parenting

Dear Hypocrite,

I love your column. Often when I’m facing a problem that I’m not sure how to handle, I’ll think about what you’d say and I follow your imagined advice. This time, however, I can write in and wait for your real response! My husband and I are struggling with this one. We’re hoping you can help us out.

My husband has a group of good friends from college. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know them and their wives and consider them my pals, too. We’ve gone on many trips together as couples, and now that our kids have finally made it to a good traveling age, we’ve started to take family vacations together. Last year we rented a house in Mexico and it was a success for the most part. The only issue is with “Lucy,” one of “Ann and Tom’s” children. My husband and I are not sure what’s wrong with Lucy. She talks constantly and is forever trying to enlist the entire group in playing a game. Ann and Tom encourage the behavior by playing her games which involve making animal sounds and answering senseless riddles. She’s forever hijacking conversations and telling stories that have no point. Her parents make no effort to curb her. She sabotages whatever is going on. Lucy is eight and already the last person I’d want to sit next to at a dinner party.

At the end of the Summer, all the families are meeting at a house in Michigan for ten days. The house is not as big as we wanted. Some of the couples have to sleep in twin beds, some are on a sleeping porch. There isn’t a lot of privacy. My husband and I are dreading being cooped up with Lucy. My husband wants to tell Ann and Tom that we’re reconsidering the trip because we’re not sure if we can tolerate Lucy’s behavior. I agree something needs to be said, but that seems too strong. How do we ask them to rein her in so we can catch up like old days?

Signed
What To Do About Problem Child

Dear What To Do,

First of all, there are no more old days. Kids change absolutely every dynamic they touch. Trying to get back to the energy of the old days is as fruitless as flossing your teeth with one hand. You won’t be able to do it. Let go of that fantasy now.

I hear you when you say you want to catch up, though. Being able to share your lives with people who’ve known you in your wilder days is the absolute best. The thing you need to figure out now is how not to fuck that up. And you, What To Do, are at the precipice of ruining everything. There are a couple of reasons why I’m going to tell you to do absolutely nothing in your struggle with Problem Child.

When I was twelve I was pretty sure I was done with the human species. I’d been betrayed by my friends and wasn’t feeling so great about my family. But there was one thing I had a lot of faith in. Squirrels. My backyard was filled with them. Every afternoon after school, I would sit on the steps going down to the yard and watch them gather chestnuts for hours. Every couple minutes or so, I would sneak a few inches closer to them, determined to be their Jane Goodall. I’d heard of some people who had squirrels at pets. I wanted squirrels as friends.

I wasn’t successful at forging the species divide. I was never able to hand them a chunk of Lender’s bagel like I wanted. After about three months, I turned my back on the squirrels and got on my bike. Within a few weeks I ended up getting a new pack of human friends who let me get close to them. The squirrel thing was a phase—one of a hundred or so I have gone through. Kids go through phases constantly. You last saw Lucy a year ago. I bet you $23 that the kid has moved on to another more or less annoying phase. You need to see where she is before you say anything to the parents about curbing her behavior.

There’s another even more important reason you shouldn’t say anything before the trip.

When kids are young, they are their parent’s possessions. Parents are hard at work guiding and shaping them. They do their best to create their child’s afterschool and summer schedules and encourage friendships for them that are morally sound and emotionally supportive. This is why parents can’t help but feel personally attacked when someone talks shit about their kid. Saying something bad about Lucy is the same as telling Ann and Tom that they are shitty parents. You say, “Lucy is hard to take,” they hear, “You have created a monster.”

You have two choices: You can sit this trip out or you can go. If you go, I think you will discover a different Lucy. But if Lucy is how you last left her, you’re allowed to drop a well-constructed, well-timed comment to her parents that may help the situation. Here are my suggestions.

“It’s so good to see you. Sometimes it’s so hard with all the kids around to get a word in edgewise. Want to sneak in a walk and talk?”

“What do you guys think of using a local sitter for the night? Catching up is hard at dinner with all the kids. I want to know how you guys are doing.”
“Lucy has so much energy!”

All of these statements can start conversations. The last one will work only if said without judgment. Say it like you’d say “Seven times seven equals forty-nine” or “Cows give milk you can drink.”

Good luck with this. I feel for you. But I also feel for Lucy. I wasn’t a fan of grownups when I was young because they were always telling me to be quiet so they could talk. Sitting there and watching them talk was excruciating. How could they be so boring? Would it really hurt them to play a game during dinner once in while?
See you next time!

The morning after Lorenzo was born, I was lying in my hospital bed, cradling the baby in my arms and gazing at his sleeping face when he suddenly started to choke. On thin air. He hadn’t been nursing or anything, he just went from slumbering in that unreachable, newborn way to gagging.

I lay immobilized for a second or two and then I raced into the hospital hallway, holding Lorenzo and yelling: “Help me! Someone! My baby is choking!”

