He could detect the approach of my hovering nit comb with the acuity of a fly on the windowsill and get away just in time.
Finally, I had to wait for them to fall asleep so that I could root around on their heads in the darkness like a deranged jewel thief, with me nit-picking as Ambrose aimed the flashlight. Lice, however, have evolved the ability to be invisible in all but the brightest noon-time light when only a teacher can see them. We would think that we'd conquered them in our nocturnal attacks, only to realize next morning that we'd nabbed less than half.
Thus, the children were boomeranged back at us when we meekly attempted to resubmit them to class, with the staff practically holding crucifixes aloft and sprinkling holy water in their bouncy, retreating tracks. Growing desperate, we slathered their heads in condiments, at the suggestion of cheerful "no problema" friends. My daughter sported mayonnaise for several hours, and my son slept in a cap of olive oil. Furniture and carpets were doused in vinegar. Everything emerged smelling odd and looking shiny. Within a week the nits were back.
You will never hear this confession in congressional testimony or from a mother being interviewed on Larry King, but the truth is this: I had my son's head shaved in order to resume my career.
Almost-Forgotten Rites of Passage
The week that Clara entered grade one, the New Yorker featuerd a cartoon depicting two mothers on a park bench watching their toddlers at play. One mother was remarking glumly to the other: "They grow up so slow."
Oh yes, I get that. Every parent who just spent Labor Day weekend with a three-year-old and a six-year-old screaming at each other about who "gets to poke the dead fish" can relate to that sentiment.
Time flows as slowly as molasses when you have to spend it trying and failing to get a sun hat on a toddler, or trying and failing to get your six-year-old to understand that God and Santa Claus are NOT the only ones who get to make the rules.
"Go to bed."
"No."
"You have to go to bed because it's the first day of school tomorrow."
"You don't make the rules."
"Yes, I do."
"Only God and Santa—"
"GO TO BED."
Aaargh.
Yet mothers of older children adamantly argue the opposite point: "No! No!" they cry in alarm. "Kids don't grow up slow; they grow up FAST." Indeed, such parents hammer this into my head at every opportunity, as if all will be lost if I don't grasp what they are trying to say. But what are they trying to say? What lies at the root of this parental perception of time-warp? It doesn't seem to apply to one's spouse or parent or pet. Nobody ever says to me, "Oh my God, my husband is aging so fast!"
It isn't a perception of time flying, but something else. I wonder if it's about control— that you lose control of your children faster than you anticipated that you would. Do you slip from the center to the periphery of their universe before you're prepared to, before you've taught them everything you wanted them to know? There is always a sense of regret affixed to the notion of children growing up fast, a feeling that one is caught off-guard because one wasn't watching.
Whatever it is that is lost, the universally acknowledged threshold for a child's crossing into the speedier time zone is grade one. Baby goes to school. There is so much hype around this entry point that the occasion is made momentous. It would be unthinkably crass to send one's child with the nanny, or a friend, to the first day of grade one. Pictures must be taken. Sunday-best outfits donned.
All this hype and all the sentiments were very much on my mind yesterday when my daughter and I crossed that threshold together. There were only two problems. The first was that as a working mother who rushes from one daily crisis to another, grade one kind of snuck up on me. I had it written down in my daybook, so to speak, but I hadn't thought over what it entailed.
Thus at midnight on Labor Day I realized that I had no idea what time school started: Eight-thirty? Eight-forty- five? Nine? Oh, God.
And what was Clara supposed to bring? A pencil? Some gym clothes? And where was she going to have lunch?
So I rose at dawn on the Big Day and flew around the house in a neurotic fluster. I hastily did her laundry, assembled random school-like contents for her
knapsack, and tried hurriedly to find a "bread substitute" for her lunch sandwich since I hadn't thought to get any groceries.
"You're such a loser," I scolded myself as I stuffed her lunch box full of leftover barbecued salmon and Cheetos.
We got out the door at eight-fifteen. "Am I late for school?" Clara asked, as we trotted along the sidewalk.
"I don't know," I muttered. "I hope not."
