Boys and girls

While the eloquent 19-year old who assures Iowans that he hasn't been harmed by his lesbian parents has gone viral on Facebook, we have more prosaic concerns: Little Bug is currently denying the actual existence of girls.

We noticed that he was signing "baby" for every kid under 12, and we thought he needed more signs. So we tried to teach him signs for "boy" and "girl." He learned to do them on the plane back from Tucson, as I pointed out a girl and a boy and he repeated my signs back to me. They seem dated an ancient: "boy" involves drawing an imaginary cap above your forehead, and "girl" is signed by drawing a bonnet string along your chin.

Tonight we were at a tree-lighting in Amherst, complete with the UMass marching band playing religious Christmas carols--a tad strange--and he was "signing" away and otherwise communicating nonverbally in a carrier on my back. Clapping for the band, signing "more" every time they stopped, making "woof" noises for the dogs. And signing "boy" every time he saw a kid older than two. Some of them were clearly girls, and Jennifer would laugh and sign "girl" and say "no, that's a girl." Gendered sign language was not working well for him. He'd make his mock-frowning face and grunt in disagreement (for a kid with few words, he gets his important thoughts across with surprising clarity). Then he would sign "boy" again. "Girl" Jennifer would say and sign. "Boy" he would sign in reply. Then he'd point to himself and sign "boy."

And the anti-gay parenting folks were afraid he'd grow up confused about his gender. Nope. Just other people's.

Moo, Baa

Little Bug is a la-la-la kind of guy.

There's a book by Sandra Boynton, Moo, Baa, La La La, that is hugely popular with the toddler set. I've read it to lots of little kids, and it has something for everyone--animal sounds, silly drawings, and opportunities for personal creativity. By far the most popular line in my experience--which was extensive when I was a daycare teacher--is "No, no, you say, that isn't right!" This generally makes toddlers shriek with joy. "No" is pretty much the most fun word you can think of.

But not Bug. In the picture above, he is responding to his second favorite line: "Rhinoceroses snort and snuff." He pouts his lips out and snuffles, which generally makes his mamas laugh out loud. He sort of stares into the middle distance when you get to the "no no" part. He likes to make the cow sound, and the sheep sound, but then when you say, "Three singing pigs say la la la!" that's when he shrieks. "La la la la la la!" he says, "la la la!" until he falls over giggling.

That seems to be how he makes his way through life.

Earlier this week, when the power was out and and the house got to be down to 55 degrees, Mama Jennifer and I were starting to get kind of stressed. Little Bug thought the whole thing was a riot. Snow falling on his face made him tilt his head back, stretch out both his arms, open his mouth, and laugh and laugh. Lights out...well, that seemed kind of weird--he kept pointing to the light switches and reaching up, like, if were just taller I could help you out with this. You really should think about putting the lights on. Flashlights got a big grin, especially when he could hold it, and everyone curled up under lots of covers in the bed was just about as good as it could get. The only thing he really minded were diaper changes, never his favorite, and having his butt naked in the cold didn't improve his feelings about them. But all and all the whole thing didn't trouble him much, despite the fact that he didn't even own a warm coat. Friends had their baby tucked up in a sort of tailored blanket thing, like Bug is wearing above. We badly wanted one. Now that the heat's been on at our house for days (although we still have relatives and friends without heat, now 5 days after the storm), the snow is melting, and the roads are becoming passable again, we have a winter coat, a snow suit, and two warm blanket things. Now we are prepared for the last disaster, and almost certainly not the next one.

But Bug isn't trying to protect himself from an unpredictable future. We went to the mall and looked high and low for boots that were warm and fit. Finally, just as we were getting ready to give up, we found a guy in a scary Halloween costume--looking all hangman-ish, in black with a long lanky haired wig--to fit him for boots. They looked warm, they fit, they weren't funny looking...so we put them on him while he sat in my lap. When I set him down and asked him to walk, he didn't. He answered his own question instead: he started to dance. Funny boy just wanted to know if he could dance in those big boots.

That's my la la la guy.

Communicating

Learning to communicate with Little Bug as a toddler has its ups and downs.

A few nights ago, I was trying to get him to clean up his room. We put on the clean up songs, and I went to work, but everything I put on top of his toy bin he knocked off as soon as it got there. I picked up 26 alphabet blocks and put them in their tray, and down they came. I organized stacking rings on their posts, and off they went. The more I cleaned, the more mess we had.

I stopped and tried to figure out what was going on. I did consider the entirely reasonable question of whether he wanted his room clean--but I think he did, since that always comes before the bath, which is the high point of his day. I turned to him, and asked with some exasperation what was wrong, looking across the disturbing clear top of the toy bin, and the wreckage all around us--beads on wire toy, stacking cups, great piles of overturned blocks. What do you want? I asked. By now we had gotten to the up-tempo salsa "Hora de limpiar" song, and my son was vibrating with the beat. He picked his way to the bin and launched in an amazing drum riff, head down, hands dancing.

