Wondertime: Catherine Newman Weekly Blog: 3.3.08 - and More Joys of Parenting Young Children

Dalai Mama Weekly Blog

Catherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5

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March 3, 2008

Fury

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Listen to Catherine

Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

I will grant that I picked a bad day for us to walk to school — and perhaps if I'd looked more closely, I would have seen everyone's coccyx broken off and lying on the ground near all the fallen bodies, and I would have thought, "Let's drive today." But I didn't. It's been alternating between pouring rain and freezing rain — that thing they call "wintry mix,"which makes me feel like someone should be offering me a bowl of white and blue M&Ms mixed with spiced Chex cereal, but which turns out to mean only that there's enough standing water in our basement to dive into, and enough black ice in our driveway to skate on. And so, halfway to school, Birdy slips on the ice and falls bottom-first into a puddle and then, three-quarters of the way to school, she slips in a puddle and falls onto the ice. She is good-natured during the drama of the falling and the fussing, but turns grouchy with hindsight.

"Where's my hat?" she spits, like the bare-headed goblin that she suddenly is, and I say, "Oh — I picked it up the first time, but it must have fallen off again." "Why didn't you pick it up?" she asks fiercely, and when I say that I didn't notice it had fallen, she asks, "Well, why didn't you notice?" and then says, like she's been taking etiquette classes from a snow blower, "Go back and get it and then bring it to me at school." Get it your own bad self, I don't say. "Birdy," I say instead. "I'm sorry we walked to school today — that was a bad idea. But I don't like how you're talking to me."

"Why did we even walk?" Birdy asks in the miniaturized preschool bathroom, while I help her out of her puddle-soaked clothing and into dry pants and undies. "That was a bad idea," she says crossly, while she pushes her ornery feet into slippers. "Mama, why did you have such a bad idea?"

What's with the attitude? I wonder, even as the cartoon memory-bubble is forming over my head, with this little scene inside: Michael standing, bewildered, over the fractured pieces of a half-assembled IKEA bookcase and me saying, "So, you just thought you'd flip it over? By yourself? Wait — explain this to me again. You just, kind of, lost your grip on it as it was going over? Was that it?" Or this little scene: Michael sniffing a quesadilla, bewildered, and me saying, "So, you didn't notice it was moldy? Or you just thought, Hey, why not make the children's lunch with moldy dill havarti! " I'm the kind of person who can really put the harp back in shrieking Harpy, if you know what I mean. Now I'm horrified to realize that the kids are taking this in — my particular opposite-day style of problem solving that revolves around the placing of blame and the lingering over mistakes. Ben's much more like Michael still: How can we fix this? Let's figure out what we should do next. But Birdy's got the why-oh-why-how-could-you gene.

"Where's my sewing?"

"What?"

"My little needlepoint. You said you were getting it for me."

"No. I didn't — though I'd be happy to, if you'd like to ask me nicely."

"Yes, you did."

(Incidentally, through some kind of misunderstanding, Birdy is convinced not that you lick the end of the thread before pushing it through the needle's eye, but that you suck and suck on it for effortful minutes on end, like it's a Tootsie Pop. It reminds me of how Ben used to think that you pressed a rubber stamp first onto an inkpad and then onto the paper for a count of, like, one million, pressing and pressing with all your might until the veins bulged out of your neck and your inky little fleur-de-lys appeared. "You don't need to suck it so hard," I say, and she snaps, "Yes, I do.")

Let me be clear that the spitting-cobra behavior is different from Birdy's general fierceness, which I love. Like when she's helping me make pizza, working so hard to grate a block of Monterey jack that when I check on her, the cheese has molded into the shape of her hot little fist and something like a teaspoon of shreds has collected inside the grater. She says, "I can do it, Mama," and pushes her hair out of her face with her cheesy hand, so all I can do is kiss the top of her head and say, "You let me know."

But today is all about, "Why didn't you punch a hole in this Shrinky Dink rainbow like I wanted you to?" followed by such a loud and juicy episode of misery that I put my hand to her forehead. I am suddenly convinced that this is going to be one of those evenings when I keep saying, "Sheesh, what's her problem?" only her problem turns out to be, you know, meningitis or the Bubonic plague. "Why are you feeling my fever?" she says, curious, while my hand is on her cool forehead, so I say, "I want to make sure you're not so angry because you're actually sick." Birdy's indignant. "I'm not," she says. And then with the graceful redundancy only an almost-5-year-old could muster: "I'm so angry because I'm actually angry."

Editor's Note:
You can also find Catherine's column on Family.com, where you can post comments and she can join the conversation, too.

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir,
Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic
Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family,
available online and in bookstores nationwide.