Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  The Third Generation will be something to see.

  As Cubby grew from babyhood into kidhood, he was like a plant that grows six inches overnight, changing before my very eyes. Talking was probably the biggest milestone, even bigger than learning to walk. As soon as he could talk, it was as if he’d spent the first year and a half of his life in a state of extreme deprivation and had to make up for lost time. Until then, I thought we’d taken pretty good care of him. We certainly felt like we’d catered to his every whim. However, when he started talking, he made it clear how wrong we were.

  First came the one-word demands, like Drink! Such demands could come at any time with no warning, even when he’d been fed and watered on a regular schedule. Then we progressed to two-word statements, which did not presage anything more appealing. One of his favorites was Poopy diaper! Everything was said as an exclamation, and if not satisfied immediately, a meltdown ensued.

  At the same time, the stimulating back-and-forth of adult conversation was totally lacking in my exchanges with Cubby. There was really no conversation at all—just a demand from him and compliance from us. If I asked him what kind of tires we should get for the Land Rover, he would just give me a blank stare. And when I asked what he thought of the government or the latest increase in gas prices, he didn’t say anything at all. That concerned me. However, when I expressed my worries to his mother, she was quick to leap to his defense. He’s just a little boy!

  I could not remember when I had acquired the ability to discuss politics, religion, and cars, and I didn’t have any other kids, so I was at a loss to evaluate my son. However, after some covert listening to other toddlers, I concluded Little Bear was probably right. Cubby seemed to have a good vocabulary for his age, and the other toddlers I saw were just as vacuous when it came to adult conversation. At the same time they were equally rude and aggressive in their efforts to get their own way.

  Still, that did not mean I had to accept bad manners. I could do something about it. Indeed, as a parent, I believed I had a duty to civilize my child.

  We had arrived at one of those turning points in tyke rearing. Little Bear was still willing to coddle him and be at his beck and call, but I wasn’t. I knew what basic manners had meant to me. As a kid who always said and did the wrong thing, a modicum of politeness was all that saved me from extermination on many occasions. With that in mind, I concluded there was no time like the present to get Cubby on the right track. If my kid was going to make more and more demands, he was going to learn to make them politely. I began his training immediately.

  “Cubby,” I said, “now that you are talking, it’s time to learn politeness. You have to say please when you want something. That way it sounds like you are making a gentle request, not an obnoxious demand. People are more likely to help a polite kid than a rude one.” He just looked at me, but I could see he got the gist of what I was saying. I gave him an example. “Please give me the milk.” I said it slowly and deliberately.

  “Please gimme milk,” Cubby repeated right away. Then he said it again. I looked at him and wondered if he’d gotten stuck in repeat mode. After another two “please gimme milk” loops I concluded Cubby actually wanted milk and was not just practicing the words. When I gave it to him he slurped it down as though he had not had a drink all day, although there had been no sign of thirst before I started training him, using milk as the example.

  Had he been thirsty before I tried teaching him to ask for a drink? Did saying it make it so? I never did find out. It was enough that I had gotten him to add “please” to his request, and I resolved to move on to the next step.

  “Okay, that’s good. But there’s more. If you want to be a good speaker you also need to add what we call a salutation when talking to grown-ups. It’s a sign of respect.”

  Cubby stumbled at the word salutation. “Hard word,” he said. I was encouraged to hear him say that, because it told me that his comprehension exceeded his speaking ability. He was mulling over what I’d said and thinking through the meaning of the words. I could see that Cubby had an idea what salutation meant even if he could not pronounce the word. That was a sign of intelligence, a portent of things to come. We all want to think our kids are smart, and parents cherish any evidence of that reality.

  “Yes, salutation is a hard word. But the actual words you say to show respect are not hard at all. What you are doing is praising someone before you ask them to do something for you. If you say, you’re the best, and then ask for something, you are a lot more likely to get it than if you say, you’re no good.” Cubby nodded, and I believe he got the picture. “For example, if you wanted me to get you milk, you could say: ‘Please, Wondrous Dada, may I have some milk?’ ”

  “Wondrous Dada?” he asked with a hint of skepticism. He actually wrinkled his nose as he said wondrous. Why would he do that? Could a toddler be that cynical? The few child-rearing manuals I had read suggested that small children view their parents as the source of all things wonderful. Clearly, Cubby did not fully embrace that point of view. But he did pay attention. Sort of.

