More in the Family

I think Sophia is finally coming to terms with the fact that the shop is closed.  For good.

“Look!” I said pointing out my car window to the right.  “It’s a store just for exotic fish.”  The tanks are glowing with cobalt light. 

“Oooh. Cool.” Her head swivels as we pass the store, trying to keep it in view. 

I stop at a light and she says, “Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I get a pet fish?” 

“You want a pet fish?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want a pet fish?” I ask, rather than just shoot the request down.  She delivers the answer, which tears off a tiny corner of my heart:

“So there can be more in our family.”

She’s stopped asking for a sibling.  I haven’t heard the request in weeks.  She’s lowered the bar hoping that something small and scaley, or short and furry will wend it’s way into our lives.  

I have mixed feelings about this resolution.  On the one hand, I’m glad that she has heard what I’ve had to say on the subject, gets it, and appears to be fairly unscathed.  On the other, I feel a great deal of sympathy for her desire to have a live-in pal.  My heart aches every time she brings up the subject.  I wish I could give her what she wants, without it coming into conflict with what Kevin and I have decided.

A couple days later, at dinner Sophie suddenly announced, “I think I’m finally mature enough to have a cat.”

“Oh really?” I say, raising an eyebrow.  Well, actually both of them.  I can’t raise just one, but I wish I could. 

Kevin, across the table, raised one eyebrow.

“Yeah.  I take care of grandma’s cats.  I feed them all the time.”  It’s true.  She is very good about feeding them.  She loves to do it, and, in fact, often remembers when my mother doesn’t.  But feeding them is a once-a-week treat, not daily drudgery. 

“There’s more to taking care of a cat than feeding them,” I inform her. “What about their poops?”

Her eyes get wide.

“You have to scoop their poops and clean their litter box.”  She had not considered this.  Sophie has an aversion to anything with a strong smell.  She can’t make it through the cheese department at Wegman’s without holding her nose. 

“Could you help me with that, Mom?”

“That,” I say, “is a slippery slope.  I would….support you in it.”

“Does that mean you would scoop their poops?” 

“No, honey, I’ve scooped enough cat poop in my time.  Until you are ready to do that, I don’t think you’re ready to accept the full responsibility of caring for a cat.”

I was five when I got my first cat.  I swore up and down I would care for it.  But it was my mother who, day in and day out, cleaned the litter box, filled their bowls, and picked cat hair off of everything.  I know how this works.  I’ve sat in Sophie’s seat.  And I know, for sure, that, as the mother of a five-year-old, I am not ready to accept the full responsibility of caring for a cat. 

Sophie gasps.  “I just thought of something!”  (She has learned this from me, a habit of gasping when she has a sudden epiphany, though mine are usually around forgetting appointments or losing my keys).

“What?”

“Well, if we had a cat and you and daddy went to work all day and I went to school, the cat would be lonely.”  It was a lovely, sympathetic sentiment, but was she doing what we often do when we can’t have something we previously thought we wanted? We devalue it.  We find rationales for why it would be no good for us.  Was she already trying to let go of this wish?

“Mmmm.  True.  I guess that’s why grandma and grandpa have two cats.”  Did I just say that out loud?  Where can I buy myself a filter?

“Oh!  Right!  We could get two cats.”  She looks at our faces.  “When I’m older.  Like seven or nine.” 

“Yes, maybe by seven or nine,” I agree. 

One day, when we are all ready, she shall have more.  

Sibling Revelry

 I am dreading Tuesday morning, when Sophia and I will have to put my sister, Jennifer and her son, Kevin, back on a plane to Florida. 

It had been two years since we had seen them.  Before they arrived Sophia confessed, “I don’t remember what Aunt Jenny looks like.”  By the way she burrowed into my leg as they approached us in the airport, I could tell they were essentially strangers to her. 

How did we let so much time go by?  We had tried to visit in the past, but we had such different lives, such different schedules it would have required a lot of bending that neither one of us was terribly willing to do.

Jennifer was the first to bend when she suggested coming here instead.  It was a step towards me, and am a firm believer that when someone takes a step towards you, you move forward to meet her halfway. 

We both pulled our kids out of school.  We both took time off from work.  We both invested financially and emotionally in coming together again.

After greeting me, Jennifer bent down to say hello to Sophie, who refused to face her. 

“She has to warm up and get to know me,” Jennifer acknowledged, pulling back, not disappointed. 

But it took Sophie no time to warm up to Kevin.  Within seconds she was chasing him around baggage claim.  The two of them shrieking. 

