Читать книгу The Sharp End of Life - Dierdre Wolownick - Страница 16

ONE OF CHARLIE’S MOST frequent complaints at home was that we never had enough money. Each time I put a date on the calendar for us, in the hope that we might reconnect for an evening, I would later find it erased, with another teaching job or convention or some other professional activity written over it. He had to work, he said. We had no money.

I had to believe him. He handled all the finances for our little family and never talked to me about any part of it. I had no idea how much we spent on what—I knew only that Charlie worked full-time, more than full-time, and that I was working part-time, but that we still had no money.

Childcare required money. His parents would occasionally watch our children, but only so we could go to work. Babysitting was costly and out of the question, so we were never alone together.

Professional help also required money. My suggestions that we talk to someone about how to manage our life a little better were met with derision. Charlie’s view of anyone in the mental health professions was simple: they had gone into that discipline to figure out their own problems, so they were more screwed up than the people they were trying to help. Clearly, we couldn’t give someone like that our hard-earned, scarce money.

So instead of trying to discover why Charlie was so angry, so distant, I worked. I wrote, for whoever would pay me. I taught part-time, a class here and there, like him, but near home so I’d be there for the kids. I guided multilingual tours of the Sacramento region for groups from other countries, as I had done in southern California. Work dulled some of the pain.

We both ran from job to job. Charlie taught, at one college or at several. Or read essays for international English as a Second Language (ESL) testing. He became an integral part of the administration at the college district and traveled to conventions all over California, and later, the country.

So he wasn’t home when I discovered that our new baby had learned to walk.

By ten months, Alex had already decided that sleeping was a waste of time that he could spend instead on his favorite activity, climbing. He fought as hard as he could against going to bed, every night. I’d always read that babies needed lots of sleep. Our first one had. Our second just couldn’t bring himself to shut down for the night. Life was too interesting.

Often, his body decided for him. Alex would fall asleep standing, leaning against the wall and clutching Blue Blankie, at ten, eleven, or even later. Charlie and I were ready for bed by seven or eight at night.

But every day, no matter when he had fallen asleep the night before, he was up at four thirty or five, his large, dark eyes brimming with adventure. Time to get active and vertical.

Every day.

In an effort to survive such a regimen, we would leave a tiny plastic bowl of dry cereal on the kitchen table before going to sleep ourselves. Maybe, if we were lucky, he’d feed himself breakfast in the morning and play by himself for a few minutes before pouncing on one of us to “go play.”

He couldn’t walk yet and never slowed down enough to bother talking. But he could travel. Months prior, I’d given up hope of finding him where I’d put him down. Books call it “cruising,” when babies who can’t walk get around by holding onto objects within reach.

But “within reach” refers to a normal, earthbound baby. For Alex, cruising was a cinch, whether it was horizontal (what most babies do) or vertical (garage shelves, closet partitions, towel racks, open drawers, etc.).

The morning I learned our baby could walk, I stumbled out of bed at five thirty. Unusually late. No one had woken me. It was already getting light. I dashed into Alex’s room. Gone. He wasn’t in the kitchen, and neither was his bowl, which meant he was already fueled up and doing some high-octane cruising.

Ten months old. Where could he go? I checked the top of the refrigerator and of all the furniture. Inside every cabinet, low or high. The shelves above the washing machine and the garage door that led to the backyard outside. All the places I’d found him before. The patio sliding glass door was out of the question—it had a heavy steel frame and an uneven, rusted track filled with debris, making it difficult for even adults to open.

My breathing got faster and shallower. He wasn’t inside, climbing any shower curtains or rods, or hanging from any towel bars. Or closet poles. It was warm enough for him to go outside. The neighborhood was still asleep, so if he cried, or knocked over the garbage pails or anything else, I’d hear it.

Dead silence.

My palms were sweating now, my heart pounding. Ten months old. Not walking. Where could he be?

