The Witching Week

Posted September 07, 2007

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Ten years or so ago, Michael and I were waiting to cross a river in a small rowboat in Thailand, where we were traveling for two weeks (Note: this was before I turned into Jack Nicholson's finger-sanitizing, doorknob-wiping character from that OCD movie). Passengers were already sardined into the boat's small cavity when a young man ran up the shore and asked a question that appeared to mean "Room for one more?" The boatman offered a cheerful answer that appeared to mean, "Always room for one more!" so the late passenger held up his finger in the universal sign of "Hang on a sec!" then turned around, retrieved what must have been the world's largest motorcycle, and used a large plank to haul it onto the boat, our boat, the one that was the size of a medium dog bed.

That tippy ride -- where you make it across, but just barely, and you're seasick and hanging onto the side while water sploshes up onto your rucksack and a colossal motorcycle is falling into your lap and the boat is capsizing and you don't have a life vest and can't even swim all that well but you're smiling because you don't want anyone to think you're a bratty, panicking American tourist -- that's what it's like to live with Birdy right now. Specifically, that's what it's like trying to cross over from school to bedtime. "She's so fantastic!" her preschool teachers gush, and I nod the way Dr. Jekyll's mother must surely have nodded. ("He really loves school!" she probably said. "He's his very best self here.") And I pick Birdy up -- the oniony Birdy who, we hear, sits in the garden munching happily on chives all morning -- and I strap her into her car seat, and I say, "How was your morning, honey?" and she says, "Great!" And then, somewhere between that moment and nightfall, she dissolves into a puddle of malevolent slime.

I know that this is happening in houses all over the country right now, at the beginning of the school year. I know that if I walked through my neighborhood at night, behind every cheerful amber-lit windowpane would be a child so exhausted from being a good citizen all day that she is now lying facedown on the linoleum, sobbing about a tiny wax bottle filled with fake colored juice. Friends call and say the same thing about their children; they come over and drink wine in my kitchen and say the same thing. Everybody's kids are falling apart. And it helps to know that -- it really does. But sheesh.

It was so different when Ben started preschool. With him, it was all about the separation, the heartbreak. The walk from the car to his classroom was as grim-faced and dreadful as a march into battle; his tiny hand waving from the window might well have been shouting "SOS" in sign language. He was so homesick and miserable all morning that his afternoons at home were filled with the tired joy and gratitude of the newly rescued. "Thank you," said his glazy, relieved eyes. "Thank you thank you thank you."

This is not how it is with Birdy. And part of the problem is that I miss her in the morning, when I'm working at home -- the sounds of her cheerful little self playing "tea party" and "birthday party" and "just a party" with her dolls and animals. I miss stealing a kiss from her sweet cheeks when she's bent over her books or her coloring. I miss her. Only now when she comes home, she's not exactly the person I've been missing. Does that sound terrible? It is -- I know. Only it's even worse than that. The dynamic now is that we'll be getting ready for bed and there will be some or other incident -- she elbows me in the stomach by accident, say, or she shrieks at me to read her a book -- and then we will get into it with her about apologizing. "I'm sorry" will be the diamond in the vault, and the vault is Birdy's sealed, furious mouth, and we're Mission Impossibling around with our wires and our suction-cup boots, trying to get to that apology, trying to snatch it away before the alarms go off. Only we never can. Birdy screams and cries and "I won't say I'm sorry to Mama" and the whole thing just feels so dumb -- like an exercise in dynamics and limit-setting and peevishness.

Yes, once we head down the "Say you're sorry or go sit in the other bedroom by yourself for a while" path, I realize we need to stay on it until we get to the Place Where Threats Are Carried Out and Consequences Are Endured. But I don't know how to stay off the path to begin with. And I feel so ridiculous with my "Ow, Birdy, you jabbed me in the ribs" -- like the pissed-off, hypersensitive girlfriend you can't make love to because, ouch, you pulled her hair with your wrist or, yinch, your shaggy cuticles abraded her spine.

And to top it all off, now that I'm being so terribly frank, I feel sad because who this exhausted Birdy wants is Michael. And it hurts my feelings -- that after 7 years of the babies shrieking and weeping if Michael so much as looked at them while they were nursing or thinking about nursing or hanging onto the place where they once nursed, now, for one week in a lifetime, Birdy really wants her dad. It's fair enough -- he's who I want too -- but I'm just saying: it hurts my feelings. But then -- well, she's still so sweet that Birdy. I woke her up for school this morning and she lay quietly on her back in my arms in just her little warm, crumply T-shirt, and after a while I said, "What are you thinking about, my Bird?" And she kissed me on my arm, smiled, and said, "Cottage cheese."

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

The Witching Week

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