Wondertime: Catherine Newman Weekly Blog: 12.04.06 - 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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December 4, 2006

Rhetorical Questions Like Melted Cheese Oozing into Your Head

more in dalai mama:

11.27.06 : By the Seat of Our Pants

11.20.06 : A Little Understanding

View all Catherine Newman entries

Birdy's in the car, enjoying a butterscotch-chip cookie she's been given at the bakery when, naturally, the treat occasions an outburst of musings on strife and despair. "What if we were at the bakery, and I wanted to get an M & M cookie? But Ben said, 'No Birdy! You have to get this pink kind of cookie!'?" "What would happen then?" I ask her, and she's quiet, but only for a minute. "What if Ben said, 'Birdy you can never get an M & M cookie'?" Her hypothetical indignation is like a book she keeps renewing from the library but never quite gets a chance to read. "Would Ben say that to you?" I ask, and she falls silent again. "What if I was playing with the dolly stroller? And Layla grabbed it from me? And I was like 'Layla I was still using that!' but she didn't even give it back to me?"

Layla is one of Birdy's best friends: an absolute lamb of a child. When Layla smiles, you hear a thousand angels singing. Plus you get to see her teeth, which look like little seed pearls. When she and Birdy play, they scamper together up the slide or twirl around in tutus and fairy wings or play Swim Teacher with their dolls, whose names are Baby Rainy-ain-bo-oh and Baby Turly-Hair and Baby Lansin-tin-din, depending on when you ask. "Great job!" they say over and over again — to the babies, to each other. "You're really jumping into my arms! You're really getting wet and drenched!" Layla is the friend you would pray your child would have if your child didn't have a friend like Layla.

Layla is also, suddenly, Birdy's favorite imaginary antagonist. "What if Layla hit me on the head with the magic wand, and I was like, 'Layla, I don't like that!' but she did it again? What if that happened?" I sigh — which is not a satisfactory answer. "What if she did that? What if Layla was on the slide and she just stayed at the top and never went down and she said, 'Birdy you can never have a turn!'?" I know that she's trying to work something out with these conversations. My guess is that it has something to do with school, which she loves, but which doubtless offers up various challenging social situations. At our meeting with them last week, her teachers described her as "totally solid," and they said this so lovingly that I knew exactly what they meant: she is self-sufficient and flexible; she's a good and easy friend. She does great there. The operative word being there. But by the time you get her home, she's unraveled herself into the many fraying yarns of theoretical perturbedness.

These conversations make me feel like there's an ace bandage wound around my brain. I know it's a "teachable moment" or whatever, but teaching it is as satisfying as a bowl of dust from the way bottom of the Cheerios box. "You would tell her that she could have the next turn," I say. I say, "That wouldn't be very nice, and you'd tell her to stop." "If you couldn't work it out you'd get a grown-up" and "You'd put up your hand like this and say, 'No!'" I am thinking that the next time Michael and I go out to dinner, I will say, through a forkful of lettuce, "What if my salad came, but instead of blue cheese they put Thousand Island on it, and I hated Thousand Island, but they were like, 'No we're totally not taking that back! Eat it all up! We hate you!' I know — I'm just saying what if they did?" But now I just say, "Birdy, does Layla ever do anything like that to you?" And she says immediately, "Oh no! Layla's always the nicest friend!"

"Are you wondering what might happen if you did something that wasn't very nice?" it occurs to me to ask, and Birdy says, "Like if I pulled leaves off of trees?" We are driving past the last of the leathery-leaved oaks before winter finally blows them bare. "If I pulled the leaves off all the trees, even the ones where the leaves didn't even pull off or ever pull off and I couldn't even reach them?" "What do you think would happen then?" I ask, and she says, because there will be no tidy ending to the afternoon's strangeness, "I really don't know."

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.