The front door was heavy wood with a regular doorknob, and it was pretty high for a baby. I unlocked it—a pretty good clue that he hadn’t gone out that way—but, desperate and not thinking clearly, I ran out front into the quiet court. No traffic, no baby. I ran to the corner. No tiny body anywhere.

Ten months old! Could someone have come in and abducted him? (That’s how frantic mothers think.) Charlie was away at a conference, the neighbors were all still asleep—it was just the kids and me. I was alone.

Before calling the police, I convinced myself to calm down and check everywhere one more time. Just in case. I ran everywhere I could think of, checked everything again. Wore out my last reserves. He wasn’t there. I was shaking by now. Someone had taken my baby!

As I picked up the phone, there was one last nagging thought: the patio door. It was ridiculous, really. I had trouble with the old, rusted door myself and needed both hands to drag it open.

I put down the phone and looked out into the big backyard. At the far end sat the brand-new swing set that Charlie had just put together. And there, on top of the six-foot-high slide, stood Alex.

All mothers have those memories that stand out, the ones we can’t forget no matter how hard we try. This is one of mine: my ten-monthold baby in his fleece sleeper, standing six feet high in the air, clutching Blue Blankie and looking calmly over the fences into all the other yards. Surveying the neighborhood. No doubt checking to see if there was anything worth climbing.

I ignored my pounding heart and raced out the patio door, which opened with just a flick of my adrenalin-enhanced wrist. I didn’t stop to think about what it all meant—not only had Alex gotten the monster door open, he’d closed it behind himself. Then, while I was running out, he climbed back down and began walking (he was walking now!) back toward the house.

I knew then that life with Alex was going to put me to the test.

This, on top of the other bewildering test I faced every day. I wondered whether I could stay sane long enough to raise my children. Alone.

BRINGING UP MY CHILDREN in West Sacramento was like bringing them up in a ghost town. I worked many jobs when they were little, but while Charlie was at work, or away, I was a stay-at-home, work-at-home mom. My kids and I often walked or biked the mile to the playground, usually without seeing another person. We passed many stray dogs and cats, an occasional duck or two near the pond, but seldom another human being.

All the other kids in the neighborhood went to daycare, so most days Stasia and Alex had only each other to play with. Despite his nonstop physicality and her quiet, thoughtful demeanor, they spent hours together exploring their world. Stasia continued to take her job as big sister very seriously. When they went off on an adventure in our large backyard, she usually held her baby brother’s hand. If they were whirling or swinging or twirling, or if Alex was climbing atop the swing set or on some other structure, she was always nearby, alert, giving him space but always there to protect him. In almost all of our photos from that time, Alex is on the go and Stasia is either watching him carefully from a safe distance or holding his hand.

She also served as his interpreter. For the first few years of his life, Alex never bothered to slow down enough to put words together. The three of us often sang songs—in a variety of languages—and I spoke only French with them. Humming these melodies was easier for him than forming a sentence so, when he wanted to communicate something, he would hum the melody of whichever song fit the need. If he wanted his little fleece lamb, he would hum “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” If it wasn’t forthcoming, he would hum louder. If he saw the moon and wanted to show someone, he would point and hum “Au Clair de la Lune” (lune is moon in French). For his stuffed kitten, he would hum “Ah, Ah, Kotky Dwa” (“Two Little Kittens” in Polish). And so on. Only the three of us knew all of our songs—and languages—so when he hummed a need to Grammie, Grampie, Aunt Carol, or anyone else, Stasia was always ready to interpret for him. They were an inseparable unit.

So we shared a special language at home, in between bouts of non-stop motion, but having another adult to talk to was still the highlight of any day. I regularly took the kids to the playground, weather permitting, and looked forward to it as much as they did. Riding our bikes there—with Stasia on her little red bike and Alex in his seat behind me, or later, all three of us on bikes of varying sizes—was a big adventure. And usually, after we’d been at the playground a while, another mother with a child or two would show up and my kids would have playmates.