Ah, I thought. I see toy storage, he sees a really big, beautiful drum. Of course cleaning up means clearing it off.

It's hard to get on the same page when you are reading from different books.


I saw the 5-year old version of this in a conversation on a crowded path near the beach in Maine.

"Look, mama, dog poop," said a little girl.


"We need to walk quickly," said her mom, unwilling to acknowledge the dog poop but noticing the people piling up behind them.


"Poop, mama!" said her immoble daughter.

"Come on now, we need to keep going."


"POOOP!" she shrieked.


By this time, only the knowledge that I never want my parenting critiqued in public kept me from telling the mom that she was going to have to talk about poop if she wanted her daughter to move from the spot where she was fixed.


This tells me that impossible communication with a youngster with a different, essentially unrelated agenda should not be considered an isolated event. This is going to go on for years.

Sometimes, though, the toddler brain is not just on a different wavelength. It is completely incomprehensible.

For example, Bug hates getting pants on. There is no reason for this that I can discern; he's happier once they are on, warmer and better protected from scrapes. But getting them on is a major wrestling match. Once we were in a parking lot with a messy diaper, and it took two of us to get new pants on him--one to hold his flailing, hollering body up in the air, the other to position the pants so he could be dropped into them. The Neilds have a song about this--one that only the parent of a toddler could understand. The enemy called pants, pants, pants, the lyrics go. If you put those pants on me, I will cease to be so sweet...if you pull those to my waist, I will make a nasty face. The enemy called pants, pants, pants.

This tells me that the problem is not limited to our toddler. It's from someplace we could call planet toddler.


Another planet toddler moment: he has started to whine. He points to something, then engages in a high-pitched, super-annoying whine to tell me that this is what he wants. I was trying to talk him out of it.

"Little Bug," I said brightly, "what could you say instead?" I understand this is not totally fair. The kid has I think 5 words and about a dozen signs. If he could say, "I want to flip on the light switch," he probably would have. But the whine is going to make me start banging my head against a wall.



He considered my question gravely for a couple of seconds. He pointed at the light switch, and then blew in my face twice. I almost fell over laughing. I carried him to the light switch.



But then there are these moments of communication so perfect it breaks your heart.


Yesterday, his Mama Jennifer called to him that it was time for his nap. He got up from a book on making paella that he had been sitting and contemplating, and ran over to the stairs. Then he saw me and ran back to give me a hug good-bye. Then he very seriously and carefully crawled up the stairs, and got back on his feet at the top. Then he ran down the hall, waving his arms in the air and shouting "Na-na, na-na, na-na" (nurse) and got into the bed.

It turns out, though, that the maternal brain has moments as incomprehensible as the toddler brain. I missed my recalcitrant Bug.



As I watched him organize and plan all these different steps to get to his nap, all I could think was, who is this big guy, and where did my baby go?

Toddler

Little Bug said, or signed, his first sentence today. Jennifer and I were planning to take a long walk with the dog, and debating stroller vs. baby carrier. Bug piped up and said, "Na na" (nurse) and then signed "eat" (and then go to) "sleep."

It's bad when your toddler is nagging you for more naps.

He also has instituted nightly baths, which I felt he could go one or two nights without. But how do you answer someone who is 13 months old and signing "bath" and “more”?

It is of course possible that this baby signing thing is over-rated, that it just makes them bossier sooner. For instance, the baby books all say that sometime between 12 and 18 months they can start to follow two step commands (pick up that block and put it in the bin), which he can. But nobody says--because most folks sensibly don't give their toddlers strategies to talk at that age, when their mouths still can't do it--that they can begin to GIVE two-step commands at this age. But I got up today into the greyness of a rainy morning, and Little Bug paddled over to his room in his feet-y pajamas (because he was sleeping in our bed, natch), looked at me and signed (turn on the) "light" (then the) "music."

Ridiculous. (Dancing boy made up his own sign for put on the music: pumping his little hands back and forth by his ears. Gotta dance, mama, gotta dance.)

He has the most astonishing desires for the very things toddlers are supposed to hate. This morning he rejected pancakes for breakfast in favor of black beans, soy milk, and gorgonzola cheese.

It's now becoming clear what direction his terrible twos will take. He will be throwing temper tantrums at the co-op for more vegetables. Stomping angrily down the hall demanding to go to bed earlier.

All of this is not to say he is incapable of real mischief. He is ever ready to throw a shelf full of books on the floor, and he approaches getting into the car seat with a great grin, prepared to drive mamas to distraction with his ability to resist every effort to strap him in. He has faked me out in a store, engaging in misdirection and then darting through strangers’ legs to take off running, shrieking with laughter.

