Walking a Mile in Their Shoes

Posted September 07, 2007

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It's true that our dermatologist might have a personality disorder. Once, for example, when he was grimly writing me a prescription for my umpteenth tube of hydrocortiscam for the umpteenth lump, bump, cyst, pustule, boil, or rash with which I have been continually afflicted, he suddenly and uncharacteristically giggled. "What?" I said. "Oh I don't know. I was just thinking about the fact that some people never even have to go to a dermatologist even once!" Ha ha ha. It was so funny I laughed all the way to Barbados with a wad of cash in my hand! Oh wait, no -- that was him. Anyways, I went in recently because of a mole on my face that had taken it upon itself suddenly to masquerade as a topographical map of Texas. The doctor looked at it silently, turned away silently, and then turned back silently with goggles on and a blowtorch roaring in his hands. "What are you doing?" I asked, and he said, "Oh. I'm going to burn it off." "Thanks for letting me know," I said, and he said, without irony, "You're welcome."

I mention this now not only to keep you abreast of my latest dermatological woes, although I'm sure you're fascinated. But also because I was struck, as I often am, that some of the most bizarre moments of my life actually mimic the more or less daily experiences of my children -- of Birdy in particular. She is just along for the ride, that kid, and sometimes we remember to tell her what's happening. And sometimes we don't. We have, for example, packed up the car and left the beach to return home from a summer trip, and ten minutes from our house, after three hours on the road, Birdy has finally thought to say, "It sure is taking a long time to get back to our campsite!" And we have had to slap our foreheads and apologize for forgetting to tell her that our trip was over. I recently beckoned the children upstairs to lie down and read books with me, and in a quiet moment, Birdy whispered, "Good night. But why am I not even tired?" and Ben answered, "Maybe because we haven't even had our lunch!"

Birdy and I have been arguing lately because she likes to wriggle her hand down the front of my shirt, wedge it into my cleavage, and sigh, "I like to find warm spots." (All you tenth-grade boys out there: even though she gets away with it, I'm not officially recommending this as a useful feeling-up line.) My rule is that she can do this at home but not in public, and I've been irritated with her for climbing into my lap at a restaurant, say, or my parents' house, and lurching into her whole second-base routine. "Birdy," I hissed at her recently, "I said not in public," and she jerked her hand back and said, guilelessly, "Mama, I don't know what public is. Is this sweater public?" In her mind, "public" was a kind of color or maybe a particular type of fabric. Doh!

The flip side of this phenomenon is, of course, the children's saying of perfectly reasonable things that we parents aren't able to understand. Honestly this happens less and less, because so often the kids remember some remote thing or notice some minuscule detail that I am growing more and more convinced of the superiority of both their memories and their powers of observation. But still. Last summer at my brother's house, Birdy was lying on the floor to admire one of their hounds, when she announced, "Clea's really a rainbow dog." I was busy stuffing breakfast sausages into my own face, and also busy reading the New Yorker, a particular sausage-eating style of "reading" that involves skimming the cartoons, so I eked out only a vague, patronizing, "I know Birdy! Isn't she lovely, with all those blacky-brown colors in her coat?" There was a silence which I only barely noticed at the time. "I guess," Birdy said. "I guess so." She said it again to my mother, who responded in a similarly abstracted way about the dog's colorful personality. And then a little later when Clea clacked by us into a different room, we looked up and saw imprinted on her side, from where she must have been lying on somebody's driveway chalk masterpiece, a perfect rainbow.

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Walking a Mile in Their Shoes

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Walking a Mile in Their Shoes

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