Come Tuesday, I will be sad.  But, Sophia will be heartbroken.

In no time, Jennifer and Kevin became integrated into our lives.  We found a rhythm—or maybe it was a rediscovered rhythm—something revived from our childhood.  Waking together, dining together, playing together.  Oh, it hasn’t been without its bumps—the same bumps that have always been there, but even the bumps are terribly familiar. 

Sophia and Kevin found a rhythm too, not unlike ours.  He has extracted giggles  from so deep inside her belly, that listening, I am aware that she is experiencing a new dimension of joy. 

They have developed private jokes.  The words “guacamole” and “room service” send them into hysterics.  He has played endless games of tic-tac-toe with her on his DS, though he’d much rather be playing skeeball.  And when he has beckoned for her to come sit next to him, the child who will touch no one climbs right into his lap, puts her arms about his neck, and hangs on his every word.

He is the big brother she will never have. 

He has taken up this mantle.  As an only child, Kevin knows what it is like to be alone, siblingless, living in the world of adults.  There is a tacit agreement:  you be mine and I will be yours. 

I am aware of my own sibling privilege—the taking for granted I did.  I do.  Paying little attention to my sister because she was there to pay little attention to.  Fighting with her because I experienced her as a rival, not an ally.  Letting years go before we saw each other again because she is, has been, will always be there. 

Through Sophia and Kevin, I see us more clearly.  Kevin’s generosity with Sophia—so much younger, hardly a peer—makes me wonder whether I had been too stingy with my own affections. 

We were at our best when we were at play:  writing songs (e.g., “I feel so sad because hay is for horses, not for children.”) and performing disco dances to them; pretending to be two ladies, Joonyurn and Joanyurn who lived in a hotel on the 44^th floor (rooms 4444 and 4443—four was my favorite number); celebrating Barbie’s birthday on a daily basis, wrapping unwanted and broken toys to give back and forth to each other. 

Now, we are still at best when we are at play: crawling into an earthquake tunnel together at the Franklin Institute; teasing each other mercilessly as we vie for the worst score while bowling with the kids; singing pop songs to Sophie as she raises the roof. 

It can be easy to forget this, locking horns over our differences.  Judging or being judged.  Feeling hurt.  Becoming indignant. 

I have Kevin and Sophia to thank for reminding me of the gifts of having a sibling. 

The Road Not Taken*

She asks me the question on a daily basis:

“Mommy?  Can you have another baby?”

“Mommy?  Can we please have more people in our family?”

“When will a baby come out of your belly?”

Each time she asks, I feel a pang of sadness.  It is the first time I have reconsidered our decision to have one child.  I know it’s foolish to have a baby simply because Sophia asks for one. 

(She can get her own baby—in a couple decades, if she still wants one that badly.) 

Yet, I sympathize with her desire to have a sibling.  I know that she feels lonely, at times.  I watch her study larger families with longing.   I admire her gentleness with younger children, and the absence of jealousy when I pick up or make eyes at an infant.

I do love those babies. 

For one week, I allowed myself the fantasy of having another one.  I did it quietly, not sharing it with anyone.  I went deeply into it, imaging myself getting pregnant and going about my daily routine with my growing belly.  I pictured swimming daily, as I had done with Sophie.  Remembering the joy of being large and weightless in the water.  I saw Sophie delighting in the expanding reality of a sibling.  Touching my stomach, squealing when she felt a kick.

Oh no, I am crying.

I am crying because this will not happen.  Because, in my heart of hearts I do believe that we are best as a threesome.  That Sophie is enough for me.  That I am living the life that I want.

I would like to be able to walk both paths.    To divide myself.  To straddle two universes.  One in which we retain our peaceful intimacy.  Another in which there is a fourth dimension—impossible to imagine—but adding a new layer of richness to what we have. 

But I can’t.  I—we—must choose. 

I find myself trying to convince Sophie that this is the “right” choice.

“You know, Soph,” I tell her, “a baby wouldn’t be able to play with you for a long, long time.  And by the time it could, you might not be interested in playing the same games.” 

“I know mommy,” she counters, “but I would feed the baby and dress the baby and make the baby smile.  You would have to change the diapers though.  I wouldn’t do that.”

“And,” I go on, determined to find the rationale that will sway her, “just because someone is in your family, doesn’t mean that you’ll be their best friend.  Some brothers and sisters get along great, and others don’t.” 

This possibility is beyond her.  “I would LOVE a sister,” she insists. 