That is, until my son became a playground pariah.

The first time it happened, I heard the cries while playing with Stasia in the sandbox. I looked up fast, knowing what Alex was capable of. But he was fine. The other little boy was standing under the monkey bars, pointing up at Alex and wailing.

Had Alex done something terrible? Thrown sand at him? Pushed him off the bars? I took an inventory as I ran over: Alex was high up and climbing, as always, already swinging from the top bar. The other little boy was not holding an injured limb, not rubbing sand out of his eyes, just standing there, looking up, pouring out a heartbroken wail. His mother had come running, too. As I arrived, I heard her trying to soothe her baby’s frustrated feelings.

“I know you want to follow him up there,” she crooned in a soothing mommy-voice, “but you can’t. See? He’s a big boy, he’s much too high for you.”

Trouble was, anybody could see that Alex wasn’t “a big boy.” In fact, he was smaller than most boys his age. Which, of course, only made the little guy angrier. And louder.

No one takes well to having their deficiencies pointed out. And Alex did just that, unknowingly and unintentionally, everywhere we went. Any wall, any tree, any apparently featureless vertical structure was home to Alex. In a few seconds, he’d be on top—the professional in him already making the dangerous and difficult look simple and attainable—as, over and over, the other boys or girls would attempt to follow. He would gladly have shared the fun with someone else, but the effect of his effortless athleticism was just as devastating as an intentional put-down.

The other kids fell. They got hurt. Frustrated. They cried. Some called Alex names. And I suspect the mothers wanted to as well. Eventually, the mothers at the playground began to recognize us. When we arrived, they’d call their little boys for snack time, or it would suddenly be time to go feed the ducks. Anything but follow that crazy little boy with the even crazier mother who let him climb places where no little boy should go.

“That’s so dangerous!” one mother hissed at me as she ran to rescue her son from Alex’s bad influence. “Can’t you control your son?”

Control him? Her words stopped me in my tracks. Was I a bad mother? What Alex was up to did seem dangerous. From the other mother’s perspective—a person with a normal fear of high places or of falling—he was a bad influence. Kids that small shouldn’t be on the top of the monkey bars, hanging by one hand. Or up on the highest branch of the biggest tree. Or standing on the top edge of the eight-foot-high brick wall surrounding the water-control machinery at the local creekside park.

But he wasn’t reckless, or a daredevil, as that mother assumed. He was training himself to recognize fear for what it was: a warning. For her, for the other kids, that warning kicked in sooner than it did for Alex. He was training himself to evaluate the warning, and if he considered himself safe, up he’d go. The other kids probably never did that. Their own fears, and lack of physical skill, stopped them from following him.

It reminded me of my summers at the beach. Before I got in the ocean, I would stand and watch the waves for a while. If they were crashing, breaking hard, I would gauge my fear level. Could I get in without getting hurt? Would I be able to get back out without being upended or scraped along the rough bottom? If everyone else seemed to be having fun, why did I hesitate?

Everyone’s fear threshold is different. And, of course, as Alex’s mother, I tried—constantly—to rein him in. But it was always clear that he was different. By two and a half years old, wearing a helmet way too big for his little body, he could already ride his tiny yellow two-wheeler around the quiet court we lived on. He never needed training wheels. On our big swing set in the backyard, he would stand on a swing, launch himself through the air—what climbers call a “dyno,” I now know—grab a cross bar, and then climb up the thick metal pillars, or feet, of the whole swing set. His sister would calmly swing, giving him lots of space as she watched.

The activities changed as he grew, but the goal always seemed the same: to get higher. A tree, a wall, a building, everything in his world was a means to get higher. As the three of us walked through the big park in our neighborhood, a constant litany went something like this:

“Alex, don’t go up there!”

“Why, Mom? It’s really easy.”

Or:

“Alex, get down from there!”

“Why?” Or just, “I’m fine, Mom.”

