Dad on a Lark, Stay-at-Home Dad, Blog: 7.23.2008

Dad on a Lark

A blog by Rand Richards Cooper, on parenting baby Larkin

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July 23, 2008

The Universe in a Lost Red Binky

more in dad on a lark:

7.9.08 : A Girl With a Past

6.25.08 : Now & Then

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My expertise in life, if I have any, is in writing fiction, something I've done for two decades. One basic challenge of creating narrative involves taking the tiny view and the big view together. Writing a scene, you immerse yourself in an imagined moment, then step back to see that moment in terms of the whole. What's the relationship between sentence and story, between scene and novel? Does what I'm doing here make sense in terms of where I need to go?

That is more or less what I was wondering as I crawled on my hands and knees on the floor below Larkin's crib at 3:58 a.m. this morning, fumbling in the darkness for a red binky. I was asking myself what any parent, writer or not, would be asking: What am I doing here, exactly?

When Larkin cries during the night, either Molly or I go into her room to locate her pacifier among the sleeping forms of Mateo the Hippo, Baby Freaky, and Donuts the Monkey, and plug it back into her mouth. Last night, however, Larkin also wanted a backup binky, just to hold. She'd gone to bed with one, and I couldn't find it. I handed her a different one from a shelf, only to have her throw it back at me. "Red binky!" she wailed, piteously, as if her whole universe depended on it.

In theory, I don't believe in giving in to demands made at the point of a tantrum. But it was four in the morning, and a full-blown meltdown would wake Molly, as well as put the kibosh on any hope I had of getting back to sleep myself.

And so there I went, down on my knees, groping blindly for the binky. This is a recurring dilemma, in a small-view/big-view way. When you opt for peace and quiet, and accede to your two-year-old's wailing demand, you're solving an immediate problem. But are you creating a bigger one later on? How hard should Molly and I push back against Larkin's desire always to have what she wants, when she wants it? Our days could be spent in a neverending battle of wills.

Take our bike ride this past Saturday. The three of us had just started out, with Larkin on the child seat behind me, when we passed the park up the street. Larkin knows the park well — including the ice-cream stand by the pond. Sure enough, as we approached, she craned her neck toward the park entrance. "I want a little something," she announced. "I want...ice cream!"

Molly and I explained that we weren't out for ice cream today: it was too close to dinner, and she'd already had a snack. "But I want ice cream!" she repeated.

I didn't have any money, I said. (This was true.) "Plus, the ice cream place is closed, honey." (Not quite true.) As we rode past the park, her whining escalated toward tears. It was driving us crazy, this nonstop I want I want I want! "Larkin," I said finally, "you need to stop asking for ice cream, or else we'll have to turn around and go home and not go on our bike ride. Do you understand?"

With a pouting look she mulled it over for a long moment — in full teeter mode, devil and angel vying for supremacy.

And then: "But I want ice cream!"

Rats! I muttered to myself (well, that's the family-friendly version.) What Molly and I wanted was a bike ride; we'd been looking forward to it all day. But now we had brandished the threat, and we felt we had to follow through. So we turned our bikes around — Larkin screaming in agony, as if we were torturing her — and glumly pedaled home, our Saturday fun in ruins.

Afterward, Molly and I wished we'd found some way to handle the situation differently. But what was done was done. When you're writing fiction, you can always go back and change the scene ("My pencil's eraser wears down before the lead," one writer famously said.) The scenes you have with your child, however, cannot be revised; each one becomes part of the permanent collection.

That fact can be nerve-wracking. I think some parents end up worrying too much, imagining that every single moment with their child is critical. It's a challenge: how, in your daily back-and-forth with your child, to see the moment in light of her whole development — and how to know when you shouldn't even try to think that way at all, but just let things happen, let them be? When does it become excessive, even obsessive, to think about your child as this creation, this text that you are writing?

The hairdresser who cuts my hair, a 58-year-old Polish woman named Sophie, is the mother of two grown children, and whenever I raise some parenting question that I consider tricky or uncertain, she gives me this majestic shrug. Use your commonsense, she says; just do your best. Don't worry about it! I find myself savoring her fatalism — tonic to a parent who perhaps takes his role too seriously at times, as if he were the writer not only of his child's blog, but of her life itself.

This summer is bringing big changes to Larkin. She's starting to use the potty, she's about to make the switch from crib to bed, and (biggest of all), she's approaching the end of the Pacifier Era. Saying "bye-bye to binky" isn't going to be easy, no matter how many books we read in which cute little Nori or Branly accomplishes it with ease. Larkin knows the dread day is coming, and she's exhibiting the whole array of excitement, reluctance, big talk, tactical delay, and tearful retreat that is a toddler's way, finally, of making progress. If I could write the crucial scene, she'd wave goodbye with a smile as her last binky floated peacefully off into the sky, attached to a purple balloon. But life is not a book, and more likely I will have to undertake several more 4 a.m. retrieval missions before this summer is through — searching in the dark to rescue Larkin's universe in a lost red binky.

Rand Richards Cooper is the travel correspondent for Bon Appétit, and is author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a collection of stories, Big as Life.