I cannot deter her.  But maybe the “right” thing to do is to let her feel the sadness, as I have allowed myself.  Let her live with the disappointment that life cannot be all things.

*Listen to Robert Frost read The Road Not Taken here.  

No Better, No Worse

Sometimes, when I hear the stories my friends tell about their kids, I feel a little envious. From the outside, there is something that appears more fun about having multiple children. When I step into their homes, there is always activity, lively conversations, and laughter. Of course, minutes later there is fighting, crying, and a plea for mom to intervene.

You can’t have it all.

My house is quiet. One night, our neighbor (with four children) came over to find Kevin and I nestled on the couch, working on a crossword together. It was a little after 7:30, and we had just put Sophia to sleep. The floor lamps cast a warm, orange glow in the room. “You two look so cozy!” she said. “It’s so quiet in here,” she noticed. And we all absorbed the silence for a moment. “You could join us,” I offered, “hide out here for a bit?” “No,” she declined, “I have to get back to my piles of laundry.” She dropped off a flier for a local 5K and headed back across the street, where her house was humming with the energy of three boys and a toddler.

There are tradeoffs for this evening calm. By day, I am the entertainer and adversary. Sophia plays and fights with me, instead of a brother or sister. I organize countless playdates and chauffer her all over New Jersey to ensure she is not socially deprived, missing out on peer interaction, and adopting my adult mannerisms, speech, and seriousness.

Sophia has filled the sibling void with an imaginary sister, also named Sophia, who is two years older than she and lives in California with her mother, Melissa and her father, Kevin. I note that even her imaginary sister is absent…living in a parallel universe, only to be thought and talked about, but not actually played with or talked to. This is how Sophie has come to terms with her only status. I admire her resourcefulness.

I am resigned to eternal ambivalence. Certainly, it was a wise decision to not have a second child. We don’t have the resources…financially, emotionally, temporally to embrace another infant at this point in our family life. It is easy to rationalize away the feelings that accompany this decision. But when I stop thinking about how much sense it makes, I do feel a little sorrow, a mourning of an experience I will never have. If one of my earlier pregnancies had survived, Sophia might have had that older sibling she longs for…I might not be so fearful of getting pregnant again, even at the advanced age of 40, and giving birth again.

But this is the way things happened, and this is the way things are. I could spend my time longing for what we lack or I could focus on my gratitude for what I have.

And so, I live vicariously through other families. I delight in their anecdotes. I offer unsolicited advice to help manage sibling rivalry, once again in the comfortable position of being able to offer ideas that I don’t have to execute. The other night I went out to dinner with Nan and our mutual friend, Pam, who we have known all of our adult lives. In a few transcendent moments, I pulled back and thought about how our conversations have changed over the years…from work (we were all teachers together), to marriage, and now to our children. Pam was telling a story about her two boys, E.J. and Ryan.

“Ryan ran into my room and said, ‘E.J. is slapping his butt at me!’”

“What does that mean?” I asked, trying to envision the situation.

“Apparently, he lay down on the couch, flipped his legs over his head, and was slapping his butt. At Ryan.”

“And this was a personal affront to Ryan?” I was confused.

Pam shrugged, “I guess.”

I thought about it for a minute. “It seems to me that in order for Ryan to have thought E.J. was being provocative, E.J. must have said something provocative. Like, ‘I’m going to slap my butt at you!’ After all, there is nothing inherently annoying about someone slapping his own ass. It’s weird. Maybe a little distracting. But Ryan felt bothered by it, because E.J. told him he should be bothered by it.”

Pam agreed.

“So, just as Ryan chose to feel bothered by it, he could make a different choice. He could choose to leave. Or he could choose to think it’s funny. You could walk him through his options.” We brainstormed a list of things that Ryan could do when E.J. antagonized him in this way. It was fun. The same as it ever was.

There is something about the difference between our situations, the distance I have from being a mother of multiple kids that made it so much easier (and enjoyable) than to generate ideas for how to deal with my own day-to-day tribulations. There is no better. There is no worse. There is only different.

Had I not been able to have any children, I think I would have forever felt this absence, just as I imagine, if I had a house full of children, I would long for the quiet life I enjoy now.

