Beach Baby

I don’t understand how it’s possible not to care about getting sand in the places where my daughter gets sand. In her hair, on her face, in her sandwich. This week we’re at the shore, and Katy’s enthusiasm for the beach is boundless. As soon as we arrive, she grabs her grandparents’ hands and heads for the water. She teases the ocean for an hour without a break and then collapses face first into the sand (actually getting sand in her mouth and swallowing). Every day around one o’clock, I scrape her up off the sand and march her the three blocks back to the house for her lunch, shower, and nap – and herein lies the rub.

A couple of days ago I started to wonder about the cost benefit balance of the nap when the day itself, a day like today, is exhausting and fun. When I do finally get her back to the beach house, she doesn’t nap until two hours after we arrive, and even then, her eight-months-pregnant, immobile mom has to deal with the gnashing of toddler teeth before Katy gives it up and falls asleep. But then something happened.

Katy was running her usual bait-and-switch operation, claiming that she needed to go to the bathroom to get my mom (who she calls Gabby) to take her back to the beach house. Once they got there, she decided that she didn’t need to go to the bathroom – it was all an elaborate rouse to get Gabby to come back and spend some alone time with her reading a book. It was obvious that Katy was exhausted when she left the beach, and during the story she seemed to get sad. When my mom asked what was wrong, Katy told her that there’s “no baby in Mommy’s belly,” she “doesn’t want a little sister,” and [she] wants to be the little sister.”

Around this time I pulled myself up out of my beach chair and walked back to the house. After about half-an-hour, Katy can get pretty exhausting, and besides, it was nap time. Gabby told me about her conversation in a furious fit of spelling (“she’s worried about the B-A-B-Y.” “You mean her D-O-L-L-S?” “No the B-A-B-Y in M-O-M-M-Y-‘S B-E-L-L-Y…”). When my mom went back to the beach, I put Katy down for her nap, and she was asleep in seconds.

Who knows how much Katy understands about how her life will change over the next year? I can barely say that I know how my own life will change. I think the baby of the mind is harder for both of us to deal with than the actual baby will be. After a conversation with my own dad, I wonder whether we started talking with Katy about the baby too early. Maybe nine months of anticipation is too much for a three-year-old. Stephen King wrote something about the closed door being scarier than what’s behind that door. And anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows that the longer you stand in front of the door, the scarier it gets. In a month, the door will open, and we’ll all adjust as we need to, but until then, things might be tough.

All this is to say that the naps will continue here at the beach. These are the kinds of feelings that sleep helps us deal with and when lack of sleep teams up with nerves, crazy stuff happens. When she’s rested, Katy confronts her problems with her knowledge (she’ll look at you and say, out of the blue, “Babies don’t have any teeth” or “Babies poop on the carpet.”). When she’s tired, she confronts her problems with her emotions – like we all do. So every day, we’ll hose the sand from between our toes together (then I’ll rinse the sand out of her teeth) and we’ll hit the sack.

Temperament Tantrum

To many she meets, Katy’s behavior seems strange – almost scary. I have to admit, it seems scary to me. In an instant she can leap from playing contentedly to screaming furiously because she has to go from the house to the car or because she has one doll flipped the opposite way from all the others in the box. When I say screaming, I don’t mean whining or yelling or pouting; I don’t mean expressing displeasure or stomping feet; I mean full-out, hand-in-a-blender screaming. Recently, though, it’s occurred to me that the screaming happens only because her wonderful words have outpaced her ideas and that perhaps she comes by the traits causing the screaming more honestly than I would care to admit.

Last night was date night for Bethany and me. Guess how we used our time. Nope, guess again. Nope. We went to the library. Why? Because when we were rich with no kids we used to drop $300-$400 a month at Borders, and now that we’re poor, the library is the methadone that helps us through our bookstore jones. I bring this up only because I found myself in the parenting section looking for something to help explain Katy’s behavior. What I found was a book called Temperament Tools by Helen Neville and Diane Clark Johnson. I tend to be skeptical of parenting books, and I have to admit that the multicultural cartoons and bubble letters on the cover combined with the Comic Sans font and narrative style of the chapters made the needle on my Bullshit-O-Meter take several convincing ticks toward the redline. Then I read this: "Katy can't make fast changes. Many of us live in a 4-wheel drive vehicle that can go anywhere. Katy lives in a train on a track - she has to build a new track before she can go somewhere different."

The chapter on the intense and slow-to-adapt child didn’t use Katy’s name – it used the name Tiganda Tiger (yes, seriously) - but I find that the train metaphor describes my daughter perfectly. She’s got the power of the Wabash Cannonball running at full speed, but she also has its inertia, its fixed course, and, of course, her train wrecks are spectacular. But then, so are mine.

Not to blow my own whistle, but I consider myself a guy with some inertia. I’m focused and intense about my job, my home life, my projects, and my hobbies. I often, unfairly, ask that other people be the same way. When we move, I don’t let anyone rest until the place looks like we live there. No boxes anywhere but the basement after the first 48 hours. On curriculum writing days I work on miserable tasks without a break until they’re done or I am told to go home. If there’s not any reconciliation to an argument I follow Bethany around the house - even when she’s trying to get away from me – until we have some closure. Once I get on a topic, I attack it pretty ferociously to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Case in point: while I am working on this essay, there’s a toy playing a mechanical kids’ song over and over. I don’t notice it at all. Bethany has to ask me to turn it off.

Like Katy, I have to change my mental picture of what is going to happen before I can be comfortable with its happening. Recently, the school district I work for changed my assignment to a new high school. This idea is hard for me to get used to because I have to picture myself walking down those halls instead of the ones I work in now. I have to be able to picture what my room will look like, how I will get to work, and who my neighbors will be. This is not to say that I’m a planner; I make conscious efforts not to plan. I reject to-do lists, calendars, and journals. Often, my spontaneous lessons are much better than the ones that have been planned for weeks. So I’m not a planner, but I need to know what to expect from my daily routine, and so does my daughter.

I don’t think we’re similar because she is learning her behaviors from me; you don’t learn this kind of crazy. I think it’s genetic. She is like me because she has to be, because I’m her father and along with my enjoying my gifts, she carries my burdens. This part of Katy’s personality is sometimes difficult to understand or even frustrating, I have to remind myself that this is the way life is, and I would rather see myself in her than not.