  When he wanted an Oreo, he’d say, “I want a cookie.” As any adult knows, I want a cookie is not a request, it’s just a statement. I’d hear that and say, okay, if he wanted a cookie he was welcome to go get one. That produced a momentary pause as he waited for me to give him a cookie, but of course, that was not happening. We reached a standstill where each watched the other and neither said or did anything.

  After a pause, the most common result was a clarification from Cubby, where he would repeat his original statement or perhaps convert it to a demand: “Gimme a cookie.”

  That didn’t move me either. I always praised him for making the leap from statement to request, but kids who make rude demands don’t get rewarded. When I heard that, I replied with, “What do you say to get a cookie?”

  He knew what to say, but he was highly resistant. The process became an elaborate dance, one in which he knew all the steps but chose not to follow through, because he was determined to use the maximum demand and the minimum manners, and I was determined to teach him the opposite.

  When “Gimme a cookie” failed, he generally tried the “please” alone first. That usually worked for his mom and the folks at day care. It even worked now and then with me. When it didn’t, he knew what to do.

  As soon as he heard me say, “What’s the magic phrase?” he would wrinkle his nose and spit the words out: “Please, Wondrous Dada.” I was never able to get him to articulate that phrase with any kind of enthusiasm, but I did at least get him using some manners right from the beginning.

  I wish I could say that he grew up to be a young man who said, “Please, Wondrous Dada,” and “Thank you, Wondrous Dada,” every single day. But he didn’t. The best I ever got was grudging compliance under duress. And even that faded with age. If you asked him today, he’d probably deny the whole thing happened.

  I recalled the way my grandmother had taught my cousins Leigh and Little Bob to say yes, ma’am and no, sir. They never did stop talking that way. Of course, I knew they didn’t mean it. My cousins snickered and made fun of grown-ups when they weren’t looking, but they did learn to show respect and I tried to do the same with Cubby. It didn’t work out as well with him, though.

  Yet we had a few good years. When he was five, I was pretty consistently wondrous. When he hit seven, I could insist on Wondrous Dada if he really wanted something, but he was highly resistant. By age nine, it was all over. He’d say, “You’re not a Wondrous Dada at all!” I was heartbroken.

  It’s possible that Cubby will recognize me as wondrous now that he is grown, but I doubt it. Still, I can take comfort in the knowledge that I did teach him some modicum of manners. That’s something any dad can be proud of.

  From the beginning, Tuck-in Time was a critical juncture in Cubby’s day. After all, the process of settling a kid in bed, carefully pulling up the covers, and ensuring that every extremity is covered is known far and wide as the onl
y reliable way to prevent monster attacks in the night. Every child knows this truth: A kid without a tuck-in might just as well be standing in monster alley, wearing a sign that reads Eat Me. Cubby did not want to suffer that fate, which meant he never ever failed to remind me by saying, “Tuck-in time, Dad!”

  There were many things I did without question, just because my little boy asked. Tucking him in was not one of them. The tuck-in was indeed an important event, but it had to be preceded by the even more important Bedtime Cleanup. A successful cleanup was required for Cubby to be tuck-in qualified. I may not have taught him many manners (despite a mighty valiant effort), but I surely taught him that.

  Big corporations get ISO 9000 certified, and it’s a complex and lengthy process. My son became tuck-in qualified by a much simpler series of steps, but to him it was a bigger deal than any achievement of corporate America. Success didn’t come easy; he resisted cleanup vigorously, wheedling, cajoling, and distracting me from my goal at every opportunity. All the while, he kept circling back to that tuck-in request in hopes of getting safely tucked in without proper qualification. But I remained steadfast. Finally he gave in, and the house was a better place for it.