He also seems to have suddenly noticed the existence of other, mostly younger babies. He is riveted by them, staring and signing “baby” so enthusiastically that the swinging of his arms threatens to knock him down. He carries dolls around, handing them to me for a cuddle and signing “baby” at me. Did you know, he seems to be saying, that there are other babies in the world—little babies—and it’s not actually all about me? And I’m not really all that little any more?

But he is still pure sunshine, that boy, even as he is making astonishing leaps into toddlerhood. He certainly is more often a pain than he was when he was still at the potted plant stage. But he is also ever more himself, achingly wholesome and square one minute, so charmingly trouble the next that it’s almost impossible to keep from laughing. But above it all, able to concentrate more joy in every minute than I would’ve thought humanly possible.

If I can't dance....

If we leave Little Bug alone with the music playing, he dances.

He’s always liked to listen to music, and recently he’s started lifting up his arms and moving his whole body in response to us. But this dancing alone thing, not so much social as personal, is new and fascinating.

We discovered it when we left him in his room and put up the gate, and Jennifer was checking on him every couple of minutes. She was peeking in, and then waved me over silently but urgently, smiling broadly. She pointed, and there he was, lifting his feet and pumping his arms. We stayed and spied, trying not to laugh out loud and disrupt him. His face was full of joy.

We took him to a concert the other night, local bands in a park doing covers. He kept us laughing from Bohemian Rhapsody to Purple Rain to Heartbreak Hotel, throwing himself into a whirlwind of turning and shaking his head back and forth and shifting really fast from one foot to another. Always his hands were high in the air. Sometimes he sang when they were finished, la la la la, just so the music wouldn’t stop. He’s still so little he would lose his footing in the sharp slope of the amphitheater, but he never stopped smiling.

He’s as sensuous as a cat, and will arch his neck if you stroke it. Rhythms and music seem to be the same sort of thing, something he feels in his body that make him move.

It’s tempting to think of his enjoyment of music as something about the species, since he’s so young and seems to have always had it. But I think that’s wrong; he’s steeped in an environment full of us and others. “Isn’t it amazing,” said Jennifer tongue-in-cheek, “he has the exact same interests we do!” He listens to the same music we and the people we know do; he has dance moves he’s seen. But certainly there is something about music and dancing that is close to the bone of how humans build a world; having such a rich and very long tradition of loving it as we do.

But it’s rewarding to watch him interact with texts and music, especially because I teach college students to do something like that, at least the texts part. When something bad happens to Little Bug—he tumbles and does a face-plant—he acts it out again and again, telling us the story over and over until he feels better, making it narrative, assimilating what happened and moving on. He uses bedtime stories to build ways to use words and thoughts. In What’s Wrong Little Pookie?, Mommy asks Pookie if he needs a drink. Pookie didn’t, but Little Bug did the other night; he picked his head up when he heard it and started urgently signing “more.”

We make meaning in our world through stories and music. I knew that about adults, and how critical that is. Someone in my new office has posted the words women sang in the Lawrence “bread and roses” strike in 1912: “hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.” At almost-13 months, Little Bug has found already that music fills his heart. Maybe it’s nurturing that contagious joy that is so much a part of him.

No matter how small

I don't think when we look back over Little Bug's childhood that we will recall the last week as among the best.

Moving's been hard on him, full of missed naps, fussing, and not enough time with moms. It's hard to play with the baby or hold him when you need to spend every waking hour packing and then unpacking boxes and organizing the furniture. Fortunately friends and family have been amazing--friends drove the car out from Tucson to Northampton and then stayed to help; grandparents have entertained him and unpacked us. When there was no safe place to put him in the house, folks put him in the stroller and took him on walks everywhere; he's seen more of Northampton than we have, and met half the population. As my mom said, "He has such lovely manners. He greets everybody with a big smile, and does something to make them feel special."

Even so, I confess that for the first time in his life, I've found myself annoyed by him and his endless needs, his crying, his very presence. I had no empathy, no ability to distinguish between his legitimate complaints and what might be "extra" fussiness from all the upheaval. Not that the days have been without magic, laughing, or smiles over how delightful he is, but only that there have also been lows where the best we could do was make sure he was safe and fed, not necessarily appreciated or nurtured.

But Monday night, our sixth in the house, I suddenly realized we were going to be alright. Friends from here had brought us dinner, and we took a real break to share it with them and enjoy their company. Most of the random and sharp stuff was gone from the first floor, and even though there wasn't yet a safety gate on the stairs (tricky space, requires special gate--of course), after they left we set him down and let him run around for the first time.