And he was. But that never stopped him from negotiating with me. By the time he was five, we had moved into a one-story ranch-style house. Alex started asking me if he could go on top of the roof. But he was little, and I still thought like a mom, so I always said no. This went on for several years. One day, when Alex was about eight or nine, I heard crunching sounds overhead from inside my kitchen. I ran outside and looked up. Caught in the act, Alex smiled his irresistible smile and chatted with me as though we did this every day. He told me all about his adventure, how easy it was to get up there, what he’d found, how he could see the whole neighborhood . . . I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen him this animated, this enthusiastic—this happy. I complained, of course, and demanded he come down. But while we negotiated, he was walking back and forth, pulling debris out of the gutters that ran the length of the whole roof. He pulled out a tennis ball, other toys and leaves and gunk. He looked completely at ease, more than I knew I would ever feel, up there. He was at home.

I had lost this round. I knew that if I forbade him from climbing on the roof, he would just go up there whenever I wasn’t home. So I did the only logical thing: I asked him to clean out all the gutters anytime he climbed up on the roof. A win-win finale.

I always talked with my children as adult to adult. With respect. The way I’d always wished grown-ups had talked with me when I was little. I had learned a lot about parenting—especially what not to do—from observing my parents, and my own children benefited from this. This scene would have ended differently if my parents had been in charge. They would have yelled until Alex came down, probably smacked him, punished him, and forbidden any more ascents.

But I’d lived with this child enough years to know that nothing would stop him from getting higher, any way he could. Beyond that, I knew that he could argue longer than most adults could stand: about chores, clothes, food, homework, or any other life obligation. He often out-argued his father, who would just give up in disgust and walk away. Alex and I, however, were well-matched in stubbornness. When I thought it really mattered, I could out-explain, out-argue, out-detail my son until he very grudgingly complied with whatever stupid rule we were talking about.

But I picked my battles carefully. I’d seen how comfortable he was up on the roof. Nothing good would come of trying to forbid it.

But I did forbid—absolutely, completely, unequivocally—another request a year or so later. There was a pool a few feet behind our ranch-style house, and just beyond the pool, in the corner of the property, sat a wooden play structure, like a frontier fort. Both kids thought it would be great fun to string a rope from the chimney of the house, over the pool, to the wooden structure. Once that was in place, they could slide down the rope from the roof and jump off into the pool. That one was a simple “no.” They both brought it up often, with Alex the most intent on it, but it was always a firm “no.” They never did go up the chimney or string the rope across the pool.

“CAN’T YOU CONTROL YOUR son?”

That mother’s question, that day in the playground, was off target. It wasn’t about control, at least not mine. The force that drove Alex upward controlled him—I suspect it always will—and he knew how to control the fear that came with it. It never entered his mind that other kids might be too afraid to go where he went, or wouldn’t be physically able to. He knew where he was going, and he knew he could get there—and back.

I didn’t have most of this figured out at first. Back then, my stomach lived in a constant state of tension. I was always poised, ready to jump, to catch, to intervene. But I rarely had to.

I learned that first from Sit ’n Spin, a toy the kids had when they were small. It seemed simple and safe—kids sit on a plastic bobbin-shaped thing, wrapping their little legs around the center. Turning the top ring spins the toy around, like on the teacups at Disneyland, until they get dizzy or fall off onto the floor, laughing.

That was not nearly adventurous enough for Alex. He would place it near a wall or a piece of furniture and stand on the top circle—sending visiting adults into a tizzy. Then he’d push against the wall, making the toy, and him, spin around. Faster and faster he’d spin, until he reached escape velocity. Then he’d launch.

The top of the recliner, side of the piano, countertop—it was all fair game for a leap and a try at a handhold. If he missed, he’d fall on the floor, laugh, ignore the adults desperately lunging to catch him—and pick himself up and try again.

That was his cycle: launch, laugh, repeat. Fortunately, his impish smile was irresistible to the adults around him. And his laughter soothed the most terrified scream whenever the closest adults leapt to their feet.

