Now We Are [almost] Six

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three,

I was hardly me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five,

I was just alive.

But now that I’m Six I’m as clever as clever.

So I think I’ll be six now forever and ever.

--A.A. Milne

                “Mama?”

                The room was dark.  The stories had been read, the kisses given, the blankets tucked.  Both twins were supposed to be asleep, but one of them clearly wasn’t.

                “What’s wrong?”  I crouched by the bottom bunk, the inhabitant of which was dwarfed by her giant Winnie the Pooh.

                “Mama… I don’t think I can all the way brush my teeth myself when I’m six!  I can’t make the little circles like the dentist said!”

                As far as nighttime terrors go, this one was pretty easy to address. “It’s ok,” I reassured her.  “I can still help with brushing, if you want.”

                “Until I’m seven?”

                “Sure.”

                “But that’s only two years away.  Maybe until I’m eight.  Or nine.”

                I teetered between amusement and pathos.  This was the same kid who had told me, a few weeks previously, that she never wanted to be done with kindergarten, because she feared that first graders needed to know how to tie their shoes.  I could easily teach her how, I’d said.  “No…” she moaned, as if shoe-tying were akin to juggling live rattlesnakes.  She won’t let me throw away her favorite size-three corduroy pants or pass on the shape-sorter box to friends with babies.  When she was barely two, she used to hide in a cupboard to fill her diaper.  She knew she was perfectly capable of using the potty, but she didn’t want me to take the diapers away.

On the upper bunk is the other twin, the one who gave up the diapers right at her second birthday, pretty much the moment she realized that big kids wore underpants.  She’s also the one who spent an afternoon alternating between rigid focus and howling frustration because she was determined to be the only kid in preschool who COULD tie her shoes.  She’ll try to lift an eight-year-old or wrestle with a boy who outweighs her by thirty pounds.  During University Park Elementary School’s Graphing Week, this was the twin who was furious to find that the mathematical questions intended for fifth and sixth graders were too hard for her.

Now they are about to turn six, an age somewhere between little and big, between “I can do it all by myself” and “I want my Mommy.”  And I’m not sure which twin’s camp I’m in.

I used to know.  Six years ago, I had two newborns and a not-quite-completed dissertation. One day, when I was peeling one of the tiny, squirmy little creatures out of her oozing onesie for the umpteenth time, I noticed the tag on the small garment.  Underneath the Carter’s logo was the company’s tagline: “If they could just stay little.” 

I stared at the tag.  The baby shrieked because she was chilly (babies never shriek because they are covered in poop, only because you try to take their poop away from them).  The other baby shrieked because she wasn’t being held, or because I hadn’t nursed her for a whole 37 minutes, or just because she was a baby.  These things were sometimes a bit obtuse to me, and I hadn’t slept in several weeks, so my logic was off.  But one thing seemed pretty clear.  Much as I adored my children, with exactly the overwhelming devotion that had once seemed slightly daft in other parents, I definitely did not want to have two infants forever.

This self-admission made me feel a little anxious.  Was there something wrong with me, or insufficient in my love, if I was eagerly looking forward to a time when my kids could communicate in a manner that didn’t involve howling, and maybe play a few games of Scrabble with me?

Although my anxiety never entirely disappeared, it was somewhat assuaged by the passage of time.  The Sack of Flour stage of babyhood is rapidly replaced by the Wiggling Worm stage, and then the Barrel of Monkeys stage.  Infants change so quickly that there’s always something new for parents to gush about.  A smile!  A burp!  Neck muscles that don’t flop about like overcooked pasta!   I enjoyed every stage, despite the curdled drool, the awkwardness of trying to get through a door while lugging two car seats, and the necessity of installing dozens of little plastic gizmos on outlets, drawers, and cabinets, rendering them kid-proof and adult-proof in one inconvenient step.

