High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [36]
She looked me in the eye and coolly knocked over her glass.
Bang, my command was dead. Socks, shirt, and overalls would have to be changed, setting back the start of my workday another thirty minutes. Thirty-five, if I wanted to show her who was boss by enforcing a five-minute time-out. She knew exactly what she was doing. A filibuster.
I’d been warned the day would dawn when my sweet, tractable daughter would become a Terrible Two. And still this entirely predictable thing broadsided me, because in the beginning she was mine—as much a part of my body, literally, as my own arms and legs. The milk I drank knit her bones in place, and her hiccups jarred me awake at night. Children come to us as a dramatic coup of the body’s fine inner will, and the process of sorting out “self” from “other” is so gradual as to be invisible to a mother’s naked soul. In our hearts, we can’t expect one of our own limbs to stand up one day and announce its own agenda. It’s too much like a Stephen King novel.
Later in the day I called a friend to tell my breakfast war story. She had a six-year-old, so I expected commiseration. The point of my call, really, was to hear that one could live through this and that it ended. Instead, my friend was quiet. “You know,” she said finally, “Amanda never went through that. I worry about her. She works so hard to please everybody. I’m afraid she’ll never know how to please herself.”
A land mine exploded in the back of my conscience. My child was becoming all I’d ever wanted.
The way of a parent’s love is a fool’s progress, for sure. We lean and we lean on the cherished occupation of making ourselves obsolete. I applauded my child’s first smile, and decoded her doubtful early noises to declare them “language.” I touched the ground in awe of her first solo steps, as if she alone among primates had devised bipedal locomotion. Each of these events in its turn—more than triumph and less than miracle—was a lightening, feather by feather, of the cargo of anxious hope that was delivered to me with my baby at the slip of our beginning.
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up,” claims Annie Dillard. That’s just about the whole truth, a parent’s incantation. Wake up, keep breathing, look alive. It’s only by forming separateness and volition that our children relieve us of the deepest parental dread: that they might somehow not wake up, after all, but fail to thrive and grow, remaining like Sleeping Beauty in the locked glass case of a wordless infancy. More times than I could count, in those early days, I was stopped in the grocery by some kindly matron who exclaimed over my burbling pastel lump of baby: “Don’t you wish you could keep them like that forever?” Exactly that many times, I bit the urge to shout back, “Are you out of your mind?”
From the day she emerged open-mouthed in the world, I’ve answered my child’s cries with my own gaping wonder, scrambling to part the curtains and show the way to wakefulness. I can think or feel no more irresistible impulse. In magnificent pantomime, I demonstrate to my small shadow the thousand and one ways to be a person, endowed with opinions. How could it be a surprise that after two years the lessons started to take? The shadow began to move of its own accord, exhibiting the skill of opinion by any means necessary. Barreling pell-mell through life was not my daughter’s style; a mother ought to arrange mornings to allow time for communing with the oatmeal—that was her first opinion. How could I fail to celebrate this new red-letter day? There had been a time when I’d reduced my own personal code to a button on my blue-jeans jacket that advised: QUESTION AUTHORITY. A few decades later, the motto of my youth blazed resplendent on my breakfast table, the color of Florida sunshine. I could mop up, now, with maternal pride, or eat crow.
Oh, how slight the difference between “independent” and “ornery.” A man who creates spectacular sculptures out of old car