I was fully aware of how ridiculous this sounded and what a spectacle I was making but my panic overrode any sense of decorum. This was life and death.

A middle-aged nurse strode over. She was solid in her scrubs, and she walked like she meant business. Within a few seconds, she’d grabbed the baby out of my arms like a sack of beans and whacked him on the back, twice, with what seemed like excessive force. I winced as I imagined his spinal column shattering. But he remained in one piece, as erect as a newborn can be, and his gagging was replaced with bawling.

“That’s normal,” the nurse explained, handing the baby back to me and paying precious little attention, I noted, to supporting his head. “He’s just gagging on his amniotic fluid. They do that sometimes.”

She said it casually, like it was supposed to make me feel better. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I’d been prepared to protect my son from all sorts of choking hazards—loose change, hot dogs, paper clips—but later, in a few months, when I’d had a chance to hone my mothering skills. I’d never thought I‘d need to start now, right out of the gate, and that I’d have to also worry about him choking on stuff that was already inside of him. The very stuff that had shielded him from harm for the past nine months.

All of a sudden, the enormity of the enterprise before me slammed down on my shoulders. Holy Mother of God. There’d be things I would fail to protect him from. And not just the stuff I’d already, very diligently, worried about like clipping off his fingertips instead of his fingernails because I couldn’t see details that small. There was a whole world, a whole galaxy, of other stuff that I couldn’t protect him from, stuff that hadn’t even occurred to me, stuff I didn’t even know about. What the hell was I going to do now?

What I was going to do was hang my head and cry, the which I did right there in the hospital hallway, in my no-slip socks and pink polka-dot pajamas.

“You mean he’s going to do it again?” I sobbed, “and there’s nothing I can do to stop it?”

Without missing a beat, the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and ushered me back to my bed. She seemed so unfazed by my sudden crying fit, it gave me the strong suspicion that that hallway had seen far worse mental breakdowns. Working in maternity was probably pretty similar to working in the psych ward, except with bigger maxi pads.

“It’s going to be all right,” she promised, “A little gagging won’t hurt him.”

“But what if—” I sputtered. “What if he chokes so much he can’t breathe?”

“He won’t,” she replied. “I’ve never heard of that.”

That wasn’t sufficient reassurance for me. There was all sorts of shit you never heard about until it happened to you and then it was too late. I’d never heard about retinitis pigmentosa and yet, here I was, unable to see the tissue she was holding out to me until she finally shoved it right in my hand.

I blew my nose and took a deep breath. Too late to back out now.

“Tell me what to do, exactly, if it happens again,” I pleaded, “Step by step.”

“There’s only one step,” she replied, “Just give him a good old whack on his back.”

“But how will I know for sure that his airway is clear?” I pressed.

The nurse looked over in the direction of my roommate who was buzzing her call button insistently from behind the room’s dividing curtain. I’d been privy to my roommate’s every sound for the last twelve hours and despite the fact that I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her, I’d put together a pretty detailed profile: Polish, first baby, C-section, not much luck nursing, prone to sudden meltdowns herself. From the sound of the call button, there was another breakdown in the works, which meant mine had to be wrapped up.

“Look,” said the nurse, “if the baby’s crying, you know he’s not choking. So I guess if you really wanted to be sure his airway was clear, make him cry. Give his big toe a good squeeze—that’ll aggravate him.”

“OK,” I affirmed, “Got it.” If I have any suspicions that the baby is choking, any at all, I should make him cry.

Which is why I spent the first month of my infant’s life annoying him relentlessly.

I’d look over at the bouncy seat, where Lorenzo lay still, silent, and peaceful. Though this is most mothers’ dream, it was my call–to-arms. Why was the baby so preternaturally still? Clearly, he was not breathing. Likely, it was that damn amniotic fluid causing trouble again. Who knew how long he’d been like this? As I sat pondering, his brain might be losing oxygen! No time to undertake the subtle investigative measures I’d learned in infant CPR class like watching his chest rise and fall; I couldn’t trust myself to see the ever-so-slight movement of his chest anyway, my vision was so poor. No, no, this emergency called for the squeeze-the-toe test, approved by medical professionals as the quickest, most effective way to confirm baby’s respiratory health.

I’d squeeze the toe. He’d scrunch his placid face into a scowl and commence caterwauling. Mission accomplished. The baby was breathing. And, now royally pissed off.

Over and over again in the first weeks of my baby’s life, people were assuring me that if I trusted my mother’s instinct, I’d be fine and over and over again, I was finding that was a load of horse-crap. Maybe other mothers, ones with all their primary senses intact, had functional maternal instincts, but worry and a severe lack of confidence had caused mine to short-circuit. None of this mothering business was coming naturally. I needed a detailed instruction manual to do everything and sometimes, even that didn’t work. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind.

Nicole C. Kear’s memoir, Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press): Order now the book and find more info at nicolekear.com.

About Lucy

Dispatches From Babyville: Baby Steps