Maybe for Halloween She Could Be a Toddler

Posted September 07, 2007

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So, it seems like 3 and 11 months may be the new 2. Birdy, who is so sweet that she wants nothing more than to sit around with her hand down my shirt, breathing softly into my face and asking me questions about when she hatched out of my tummy -- this same Birdy sometimes turns mysteriously back into a tantruming baby. If Franz Kafka came back to life, he could visit our house, eat a little schnitzel, and make some notes for the sequel in which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses from a cockroach into a yelling almost-four-year-old wretch of a girl, her mouth threaded with angry strings of saliva.

Is this technically called "cabin fever"? Maybe. Maybe it's because the season has been so mild that we never put her into her down jacket until now -- and we can't help noticing that the sleeves are a foot too short. With 6 weeks left of winter. Do we buy her a new jacket? Or do we let her go around with frozen forearms constricted by bands of elastic that are slowly cutting off the blood supply to her personality?

Ben himself suffers from Exposed Shin Syndrome thanks to the 6-inch gap between the bottoms of his snow pants and the tops of his boots -- his legs grow like dandelion stems -- but it really doesn't seem to be a mood-altering situation for him. But Birdy -- Birdy staggers around with a turtleneck pulled a quarter of the way onto her head, screaming. She screams wordlessly. Then she screams, "Help me!" And then, when you bend down to help, she screams, "Don't help me!" She staggers around screaming like it's Dawn of the Living Headless Turtlenecks. I finally grab her, kneel down in front of her, say, "Birdy, Birdy honey. Come out of there -- look, look, you've already got a shirt on." And from underneath the cottony stripes, after a long silence, I hear her laughing.

When she's not screaming, she can usually be found strutting around inside her own indignation. In the middle of the night, for instance. Every night the kids still lurch into our room like heat-seeking zombies, only they're no longer allowed to get into the big bed with us anymore. Instead we force them, because we are cruel this way, to squash together into the twin bed that is pushed right up against the queen bed where their father and I slumber in heavenly, romantic peace because this bizarre configuration actually represents the most privacy we've had in seven years. But the children shove and snap at each other in their twin-bed banishment. We try not to hear Ben say evenly, "Birdy. Birdy. No, Birdy, you really can't do that." We try not to hear Birdy screaming -- except that, well, she's screaming and it's hard to not hear her. "I can't move over, Ben!" she screams. "Ben! I can't!" And then, absurdly, "Benny, it's too tempting." It's a word she seems to associate with general frustration since we used to offer it up to her -- "Birdy, is that candy so tempting?" -- whenever she was, say, lying on the ground sobbing over Ben's box of Junior Mints. Although, come to think of it, there are many temptations when one is lying next to Ben: pinching his booty is one, as is biting his neck. He likes neither of these things.

Birdy, meanwhile, is onto other absurd expressions of her general rage and irritation. "When is it my sharing day at school?" is the first thing huffed and puffed out of her mouth in the morning. "I'm bored for my sharing day." She pouts and pounds the mattress and then sticks her lower lip so far out that it actually succeeds in pulling all the joy away from her person. "I am bored for it!" she cries and we warn her: "Birdy, honey, you're really hurting your own feelings about sharing day. It's tomorrow, but you're really going to get yourself into a bad mood about it." "I did already," she sulks, and this appears to be true. But then because of the Greatest-American-Hero way she insists on wearing her hair band -- kind of pulled down around her forehead, above her ears -- you can't help kissing her petulant cheeks.

A little later you might hear her clacking around downstairs in the plastic dress-up fancy shoes, and she sounds like a woman heading for the office: clack clack clack a little lipstick clack clack clack notes in the briefcase clack clack wallet and keys. When you finally see her, she's actually clacking around with a penguin puppet balanced on her head. A penguin named Lenguin. "But you said just let you do it!" she screams at Ben, we don't know about what, while she clacks around. "But just me do it is funner! Yes it is! Well it's funner for me. That's not fair. I just want to be the only one doing it one!" "Birdy, fine, okay," Ben finally sighs, and we feel the same way. But then we get to school and Birdy is so happy and excited that the only verb to describe her forward movement into the classroom is wiggle. And she's not a tantruming baby at all, suddenly. She is, quite simply, the roly-poly personification of joy.

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Maybe for Halloween She Could Be a Toddler

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Maybe for Halloween She Could Be a Toddler

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