Bug found a box where I'd been collecting a few things to take down to the cellar and gravely carried it into the living room. Then he unpacked the things in it and took them all to the kitchen. Then he went to work in the play space, carefully taking down all the big pillows against the wall and making a pile of them in the middle of the squishy letter tiles. Then, as we watched all this with growing amusement, he slowly backed up to survey his work, in such a perfect imitation of Jennifer checking out her organizational work that we were shouting with laughter.

All that time he was stuck in his play pen he was watching us. And there he was to help, if only we were open-hearted enough to appreciate his work. Somehow, I'd forgotten that he wasn't just a baby, full of needs and a bundle of work. He's a person, no matter how small (as Horton said), generous, funny, loving, trying at times, but fully a human in his own right.

Signs and Wonders

Little Bug was discharged by the cardiologist today--the hole in his heart has closed completely. Thank God.

The hole in his heart was the last trace in his body of the complete mess that was his breathing and circulation when he was born--he had PPHN, or Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn. When he was born, his heart and lungs didn't make the switch from fetal circulation to baby circulation; he remained a hybrid, an amphibian, not quite ready for life as a land mammal, ready to dip back into amniotic fluid and resume life as a fetus.

If it hadn't been completely terrifying, there might have been something fascinating about the coming into the world of our liminal boy, the way he walked between the worlds--of life and death, of fetus and baby. It also made me realize what an astonishing series of events take place inside a neonate's body, just as much as inside the mother's body, the switching over of heart and lungs, digestion...everything.

But then babies are always in between, in some astonishing process of becoming. They grow at a rate their first year that is scarcely human, more plant-like than mammalian, except that all mammal babies do it. Little bug's leg is about as long as his whole body was eleven months ago. The first year is a fast-forward blur of milestones, rolling over and grabbing stuff, focusing the eyes and attending to social interaction, then suddenly sitting, standing, walking, running.

The most startling to me is the leap into language. When I worked in daycare, we would watch the inevitable process by which they would start to communicate with words around 12-18 months. As the director said, it was as if your cat suddenly started to speak. Here are these little beings who go through being a jumble of incomprehensible smiles and cries to older babies who have begun to make sense of their own needs and desires and can communicate them pretty well to you. And then, suddenly, they talk; they are so much more than hungry or tired or in need of a diaper change. They are little people; unformed to say the least, in-process, but unmistakably human.

Bug has started calling me "Raura," or 'Mama Raura," or just some version of "Mom." The "Raura" startles me, because it's so nearly what everyone else calls me, a casual, friendly name. I got him up to go to the doctor this morning, woke him before he was ready, and he wailed, "Roooora!" to complain, a plaintive sound, so eerily like what any adult I know might have said in the same situation.

Aside from a few words--names for us and a word for nursing, "na-na" which he says with such deep pleasure he can't help but smile--he has some signs. Like a lot of parents of our social location, we've been teaching him a little bit of American Sign Language, because it turns out that the major obstacle to speech is what you have to do with your mouth and tongue, not what you have to do with your mind. It's still mostly the sign for "more"--more food, more tickling, more kitty, more game, more singing...always, give me more of life!--but he's added a few here and there: change my diaper, pick me up, fan. Like most babies, he loves ceiling fans; the first thing he does when we go somewhere new is scan the ceilings for fans.

They say that you need language before you can form memories, because language abstracts and symbolizes things, and you need that to store them in memory.

I also notice that these bare beginnings of language make Little Bug more self-conscious, more aware of himself as different from other people. It's a concept he's been wrestling with. I see it flash behind his eyes when I tell him to stop and he gets a wicked smile and takes off in a different direction. "See!" he seems to say. "I am my own person. I have different desires than you do!"

Recently, he saw Jennifer start to cry and he cried too. "It's okay, Bug," I said. "You're a different person than Mama Jennifer." Something about that clicked for him, and he suddenly stopped.

Language requires self-consciousness. Not only do I have different desires from you, but I understand that what I am thinking is opaque to you, and I will communicate it to you. You live in a different consciousness. Even little babies must have some understanding of our separateness, because they are so social, always trying to bridge the gap between us. But Bug at 11 months, more and more, is aware of himself.

He took this to a new level a couple of days ago. I said to Jennifer, with him sitting a few feet away, "You should get a picture of him signing 'fan'." She picked up her camera, and he posed, apparently having understood exactly what I had just said. He put his hand in the air in his sign for fan, and got a super-fake smile on his face. Jennifer snapped it, and when we saw it--the picture above--we laughed and laughed, unable to believe the evidence of our eyes, that he had the ability to pose, to act, to be false, to project an image of himself for others. He leaned in, grabbed the camera, looked at himself, and joined our laughter. He found a digital image of himself pretending to sign "fan" hilarious.

Liminal boy crossed another threshold, imagining seeing himself from outside himself. With each day, he's a little more of a person. And it happens so fast it makes my head spin.