  First, Cubby had to pick up all the toys from the floor. Food had to be eaten or put away. Clothes had to be in their drawers. His teeth had to be brushed and sharpened. Finally, he had to put on his pajamas. Only then was he eligible for tuck-in. He climbed into bed and I arranged his covers neatly, making sure there were no exposed toes for monsters to grab. Then I sat down to begin a story.

  For toddlers, bedtime stories are like crack cocaine—give them a taste and they’re hooked. Cubby would get so excited that he’d bounce up and down when we tried to put him to bed, saying, “Story time! Story time! Read me a story!” Even after he could read perfectly fine on his own, Cubby still loved to hear bedtime stories. In fact, I read or told stories to Cubby right up till his sixteenth birthday.

  If you asked him how it began, he’d say he was always fond of stories, but of course he wasn’t. How could he know he liked stories without adults to tell them to him in the first place? In my experience, toddlers grow up liking most of what grown-ups expose them to. They have very little ability to actually experience the world on their own, independent of their caretakers. So your kid is really what you make him. If you read Shakespeare to your tyke from the beginning, he’ll grow up to be an articulate and well-spoken gentleman. If you teach him to squash cockroaches with a mallet and pull the legs off frogs, you’ll create an illiterate serial killer.

  At first I read stories from children’s books—classics like Green Eggs and Ham and Where the Wild Things Are. I had a preference for tales I’d enjoyed myself when I was his size. His mom tended to like newer compositions like the Thomas the Tank Engine and Berenstain Bears series, but it really didn’t matter what we read. Cubby liked them all. In fact, he more than liked them. He was totally in love with stories to the point where we could read the same material over and over and he’d just smile contentedly as he went to sleep.

  I know that’s true because I tried it. If I read a single page and then went back and read the same page again, Cubby would always notice. “Keep going!” he’d exclaim. That told me one page was below Cubby’s repeat threshold. However, if I read the whole book and then restarted at the beginning, he would almost always lie there quietly, failing to notice that the story was repeating. Or maybe he did notice but he was happy to hear it twice.

  That was particularly true when I read the wonderful works of Dr. Seuss, whose words rolled like pebbles down a mountainside, making a melody that Cubby could relax to and follow as he nodded off. In the beginning, Cubby fell asleep pretty rapidly, making reading a fairly brief exercise. However, as he got older, he began paying more attention to the words themselves, even asking questions at times. He was obviously making an effort to stay awake.

  That presented a small problem, because I got bored rereading the same stories every night. How many times can you recite One Fish, Two Fish before going nuts? I began interjecting subtle modifications, being careful to ensure my changes flowed just as smoothly as the Doctor’s original material. My fish became aggressive, and the gremlins acquired weapons. I thought the changes lived up to the Seuss standards, but Cubby almost always caught me, and quickly too. “Read it right!” he’d yell.

  No matter how nicely it rhymed, the original Dr. Seuss never said things like, “the one in back, he has a gun,” or, “black fish, blue fish, I’ll eat you, fish.”

  That led me to search for more variety in storytelling. I tried reading him sophisticated stuff—articles I read for my own enlightenment or entertainment. The results of that experiment were mixed. He liked stories from Scientific American, but he became bored with the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. We both enjoyed Professional Mariner, while People magazine proved largely incomprehensible.

  I also exposed Cubby to the classics. Unfortunately, that was not very successful. He found the tales of Poe scary, and older works by Aristotle or Plato did not flow melodiously enough for his five-year-old mind.

  I discovered that what he liked most were clever turns of phrase, alliteration, and topical variety. Things like acrimonious armadillos, pedantic penguins, and goons with guns. He just didn’t want them to pop up unexpectedly in the middle of Green Eggs and Ham, which he preferred in its virgin state. Since I couldn’t get away with incorporating the penguins into the stories and articles I read him, a new plan was needed. I decided to create my own bedtime stories. They would be Wondrous Dada originals.

  I had always been a storyteller, even when I didn’t have an audience. As a tyke in the sandbox, I constructed elaborate fantasies around blocks and toy trucks. I imagined whole cities with sophisticated machines to run them. All that was missing were people to tell my stories to. Sometimes other kids would join me long enough to enter my worlds; other times when they departed, adults would stay and listen to my tales. They were my first audiences.

