The 7 Habits of Highly, Um, Successful Children

Posted September 07, 2007

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You know when a relationship ends kind of suddenly, and maybe it's good that it's over -- it's even high time, actually -- but still you remember the last night you were together and think, "I wish I'd known that was the last time," so you could at least have spent the early morning hours awake, burning the memory of your lover's face into your own ambivalence? That's how it is with Ben's thumb sucking. Ben is done sucking his thumb, and I'm happy for him to be getting on with his life -- He's such a big kid! I'm so proud! -- but I will miss the sight of his rascally smile behind that thumb. I will miss the hardcore relaxation of watching him sleep with a little fist curled by his face, like a baby, if babies actually ever slept, which of course they don't. I will miss the way I see that thumb in his mouth and remember him a year ago, or at 4, 3, 2, 1, a newborn, always with the thumb, always with the smile behind it. I didn't know it was the last time!

I was speaking with a friend today about our kids and the phases they go through. This friend was talking to me in particular about her son and his sudden but persistent fear of dragons and how sorry she feels for him but also how very, very tired she feels for herself since this fear of dragons comes on most powerfully -- like with the fevers and the barfing -- in the middle of the night. And when a friend is worrying, you can usually see from the outside that your friend is in a plane moving through some clouds, and yes, her tray table is shaking a little, and she has to refasten her seatbelt, and maybe the flight attendant has to take her own seat and so your friend is waiting still for her tomato juice, but it's just a moment of turbulence; in another minute the plane will be slicing back along through the clear blue, taking her all too quickly to wherever it is we're all headed. But from the inside it's different: she feels that first rattle and she pretty much knows that the plane is falling straight down to splash into the sea, where nobody really believes that crazy slide is going to inflate and convey everyone smilingly to safety in their high heels, the way the emergency card seems to promise.

You could just see this in my friend's face: her certain knowledge that 50 years from now she was going to be swinging her arthritic knees out of bed and old-lady jogging to her son's bedroom to smooth the hair back from his forehead, click his nightlight back on, and yell through his closet door, with her creaky voice, for the dragons to go back where they came from. And I have felt this way myself about so many things, so many phases that my children have gone through. (Infancy itself, for example.)

But I'm thinking about those phases now, and boy most of them have just blown right through the house -- we barely noticed when they were gone, despite how permanently they seemed to have taken up residence. In his almost-seven years on the planet, Ben has developed mild compulsiveness around all the following things: chewing on his sleeves; hiking up his pants so that the waistband would stay firmly under his armpits like he liked it (without pants, he would simply hike up his undies); peeing, or trying to pee, or peeing just one more last time before each and every activity, even if it was just reading Green Eggs and Ham or popping outside to check the mail; talking in a slurry-fast way so that allthewordsrantogether; and, last but not least, smelling his fingers. And I worried a little bit about these behaviors; I imagined Ben growing up to be a cross between Felix Unger and Mr. Bean; I bit my tongue so I wouldn't nag him. And sometimes I nagged him through my bit tongue, even though, my God, if someone were to nag me about my own peculiar behaviors I would have to spend the rest of my life explaining myself ("No, I don't think that peering at my pores up close in the mirror like that actually makes my skin look prettier, and no, I guess you're right, it's not really helping me get my work done either."). But now? Nothing.

Not even the thumb sucking which was something we never actually worried about. It always looked so comforting, on the one hand; we figured he would stop when it seemed important to him to stop, on the other. And so we were surprised when the dentist suddenly talked to him about it: with great respect, he said, "I see that you're a thumb-sucker, Ben, and I have to tell you: you're starting to change the shape of your jaw a little bit here." And he showed Ben in the mirror and said, simply, "If you think you can, you might want to consider stopping before all your permanent teeth come in." And Ben, big-little Ben, said, "Okay, I will," and then cheerfully brainstormed his own solutions in the car. He decided on a Bandaid -- which he ended up sucking in his sleep, which I then worried about him choking on, which made me think, "What if Ben chokes to death because we were worried about the shape of his stupid jaw?" So he came up with another solution: a mitten. And that was that. He wears his mitten to bed; he doesn't suck his thumb. He holds up his unsucked-on mitten in the morning, like a victory flag, and smiles.

So the next time we go in, I'm going to give the dentist some cue cards to read while he checks Birdy. "There's something going on with your molars here. It's going to be really important for you to stop screaming when things don't go your way, like with the cashews or that doll cradle. Also, eat your vegetables and I won't have to drill up all your teeth." I'll let you know how it goes.

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The 7 Habits of Highly, Um, Successful Children

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

The 7 Habits of Highly, Um, Successful Children

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