My enjoyment was real, but it was also forward-looking.  I didn’t mourn the outgrown 3-6 month snowsuits because I had sacks of larger hand-me-downs lying in wait.  I was cheering the kids along as they grew teeth, gnawed on Cheerios, and learned to walk.  In retrospect, it was predictable that one kid seemed to find crawling demeaning.  It made her angry.  She was so desperately eager to get on her feet that she became fully bipedal at ten months.  It was also predictable that the other kid waited until 13 months, when she could be sure she wouldn’t totter and fall, then ambled around without fanfare. 

I don’t recall greeting a new stage with any pangs of regret until it came time to (finally) wean my little milk-monsters. I didn’t really plan to keep breast-feeding long enough to have toddlers who marched up to me and announced, “Want nurse!” but it happened kind of quickly.  I wanted to be done with it… and yet I didn’t.  My biologist sensibilities and my mom-sensibilities were equally entranced by the nonchalance with which my body, after doing nothing of the sort for 33 years, was able to produce two complete human beings, and then a couple of hundred gallons of milk.  Some women feel insulted or grossed-out by being reminded of their kinship with cows, but I kind of liked the simplicity and sisterhood of mammalhood.  I enjoyed being one with all the shrews, gnus, dolphins, and elephants who had done this long before me.  So I felt a little sad when I told the kids that the milk was All Gone, and ceremoniously re-sewed Boppy the Nursing Pillow into two smaller pillows, one for each crib.  One kid – I probably don’t need to say which one -- took this transition a lot harder than the other, and required a bedtime pacifier – not just for a couple of weeks, but for two more years. 

Despite this small blip, I was still gazing ahead to the horizon: to age three, the minimum for preschool; to age four, when their legs would be long enough to hike appreciable distances and pedal a tag-along bike; to age five, and the beginning of formal education.  When I was sick of reading Touch and Feel Farm, Corduroy seemed like a reprieve.  When I was sick of Corduroy, James and the Giant Peach was a treat.  Each birthday felt like a real celebration, not just because of the fire truck cakes, fruit dragons, and sunny playgrounds.  Each year, each new number, seemed like a new chapter, a new adventure.  Why bother being only three when one can embrace the excitement of being four, or even FIVE? 

This year, though, I find myself starting to notice not only the positives of growth, but also a few of the downsides.  Two kids are hard to cram onto my lap these days, although they still want to be there.  For how much longer?  The bunk beds will be too short pretty soon.  The peer pressure is starting to kick in, escalating the requests for tacky plastic toys.  In these peer groups, the restrictive gender lines are becoming more tightly cinched.  Life is more complicated, more scheduled.  There are tests and report cards – report cards!  What does it mean if my child does not yet Meet Expectations in kindergarten music class? 

On the flip side, though, I now get to spend my free hours with two distinct and fascinating individuals who ask questions about how static electricity works, how often whales need to breathe, whether the Easter Bunny can receive mail, and why the cement doesn’t harden inside the mixer. My answers are circuitous and fumbling.  I find myself jogging around the living room holding a beach ball and saying, “Now, if you can imagine that this is the sun…”  Yet my children still think I’m brilliant -- mostly.  Their ideas have the chaotic orderliness of poetry, and they play point-counterpoint to one another like a scientist who has been locked up for six years with an architect. 

“Look, every strawberry is different,” says one, rolling the fat fruits between her small fingers, examining each dent and seed.

“Of course,” says the other, cramming one into her mouth.  “They all have different DNA.”

Young Christopher Robin Milne once loved his teddy bear.  He built things out of chairs.  He was afraid of invisible Heffalumps.  He was six, and as clever as clever.  But he didn’t stay six forever and ever.  He got older, and went to boarding school, where he was mocked for the stories his dad had written.  He came to hate the books.  In their pages, he would always have a pudding-bowl haircut, a nanny, and no idea how to spell Wednesday.  He was furious at his father for exploiting the person he used to be.  Cuteness is all very well, but it has a sell-by date, after which it’s about as appealing as a fermenting haddock.