That wasn’t me, though. Experience had taught me what he was capable of, and I knew that unless there was blood instead of laughter, or he lay writhing on the floor, things were as they should be and I could keep cleaning the kitchen or making coffee for my guests. And his big sister, his partner in adventure, took it all in stride; he was the only baby brother she’d ever known, so it was all normal, to her.

My father used to talk about a similar experience he’d had during World War II, when he was stationed in North Africa. He was terrified when he shipped out of New Jersey for a place he’d never heard of on the other side of the world—a place where a lot of people were getting killed. People he knew. But he used to tell me that it was impossible to keep up a fear like that. Eventually, it dulled into a vague ache in the back of the mind, fading behind the wear and tear of daily life, lying dormant until it was needed for survival.

Thanks, Daddy. Lesson learned. Over time, my fear for Alex’s safety had faded into something that could come screaming to life if needed. But for my own sanity, I had to train myself to put that aside as life chugged along.

The more parents I met like the woman at the playground, the more I realized that none of them would have been able to live with—let alone encourage—the skills my son worked so hard on every day. They, like my own mother, would have tried to shut him down. From their viewpoint, what he loved to do was far too dangerous for a little boy.

On weekends, I’d often see kids, usually with their dad, practicing with a bat or kicking balls across the cul-de-sac. And I knew that some of them went to dance or acrobatics or swimming classes. It seemed their parents had their own list of acceptable endeavors that they would encourage. Alex just wasn’t interested in any of those.

Some parents I talked with even suggested that I take him to a professional for evaluation, so he could be put on a drug that would slow him down—make him more “normal.” A drug? I didn’t even like taking aspirin. To give a perfectly healthy child a drug just to make him conform to someone else’s concept of normal seemed filled with hubris. What made their version of normal more valid than my son’s?

Other people advised trying gymnastics when I talked with them about the difficulties of raising Alex. “That’ll harness all that energy,” they promised.

For a year or two, we tried it with both kids. Alex hated it. The teacher controlled what his students were allowed to do during the class. To Alex, this was intolerable. His little body yearned to do so much more—to do what he knew he could do on those bars, rings, and ropes. He was probably more in control of his body than the gymnastics teacher was of his own. Instead of harnessing excess energy, gymnastics made Alex more pent-up and frustrated.

Can’t you control your son?

I could only ever think of one sensible reply to this: Why would I want to? Don’t you want your child to know what he’s capable of? How much she can accomplish? I wanted both my children to know that about themselves.

That was why I gave them the gift of bilingualism. I knew from experience that children can grow up using multiple languages—each one helps expand their brain, helps them view and interact with the world in ways incomprehensible to a monolingual person.

In the same way, they needed the freedom to choose the activities they loved, the ones that kept them up at night with anticipation. Stasia sampled many activities as she grew—soccer, dance, piano, flute—before finally settling on the few that would become the foundation of her adult explorations: running, cycling (often with camping involved), and anything that took her outdoors (with the written word and music as secondary passions). In Japan, one of her first words was “outside,” pronounced without consonants. “Ow—eye” she would exclaim any time we sat her down to put on her shoes for an excursion.

If I hadn’t given my children the freedom to discover the things they loved, their lives would probably have been much safer, and my life would have been much calmer. Easier. Should that be our goal?

I was sorry that Alex had no one to share his adventures with. I could relate to that from my own childhood, and now from my marriage. I knew from experience that loneliness can be survived, even surmounted. But I wished for better for my son.

I was married for life. For better or for worse. When I made a vow, I kept it. And we had been married in my parents’ Catholic church, in Pennsylvania, where the rules about that were very clear: “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.” And I had never known any divorced people. Back then, that word was always whispered, never said out loud, especially not in front of the children. It wasn’t a polite word, at least not in my world, not allowed by church or social milieu or family.

There would be no sundering, for us. I would make it work.