This and That

I am reading essays about the “singular joys and solitary sorrows of growing up solo,” when I come to a passage that I find thought-provoking:

A biographer discovers that embedded in most lives, especially literary ones,
there is a dialectical principle—two poles with an opposite charge that behave
like force field, shaping a subject’s sense of self and view of the world.
In the case of Isak Dinesen, these poles were Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the
aesthetic and moral imperatives [stay with me here]. In the case of
Colette, they were the Pure and the Impure—categories that helped her understand
her culture’s too strictly assigned notions of gender; the ambiguities of
self-exposure and concealment in her writing; and the condition of an
inveterately needy woman who, just as inveterately, yearned for autonomy.
In my own case, and perhaps for many only children, those antipodes are
“normality” and “uniqueness,” the former an unfamiliar state that one idealizes,
yet also obscurely mistrusts and disdains; the latter a neat description of the
predicament and privilege of being the lone egg in the basket. (Judith Thurman,
“Minority Report,” in Only Child)

I look up from this passage and stare blankly for a moment, processing these words and wondering about the polarities that have shaped my self and view of the world. A synapse embraces the charge of its neighbor and the thought is there: secrecy and candor.

Silently, I assess all the ways in which these two opposing forces have played a significant role in my life. As I do, I suddenly feel the compulsion to share the truth; to enumerate all of my family’s dirty little secrets both to illustrate my point and (not without malice) to expose, expose, expose. Lay bare my thoughts, as I do when I write, butting against the code of silence in which I am complicit. But I cannot betray my parents, my sister, and all those I love. So they stay locked inside and I feel resentful, torn between my will to truth and my respect for the privacy of others. This dichotomy has turned me into a blurter. One who speaks her mind and immediately feels shame and regret glowing in her cheeks. It has created a need to hoard secrets of my own, keeping a part of me forever inaccessible to everyone I love. It has made me a writer, both brazen and careful as I select words to combine into thoughts and stories. As a parent, it has made me cognizant of the line I walk between telling too much and telling too little.

I turn my thoughts to Sophia’s struggles:

Again, at Hanukkah as she did after Thanksgiving, she asserted her innate social propensities, “I like EVERYBODY,” she told me, gazing down the table flanked with fourteen adults and one baby. She meant this, not as a general acceptance of the varied personalities present, but more broadly to mean, “I like having lots and lots of people around me. All the time.” Or, more simply, “I like HAVING everybody here. With me.” However, Sophia rejects the anonymity that comes with being part of a crowd. She does not want to be lost among others. She dances through parties, commanding focus. She greets guests a he door, not with “hello” but with the words, “I’m SOOO pretty.” She throws books down in the lap of anyone with a pulse demanding, “READ a book-y.” Nor does she want to share the spotlight with others. When her grandmother held and cooed over another baby, she pulled at her velour pantsuit and whined, “Grandma, play with me.” I am having a hard time finding language to describe these poles—with and apart, perhaps? She wants to be surrounded by people, but they may do nothing but adore her. But perhaps this is every two-year-old’s great wish, not just that of an only child or of Sophia.

I am aware of the reductionist dangers of attributing too much of who Sophia is or who I am to a “dialectical principle.” And yet, I’m tempted to explore my antipodes and the role they play in my parenthood…and to apply Thurman’s theory to my daughter, taking a glance at how Thurman’s two articulated poles might apply to Sophia’s solitary condition.

In moments, I fear Sophia. She has the clearness of sight and the cleverness of mind to expose me (as I am tempted, at times, to expose my parents). She is always listening—whether I’m chatting on the phone with a friend, muttering under my breath in anger, or telling her something she doesn’t want to hear. She drinks it in and later repeats it with surprising accuracy (to her father, to her toys…and sometimes, to me). This has made me cautious…speaking in code, spelling things out, or simply not saying it at all. Of course, not all things are fit for little ears. But when does secrecy become dangerous? How do I make the distinction between what gets buried and what gets discussed? When is the truth more toxic than an omission of the truth? As for candor, I know a parent can also make the mistake of saying too much (or at least too much too soon). Every act of sharing must take a number of factors into account—is this something she needs to know? Is she developmentally ready to hear it? What are the consequences of hearing this? What are the consequences of not hearing this?

But isn’t this something, as parents, we all wrestle with?

As for Sophia, I’m not sure that she, as an only child, has a lock-down on the struggle between normalcy and uniqueness. I mean, isn’t this too, a more universal struggle? Don’t we all think that the family on the other side of the fence (with four kids or no kids or one kid) is more normal than our own? And don’t we all have the experience of (and ambivalence about) our uniqueness? Feeling that nobody is loved the way we are loved (either poorly or wholly by our families).

These dichotomies are fun, but I think they are only useful to a point. It seems that the moment we say I am “this” or my child is “that”—the case can be made that everyone is “this” or every child is “that” We are not so very different from each other, by virtue of our family constellation or any similar construct, as we appear to be.