Luckily, my writing has an audience of no more than a hundred people, and it’s unlikely I’m dooming my kids to infantile notoriety.  They probably won’t, like Christopher Robin, have to take up boxing to defend themselves against Pooh tormentors.  Still, I know that no matter how obscure I am, there will come a point in time when I will embarrass my kids.  They may not cringe over my writing, but they will hate my socks or roll their eyes at my jokes or try to convince their friends that they have not in any way been influenced by my appreciation for Thai eggplant, They Might Be Giants, or E.B. White.

For now, though, they’re willing to appreciate Charlotte’s Web from the vantage point of my lap.  How long will this last?  A year ago, they couldn’t read.  Now, they can, albeit with a lot of stumbling.  This transformation, like so many others, is wonderful.  I can’t wait to invite my kids to meet the residents of Prydain and Middle Earth and Wildcat Island and Hogwarts.  But I hope they let me keep reading out loud for a while longer, so that I can go there with them.

These days, we read four bedtime stories each night, with each family member taking a turn.  Then I tuck in the blankets, and the kids snuggle down with their heads on those old halves of Boppy.

“Good night, my big girl!”  I give my child a kiss.

“Mama!”

I pause.  “What’s wrong?”

“Mama… I’m NOT big.  I’m little.  And… I want to be with you!  I want to be with you forever.”

I’m immobilized by surprise.  Not by the sentiment – but by whom it’s coming from.  My five-going-on-twelve girl.  Little Miss I-Can-Do-It-All-By-Myself.

Of course, there’s only one possible answer. “Ok, little one,” I agree.  I give her another kiss. 

She’ll change her mind, I know.  I’d be devastated if she didn’t, eventually.  But as to when she makes that mental transition – next year, or in ten years, or every day, back and forth, from now until college?  It’s up to her.  I’m in no hurry.  And yet… I can’t wait.  Because the only thing more fun than letting them be who they are is seeing who they will become.

Honk, honk

“Yerba Wubba Zrrrrble Uggugg!”

I hear the distinctively incoherent call as I jog along the muddy verge.  It’s springtime, and a common migratory species is once again rolling down its truck windows and exercising its vocal cords.  That’s right -- the Drive-By Warblers are back.

April offers lots of other signs of springtime, of course.  Slush and gravel whisper invitingly to small people in big boots.  Puddles large enough to be given names lurk along roadsides.  The cranes have returned to Creamer’s Field.  The swans are here, and so are the geese, the newborn reindeer and the adorably homely baby muskoxen. Flocks of bikers, their spandex plumage lurid in the sunlight, have repopulated the routes that were my private terrain in black January.  Family birthdays are gathering on the horizon, chirping “six, six!” and honking “forty!” These are iconic harbingers of the season – but so are the Warblers. 

Warblers are not just a Fairbanks phenomenon, of course.  In fact, they seem to be a species with a vast range, inhabiting every continent I’ve visited. While emphatic, their comments have almost always been obtuse.  I figure that the participants in this warm-season sport must have been cutting class on the day that the Doppler Effect was discussed in high school physics, and are thus blissfully unaware of the distortion of their voice effected by the motion of their 1989 Ford pickup, not to mention the masking effects of an elderly muffler.   They may also have missed out on the finer points of elocution and grammar.   

In years past, out-of-truck pronouncements unsettled me.  They undermined my need to be invisible, and augmented my hefty burden of insecurities. I’ve been walking, biking and jogging around -- in several states and nations -- ever since I was a kid.  To varying degrees, my non-motorized habits have been considered unusual, quirky, and downright weird.  Although I’ve always preferred to imagine that I’m utterly unremarkable while undertaking these perambulations, it’s hard to maintain that pretense while getting hollered at from a moving vehicle. 

