1
Inner Childhood
“What do you think is the first letter in the word ‘bunny’?” I ask Jodi. “E!” he shouts proudly, picking the sound that sticks out the most. I do not know the questions to ask, the things to say that will breach the dam in his brain that I imagine holds back a flood of understanding. I did manage to teach him how to add, using his fingers, over the course of three days. When I began to see him actually get the hang of it, my frustration turned to exhilaration, and then to pride. Truthfully, I was at least as proud of myself as of him. Until seven weeks ago, I had never before spent a meaningful amount of time with anyone much younger than myself. Then I met Jeff, a single father, and soon became a volunteer babysitter for his children, Jodi and Karma.
I first saw Jeff at the record store in my neighborhood where he worked. In the short time it took for him to ring up my CD, I made a note of his friendly and slightly awkward coolness (a combination I find thrilling), his good looks, and his impressive knowledge of my favorite band, along with which day of the week it was lest I ever work up the courage to visit him there again. Typically for me, I never did. I saw him saunter into the local Starbucks several weeks later, however, looking for all the world like the artist Basquiat from the movie of the same name, and decided to go for broke. We talked for the 30 minutes that remained of his lunch break. Then I walked with him back to the record store, and he asked for my number.
We were on the phone two days later when he impulsively decided to put his son on the line. I scrambled to come up with a viable topic of conversation for a kindergartener. “What’s your favorite color?” I asked. “Blue,” he replied. “And orange. And pink, and red, and green, yellow, and purple.” I then spoke to his younger sister, who had just as many favorites, if not more. To fill the lull that ensued, I asked her about flowers. She had never heard of jasmine or gardenia or ylang ylang or plumeria, my favorites. Hers was the carnation. I fell in love with Jodi and Karma as quickly as I had with their father.
Jeff had a steady babysitter when I first met him, an older woman with the easy wisdom that comes from having a few kids with a few kids of their own. The morning I met her, I watched as she gently chastised Jodi for not being assertive enough with his words. He had just exclaimed that he was having trouble buttoning his pants. Ms. Maddy encouraged him to ask outright for what he needed – namely, someone to help him button up. “You’ve got to speak up for what you want, kiddo.” I would never have caught that particular opportunity to impart a life lesson, and certainly his father wouldn’t have either. Unfortunately, Ms. Maddy split the scene a few days later, when it became clear that Jeff could no longer afford to pay her anywhere near on time. The afternoon care of the kids then fell into the hands of whatever friend of Jeff’s had time and pity enough to spare, which at least a couple times a week ended up being me.
The first time I ventured out of the house with Jodi was for a trip to Wendy’s. Three kids from down the hall, wild ones not accustomed to much parental supervision, accompanied us across the street to the restaurant. There was no one else in line when we got there, and Jodi and his friend immediately began using the railings as monkey bars. I figured that, since the kids weren’t in anyone’s way, and the railings were low and the floor around them carpeted, there was little chance of them harming themselves or others. I marveled at how they immediately took over the space – they embraced the whole world as their playground. Then someone behind the counter said, “You have to tell them to stop jumping or they’re going to get hurt.” I felt that what he was really saying was something along the lines of: “It is not socially acceptable for these kids, who we are assuming are yours, to play rowdily indoors. You are projecting the image of the careless mother, and, should we choose to ignore this breach of acceptable conduct on your part, we would be compliant in fostering this undesirable image.” Well, who could argue with that? Since then, I have become more concerned with making the kids “tow the line”, having learned that if I let them give free reign to their impulses for even a little while, they grow more and more insolent as the hours roll by. Still I am not entirely sure that constant discipline is more essential to their well being than to mine.
Interaction with the under-seven set is territory familiar to many but completely foreign to me. I have no siblings, younger or otherwise, and my temperament in my adolescent years was too spacey to allow for much babysitting. I am at the age now when my friends are popping out babies like hotcakes, but none of these children is yet old enough to converse. To supplant my lack of experience, I have attempted to turn to my own memories of childhood for guidance. What was life like for me when I was their age? If I remember, could it help me relate to them better? It turns out that I have absolutely no recollection of dealing with homework or bedtime or learning how to sit still or even to read. In fact, I have forgotten about 99.9% of all the things that happened to me before age eleven or so, when the memories become a little more frequent. I seem to remember the uncomfortable, traumatic parts of my childhood the most – flubbing a 1st grade spelling bee on an easy word because of nerves; forgetting to bring my bathing suit to kindergarten on the day the kids got to play outside with water; being picked on by a summer camp counselor at the YMCA; getting shoved against the schoolyard fence in the 2nd grade for being a “teacher’s pet.” (The list, unfortunately, goes on and on.) I also remember boredom. I remember trying to coerce my mother into playing the Strawberry Shortcake board game with me, then being frustrated by her own obvious boredom. I do also remember some of the wondrous parts – the beautiful velvety blue and black disc inside a cow’s eye at a summer camp dissection; witnessing a lizard slowly ingest a cockroach after school; being shocked by a classmate’s precocious pubic hairs at a 4th grade slumber party; learning how to jump over ocean waves as they rolled in. I tried to teach Jodi and Karma to do this a few weeks back, but they were too inexperienced in the water, and clung to me as if they would drown the second I let them go.
Jeff has always been too busy struggling - first with trying to save a failed relationship with the kids’ mother, then with (unsuccessfully) trying to finish his bachelor’s degree, and now with trying to make it as a single father with no financial support – to pay the kids a great deal of attention. I am often surprised by how little he seems to understand or relate to them.
He is worried about his son’s skinniness, and one night I watched him put down a plate of spaghetti for him that contained more food than could possibly ever fit into the stomach of a grown man, much less a six-year-old boy. This was a routine occurrence. Jodi, the slowest imaginable eater in the universe, would eat a few bites and the rest would get thrown away. “If you put down a realistic amount of food in front him, maybe he’ll be able to imagine actually finishing it, and it’ll be a goal he can work toward,” I told Jeff. Surprisingly, my hunch was right. Jodi’s four-year-old sister, Karma, is another story. She is a born actress and stubborn as a mule. She will laugh in your face when you are trying to make a serious point about the importance of something, and will do a funny and skillful little dance when she ought to be holding still to get her hair brushed. These willful aspects of her frighten and alienate her father, and I must constantly remind him that she is just four years old, fragile and hungry for affection. This is, I’m sure, more than a hunch.
Karma said something to me once that didn’t sink in until days later. We had just left the beach and were getting ready to go home, but she refused to get in the car unless Jodi gave up the front seat. I had decided a day or two before that avoiding a tantrum was less important than teaching her that, like Mick Jagger says, she can’t always get what she wants, and this seemed like the perfect time to put this lesson into practice. She was hungry, she wanted juice, and she needed a bath, but I told her we weren’t going home until she climbed in the back and that I would wait as long as it took. After a few minutes she finally relented, and then tearfully wailed, “Jodi gets to sit in the front because he’s better.” Her statement reminds me of that obscure quality that permeates my childhood memories - the forgotten logic, simultaneously narcissistic and insecure, that said that I should be at the center of the universe and the constant disappointment that I wasn’t. I remember this much about childhood, but how do I acknowledge it in my dealings with the children, and sort out which things to teach them that will really matter in the end?
Jeff is now in a more stable financial situation and was able to hire a steady babysitter again, so I will probably not find an answer to these questions anytime soon. I must now face the fact that my relationship with the kids has slowly become more important to me than my relationship with their father, which doesn’t bode well for the latter’s future. If Jodi and Karma’s powers of recollection turn out be anything like mine, they will eventually forget the time we spent together – but I never will.