Goes Around and Comes Around

Posted September 07, 2007

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"That was very rude to spit at Ben. Very, very rude. Now stay in here until you're ready to come out and apologize."

Can you guess the identity of this harsh disciplinarian? Yes, well that's a logical assumption -- but no, if it were me, I wouldn't stop at the door before sternly closing it to blow three kisses inside. It's Birdy herself, and the object of her scolding is none other than her beloved shaggy purple hippo, Eebo. Her equally beloved and equally purple plastic Froggy, who was recently birthed from a piñata into her maternal arms, is also shut away in the bedroom and may or may not have been an accomplice in the alleged spitting incident -- I don't know. What I do know is that a Psychology 101 textbook seems to have come to life, and I suddenly find myself inside an animated diorama of the chapter called "Working Through Your Feelings" or, maybe, "Repetition Compulsion."

Because not one hour ago, and minus the blown kisses, that was me in the doorway, speaking sharply to Birdy after she attempted to resolve a dispute with her brother by shrieking, "Benny, it is fair that I get every single last train car and you don't get any!" and then using her own two feet -- O Instruments of Fairness! -- to wreck the track he'd built. Mostly, Birdy is a big-hearted and sunny child, not unlike Ben at her age (and, come to think of it, at his own), but she does occasionally plummet into the gap between will and reason. And she's just a different child from Ben. When he needed to be shepherded back to the flock of gentle fairness (say, after hugging somebody too roughly down to the ground) all you had to do was speak his name -- "Ben!" -- and those dark lamb eyes would shine immediately with remorse. If we had ever put him on something like a "time out," I think he would have fainted from the shame of it.

But Birdy -- Birdy's the kind of person who can use an occasional moment to herself to gather her thoughts. Even if this gathering looks like her lying noisily facedown on the floor like a giant weeping crocodile baby. Every once in a while I will carry her flailing self to some or other room and shut the door behind me, and I wonder, even as I'm writing this, if that's the right thing to do. It's hard to explain it now, but every action with Ben was so meticulously weighed out -- like we were measuring diamonds on a jeweler's scale. "What do you think?" Michael and I said to each other a dozen times a day. "Was that the right thing?" we asked each other every night, our worried heads bent together above the comforter. "Should we have?" With Birdy it's all a little quicker, a little cruder, like I'm just weighing the jewels -- or bitter herbs -- in my palm, shrugging, "This feels about right."

Mostly I think it's good. I think that second kids blossom and spread inside that airy absence of scrutiny, while first kids are so often sweltering inside a kind of worried parental greenhouse where they get clipped into odd, neurotic topiary children. But I don't know. With so much more going on all the time, I sometimes sacrifice my big-picture goals for immediate resolution in a way I never did with Ben. Like one day last week, when Birdy started moaning in front of my parents about eggs and not eating them and I, simply because I don't like her to be moaning in front of my parents (because I am, though second-born, an odd and neurotic topiary child) hissed right into her ear, "If you keep whining and yelling, there won't be any treats for you today." And she wiped at her eyes with the flat backs of her hands, pulled her mouth into an umbrella of sadness, and made not another sound.

We have so much power, don't we? The kids are in its thrall. We can change the expression of their feelings with a single command -- but oh, it's those feelings themselves that I worry about, that silent turned-down mouth, the stifling need to be good, the way dependency can humiliate them. I don't know what the right thing is sometimes. But then I was wiping Birdy's face with a washcloth -- gentling off that crust of dirt and tomatoes and dried tears and blueberries -- and I said, "This was my washcloth when I was a little girl just like you." And Birdy looked at it -- the wide Marimekko print of blue and yellow flowers -- and said, "Did I wash your face so, so gently then?" And I said, "When?" And she said, "When I was the Mama and you were my little girl." And then, like karma incarnate, she popped up onto her toes and kissed me on the forehead.

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Goes Around and Comes Around

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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Goes Around and Comes Around

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