Even when I couldn’t hear what was said, correct interpretation of the commentary always seemed like a lose-lose bet.  Option #1 was that these unknown males were making fun of me.  Maybe they were telling me that my butt looked vast and jiggly, or that my running style was reminiscent of Daffy Duck.  Maybe they thought that my speed was more glacial than their great-grandma’s, or that my bike helmet was the dweebiest thing they’d ever seen, and was buckled crooked besides.  My own imagination provided dozens of possibilities for humiliation.  Option #2 was even worse.  Maybe these guys were objectifying me, to the tune of, “A female!  In shorts!  With arms and legs in what appear to be roughly the correct numbers!  Woohoo, let’s engage in reproductive behavior immediately!”   Objectification, my angry-white-female self told me, was socially depressing, slightly threatening, and embarrassing in its own way.  In any case, whatever the options, humiliation was always on the menu.

I encountered my first Warbler a quarter century ago. I was biking back from the beach with my friend Mia, shorts pulled on over our damp bathing suits.  We were 14.  I had yet to hit puberty, and was such a blissfully clueless late bloomer that I turned to Mia in confusion and asked why some grown-up was offering up loud garbled pronouncements.  She rolled her eyes.  “Because we’re girls,” she said.  I blanched.  Because, you know, ick.

Ten years later, I was living in rural Jamaica, where it’s always the warm season, and where a young white woman on a bicycle is about as unnoticeable as a firecracker in an elevator.  No one had a truck, so as soon as my brain could parse Jamaican Patois, I understood the comments.  The many, many, many comments.  Every day.  For two years.  Options 1 and 2 were both employed, with myriad creative embellishments. My skin got thicker.  Not thick enough, but thicker.

Nevertheless, I never stopped walking, biking and jogging.  I do it because it’s a cheap and convenient form of transportation; because it’s often my sole source of exercise; and because it’s an excellent way to multi-task – I’m commuting, saving gas, saving money, trying to save the planet, and saving myself from cabin-fever in one easy maneuver. 

Fast-forward another fifteen years.  Some things are the same: it’s April, and the local truck windows are starting to roll down once again.  I still run, walk, and bike all over the place.   I still look like Daffy Duck, and I still can’t get my bike helmet to sit completely symmetrically.  On the other hand, a lot has changed.  I’m a professor – with, you know, an advanced degree and a career and everything.  I’m also a mom, and there’s often a kid-trailer or a tag-along bike clamped onto my own set of wheels.  Thus, when I met the first Warbler of the 2012 season, I was on my way from work – my I-have-a-doctorate mad-scientist job – and was heading over to pick up my kids from kindergarten.  And I was running, because, as mentioned, I’m a bit strange.

“Yerba Wubba Zrrrrble Uggugg!” shouted the guy riding shotgun.  I had no idea what he’d said, or which option it fell under.  That part was normal.  But then I realized that the game pieces had shifted.  Option #1, The Insult, now seemed to have a slightly new translation in my mind.  It sounded something like, “I am a pasty-faced under-employed young man who feels a peculiar need to shout rude things at almost-40-year-old professors.”  Option #2, The Come-On, now meant, “I am an awkward, incipiently paunchy 22-year-old who feels that he’d really like to sleep with some random almost-40 mom who is about to pick up her twin kindergarteners.”

This year, the season’s first Warbler didn’t leave me feeling irritated, vulnerable, or over-aware of my goofy, jiggling running style.  Instead, it left me laughing. 

Maybe laughter wasn’t the correct response.  I suppose I could get worried about my impending birthday.  I could develop a sudden urge to buy a red sports car, wear polyester pantsuits, or pen mournful existential poetry.  I could stock up on wrinkle cream and hair dyes and worry about my over-ripe ovaries. But, then again -- nope.  I’m not going there.  I wasted too much time in my pre-forty years feeling insecure.  It was supremely unhelpful.  Laughter is way more fun.

I think I have another ten years or so before I’m officially a crone, but I’ve already decided that I want to pick and choose the aspects of crone-ness that I embrace.  I think I’ll go with the part that allows me to wear odd hats, champion unpopular opinions, and laugh at things that I’m not supposed to laugh at.  I want to dispense wisdom on the rare occasions that anyone asks for it, and know how to shut up when they don’t. 

And of course I will continue to walk, bike, and run all over town in every season – and enjoy it. I’m already enjoying spring.  And I think I’m going to enjoy this birthday, too.