Au contraire, we were thirty-five minutes early. This gave me sufficient time to ponder the second problem, which was really more a dawning revelation. To wit: Times have changed. Grade one doesn't feel like that big a day.
Clara, you see, is a day care child and I am a working mother. We were not dealing with our first full-time separation. I did not look at her with her knapsack and her new shoes, and think: "It seems like only yesterday that she was a babe in my arms bawling from colic." I didn't feel that pang of nostalgia. Clara has been beyond my control and among her peers since she was ten months old.
Clara stood comfortably in the crowded and clamorous hall, yakking with friends, waving at her kindergarten teacher, showing off her Barbie bracelet. She knew what to do, in some ways, better than I did. She lined up expertly along the wall when the bell rang and then slid past me, smiling at her new teacher and scampering into the classroom without so much as a "see ya later."
"Oh," I said, still standing there. "Well, okay then . . ." I suppose I'll just go to work now.
I left the school with a good friend who had just deposited his daughter alongside mine. We fretted about the huge class size and wondered if our daughters would be all right eating their lunches in the gym. And then, as swiftly, we moved on to other topics— to our work lives, our marriages. At one point, I thought: "We should be talking about the Big Day more, shouldn't we? Isn't it momentous?"Then I shrugged and kept on walking. They grow up so slow, you think. And then one day you realize they're growing up just fine.
My Sunny Valentine
The other day Clara excitedly sang a song that she'd learned in her grade one classroom:
"Clara and Lucas sitting in a tree, K R M L B M G." I started chuckling.
"Why are you laughing?" she asked, her sweet heart-shaped face lit up with concern. "What does the song mean?"
"You didn't get the letters quite right," I explained, "but they're supposed to spell out 'kissing.'"
"Oh," she said, smiling in surprise. But she still didn't get why the song would be salacious and meant to tease. I can't explain romantic love to a six-year-old, because it would be inseparable in her experience from familial love. She wants to grow up to marry her father, and everything else is merely idiom and play.
I was reminded of that yesterday when she overheard talk of Valentine's Day and asked me what it was for.
"Well," I started brightly, opting for a religious explanation, "it's a special day in honor of Saint Valentine, who . . . uh . . . er . . ." Of course, I couldn't remember who Saint Valentine was. "Anyway, it's a day when you tell people that you love them."
"Why?"
Why being the classic follow-up question of all small children on every subject, guaranteering that you gape like a carp while you try to formulate an elaborate response to an issue that you haven't thought about. Why don't we tell people that we love them on the other 364 days of the year? Hmmm, well, I guess we do, so . . . really it gets back to celebrating Saint Valentine, who was . . . er . . . oh, never mind. Finish your Cheerios.
Clara plays with weddings and family units and the idea of boyfriends, and last summer we were surprised to find her group playing Spin the Bottle in someone's basement, without having the faintest clue that the objective was the kiss, rather than the spinning of the bottle, which they all thought was very cool. But I watch her and wonder:When do children genuinely grasp the concept of romantic love? Do their parents see it coming? Are we prepared to take the revelation seriously after years of watching puppy-like rehearsals?
Shortly after our conversation, the local paper ran a story about this question as posed by Dr. Wendy Austin, a University of Alberta mental health expert who has written a book about early adolescent love. In First Love: The Adolescent's Experience of Amour, Austin argues that adults don't take teenaged infatuations as seriously as they should. Of course, it's difficult to take the matter seriously when your child's love is the two-dimensional image of a pop star on a poster or the son of your best friend, who you still remember being transfixed by Bob the Builder.
But Austin feels that adults misperceive how powerful their children's feelings are when they first develop a "crush" on someone, and because they don't understand, parents risk alienating their children by not being able to guide them through a hugely tempestuous experience.
