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By Root 446 0

conveys itself to us in four-second camera shots. But in a process as slow and complex as parenting, an eye to the future is an anchor. Raising children is a patient alchemy, which can turn applesauce into an athlete, ten thousand kissed bruises into one solid confidence, and maybe orneriness to independence. It all adds up. From the get-go I’ve been telling my child she is not just taking up space here, but truly valuable. If she’s to believe it, I have to act as if I do. That means obedience is not an absolute value. Hurting people is out of the question, but an obsession with the anteater bar can and will be accommodated. I hope to hold this course as her obsessions grow more complex. For now, whenever the older, wiser parents warn, “Just wait till she’s a teenager,” I smile and say, “I’m looking forward to that.” They think I am insane, impudent, or incredibly naïve. Probably I am. Call it creative visualization.

My time here is up today, for I’m being called to watch a theatrical production entitled approximately “The Princess Fairy Mermaids Who Save the Castle by Murderizing the Monsters and Then Making Them Come Back Alive with Fairy Dust and Be Nice.” I’ve seen this show before. Some days I like it, especially when they tie up the monster with Day-Glo shoelaces and pantyhose. Other days my mind drifts off to that spare, uncluttered studio where I will arrange flowers, Zenlike, when I’m sixty. I’ll write great things, and I’ll know once and for all the difference between boundaries and bondage.

SOMEBODY’S BABY

As I walked out the street entrance to my newly rented apartment, a guy in maroon high-tops and a skateboard haircut approached, making kissing noises and saying, “Hi, gorgeous.” Three weeks earlier, I would have assessed the degree of malice and made ready to run or tell him to bug off, depending. But now, instead, I smiled, and so did my four-year-old daughter, because after dozens of similar encounters I understood he didn’t mean me but her.

This was not the United States.

For most of the year my daughter was four we lived in Spain, in the warm southern province of the Canary Islands. I struggled with dinner at midnight and the subjunctive tense, but my only genuine culture shock reverberated from this earthquake of a fact: people there like kids. They don’t just say so, they do. Widows in black, buttoned-down CEOs, purple-sneakered teenagers, the butcher, the baker, all would stop on the street to have little chats with my daughter. Routinely, taxi drivers leaned out the window to shout “Hola, guapa!” My daughter, who must have felt my conditioned flinch, would look up at me wide-eyed and explain patiently, “I like it that people think I’m pretty.” With a mother’s keen myopia I would tell you, absolutely, my daughter is beautiful enough to stop traffic. But in the city of Santa Cruz, I have to confess, so was every other person under the height of one meter. Not just those who conceded to be seen and not heard. Whenever Camille grew cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?) the waiters flirted and brought her little presents, and nearby diners looked on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that I’d thought diners reserved for the dessert tray. What I discovered in Spain was a culture that held children to be its meringues and éclairs. My own culture, it seemed to me in retrospect, tended to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it’s not our own we don’t want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.

If you don’t have children, you think I’m exaggerating. But if you’ve changed a diaper in the last decade you know exactly the toxic-waste glare I mean. In the U.S. I have been told in restaurants: “We come here to get away from kids.” (This for no infraction on my daughter’s part that I could discern, other than being visible.) On an airplane I heard a man tell a beleaguered woman whose infant was bawling (as I would, to clear my aching ears, if I couldn’t manage chewing gum): “If you can’t keep that thing quiet, you should