  When I turned eight, my mother got me a little brother, whom I called Varmint. Varmint followed me everywhere and paid close attention to anything I said or did. He loved my stories, which presented me with daily challenges as I struggled to dream up a never-ending variety of fresh material.

  I realized Cubby was much like Varmint; if I thought it up, and it made sense, he would listen and like it. And by then I had twenty-some additional years of life experience. That was a lot of story material.

  Cubby’s favorite bedtime beastie was Gorko, a flying lizard. Gorko had been born far away, in Flying Lizard Land, which is below and to the right of Australia on certain secret maps of the world. By the time I first told Cubby about him, Gorko was eight years old and had already mastered solo flight and medium-strength fire breathing.

  Gorko was my own invention, but I knew how much Cubby liked his routines, so I wove all his childhood favorites into Gorko’s stories, distorting them mightily as I went. I had Gorko leading a lizard army into Bear Country and rounding up the Berenstain Bears for the Lizard City Zoo. On the way there, they passed Road Kill Phil and the Cat in the Hat, who was destitute and homeless. Gorko’s friends the Cargo Lizards went to the Isle of Sodor, where they picked up Thomas the Tank Engine and carried him south to the Lizard Country Railway. Cubby loved it when I put all his favorite characters together, an approach that had the advantage of reducing the number of creatures, places, and things I had to conjure out of thin air.

  Like many good fables, the story of Gorko was inspired by life—in this case, the lives of Zeke and Pete, the fire-breathing lizards that lived next door to Cubby’s GrandMargaret in Shelburne Falls. Everyone in town knew them. We didn’t actually catch sight of them much, of course, because fire lizards are very shy and because they lived in the basement. But we knew they were down there, and it’s comforting to know there’s a quarter-ton lizard next door if you need it.

  Zeke and Pete worked for George the glassblower,
who had a shop down the street from my mother. Townspeople said George walked his lizards to work every morning before dawn and took them home after dark. They worked long hours, those lizards, but they had fun and it kept them busy and away from bullies who might otherwise have tormented them.

  Bullies were always a problem for lizards like Zeke and Pete. Anyone who’s different attracts bullies at some point growing up, and lizards are very different, so they can end up being bully magnets, especially in unenlightened hill towns. Up there, mean kids would throw rocks at them and even jab them with sharp sticks.

  Like the rest of their kind, Zeke and Pete were placid, tolerant creatures, but they had their limits. And when they got mad … watch out! An angry lizard could turn a mean kid into a pile of cinders in a matter of seconds. A hundred years ago, a lizard might have gotten away with defending itself, but modern lizards didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes the lizards ended up in jail; other times they got run out of town on a rail. That’s how Zeke and Pete had ended up in Shelburne Falls. They’d been run out of Wappingers Falls, New York, after a scuffle that ended with two toasted lowlifes and one burned police car.

  George had taken them in, befriended them, and given them a warm place to sleep next to his furnace. That was very unusual, because most glassblowers grow up alongside their lizards. Very few bond as grown-ups. Zeke and Pete knew that, and repaid George’s kindness with faithful service in his shop. Sometimes Cubby and I would go to the art galleries in nearby Northampton, and we’d speculate as to which lizard blew the fire for particular pieces of glass sculpture. Folks said Zeke had the stronger fire, so we figured he blew the biggest ones, whereas Pete was renowned for his small, precise flames and beautiful detail work.

  Cubby loved to watch glassblowers at work. He was captivated by the idea that glass could be heated red hot and pulled and twisted into strange shapes. Before seeing a glassblower at work, he had assumed glass was an immutable solid, like rock, unless you dropped it and it shattered. Seeing it flow like taffy was a shock. But he knew ice melted, so he was able to grasp the idea that glass melted too. You just needed a lot more heat. And that was what hit us as soon as we entered the glassblower’s shop: heat from the lizards. Even if you couldn’t see them, you couldn’t help but feel the heat pouring out of their mouths as they blew that glass.