I agree with this up to a point. But to judge from some articles and documentaries I've caught lately, it is teens themselves who are currently avoiding romance. Instead, they're just checking out sex. Fellatio in school bathrooms. "Hooking up" for quick screws rather than dating. Hanging out— not with their Romeos— but with guys that the girls call "friends with benefits." This news, I must confess, has a tendency to make me want to gnaw straight through the kitchen table and then contemplate where to send my daughter for safekeeping from twelve to twenty. Which nunnery? I don't remember caring whether or not my mother took seriously my love for the singer Cat Stevens, but if I'd been giving him oral sex in the stairwell with no promise of anything so much as a prom date in return, I think I would have wanted my mother to snap me out of it.
I certainly agree with Austin saying this: "We talk to young people about sexual health, but we don't really talk to them about love."
We talk to them about the beginnings of love, its early sweetness— if not explicitly, then through the fairy tales we read to them and the romantic Disney movies we bring home for them to watch, about Snow White, Pocahontas, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid. But these happy stories scarcely rehearse them for love's danger. Never mind the unexpected miseries that overwhelm the cavalier heart. We let them play with fire without a warning. And far from maturing them or strengthening their independence, the sex that now goes hand in hand with anything resembling love renders them all the more vulnerable.
To give all of yourself, both symbolically and actually, to a fellow child who recklessly throws you over is an absolutely devastating experience, for which our culture shows little respect. I remember feeling deeply confused, in my early twenties, by the fact that a woman who was widowed or divorced received solemn recognition for the love that she lost, but I did not. I got dumped; I couldn't wear black. My love had less value. My heartbreak less meaning.
"To dismiss it as superficial, comical or trivial is to underestimate the power it has over the individual," notes Dr. Austin.
Alas, in our world, the length of time between first crush and anything approaching a ritual acknowledgment of love is growing longer and longer, as twelve-year-olds have sex and thirty-year-olds remain unmarried. Eighteen years of hoped-for valentines and broken hearts with no help in mending? Surely I must come up with an imaginative and caring way to prepare my little daughter for that.
The Seven Circles of Heck
I recently had an opportunity to tour the seesaws and beehives of Italy, which I highly recommend as a travel itinerary if you are (a) insane or (b) in the company of a toddler.
Traveling through Italy with a toddler is not hell, because the country is so divinely beautiful that even the many, many beetles that get pointed out by one's teensy tourist are gorgeous to look at. Albeit, they are buzzing around some humdrum playground in a village, forty-five minutes' drive from Florence, capital of the renaissance, to which you dare not venture because your toddler will be creamed by a scooter in five seconds flat.
But still, if you combine the beauty of the Italian countryside with the unromantic tantrums of your offspring, you come up with an experience that feels less like hell than heck.
I am now going to face myself in the mirror an
d concede that I just spent several thousand dollars on a trip to heck.
Why did I do this? Well, before Clara was born, my husband and I had lots of travel lust, and the spending power of gnats. We drove to Cape Breton once, and went into debt on the gas.
Then Clara came along and we took a journey into the Twilight Zone of infant colic, which was free, and after that a tentative foray to Florida, which resulted in the worst fight of our entire relationship, fueled by the huge irritability of being trapped in a beachside motel with a teething baby.
So we were feeling rather unfulfilled in the realm of romantic adventure.
"I refuse to accept this," I told Ambrose. "I'm not going to drag around our neighborhood encountering the same dull vistas over and over until I'm fifty."
Let's damn well go to Italy I'll stand among the ruins and fantasize about Jude Law. (Of course I didn't say that out loud.)
I bought some guidebooks and began to plan. The first obstacle I encountered, from a mother's point of view, was Rome. I wanted to be in Rome, city of Fellini and Loren and Michelangelo and excellent sunglasses. But I couldn't figure out how to be in Rome with a toddler.
What's in Rome? Priceless art, crazed traffic, mad crowds, stray cats riddled with disease, gelato as an all-meal substitute. Who would be strolling with me through the gorgeous piazzas? A witless, zany loose cannon about eighteen inches high who would rather fling herself into the Trevi Fountain than be deprived of a fifth ice-cream cone.
Are guidebooks useful on this point? No, they are not.
In one sense Rome is the perfect place for toddlers, because it's the birthplace of opera. Operatic theatrics combined with indecipherable words: Toddlers should write opera, I've always thought. The plot could go something like this:
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