Yesterday was L's birthday party. And it's about time: he's suffered some from the second-child syndrome, and if you measured his birthday events against some of M's utter extravaganzas, somebody would be wincing. This year the extravaganza was all his: there's a reptile rescue group that has a collection of 5,000 snakes, bugs, lizards, and spiders, and they raise money by giving presentations to schools and hauling the rescued beasts to birthday parties. And so a houseful of classmates and cousins--and his teacher--held pythons and tarantulas and turtles and lizards. An alligator came to the party, too, but the kids were kept at a distance--more, I think, to protect the alligator than the people. It was a blast, and L was lit up from the inside.
A little boy named Dylan came. He was trouble: kept lunging at the animals and got sharply rebuked for it; crawled under the couch and started chanting while the animal person was talking; pulled his pants down, took his shirt off, pissed me off so much that I took him by the arm and sat him in the other room for ten minutes. (It takes a lot for me to discipline somebody else's child.) There was nothing I could say that could persuade him to behave. When I sent all the kids out to burn off some steam on the hill--a great sledding hill, and we had supplies--Dylan pulls his shirt up and slides down the hill on his bare skin. Etc.
My cousin Oona came as well, and brought her two daughters. They're lovely kids; the elder, Aidan, is brilliant, and socially awkward. The younger one is one of the crowd, and also the prettier child; it's always that way, isn't it? I'm partial to Aidan; she reads college-level work in 6th grade, and if you can get her talking she's so interesting. So all the kids are flying down the hill on plastic saucers, and it's completely safe: there's a long stretch of flat ground for them to slow and stop at the end of the hill, and the hill itself is only dramatic because the snow is a little icy--not because the grade is particularly steep. But Aidan doesn't want to get on a sled. She stands off to the side, kicking snow, looking at trees, a few years older than the other kids and a bit detached. Oona is bothered by this, and begins to prod her to get on a sled. "It's fun--try it!" Aidan resists. And so Oona betakes herself up the hill to sit on a sled herself and to keep pushing Aidan to sit on her mother's lap and go down the hill that way. I was wincing at this point: how embarrassed the child must be feeling--being pushed to confront this fear in front of a bunch of 1st graders--being pushed to take the hill in her mother's lap. Ultimately she did it: sat on Oona's legs but kept her own heels firmly planted on the ground all the way down, so ten seconds after they began she'd stopped the sled.
I applauded. "Well done!" She grinned and went back to looking at the trees.
Aidan's grandmother--my aunt Maura--would probably fail any contemporary measure of sanity. When her children were young she planted them with her mother and took off to Saudia Arabia to work as a nurse for years. She recounted her adventures there in long letters to my mother, written on that transparent onion skin paper in scrawlings I couldn't decipher despite my best efforts. I knew there was something worth reading there because my mother would keep them in her bag and read them again and again--my mother, who married at 20 and raised five children on a carpenter's salary, and I couldn't begin to imagine the kinds of costs it all entailed, but at the very least I know my mother has an adventurer's soul.
Maura's daughter, Oona, is zany, too. She was the one who would concoct the edgy pranks when we played together as children--the first one out the door for any fun. She was afraid of nothing, like her mother. But she married a very proper guy--an attorney, like her--and they live a fairly conventional life. I think it's a good marriage--her husband's a wonderful father. But I can see, too, Oona as the consumate utilitarian, making choices that would ground her life in ways her mother never did. It's not that she's cautious, exactly--Oona, I mean--but that she's living for her children. Her mother never did that.
Aidan is a step further: afraid of a sled, quiet and careful and proper. Guarded. When I think of how far that line of women has traveled--from Maura, who would leave her children for years to experience the world, to Aidan, who will be extraordinary, I'm sure, but her adventures may be confined to her mind--I think that we are raising cautious children, and the Leif Ericsons of the world are a thing of the past.
Unless, of course, they're among us, manifesting as Dylan.
A little boy named Dylan came. He was trouble: kept lunging at the animals and got sharply rebuked for it; crawled under the couch and started chanting while the animal person was talking; pulled his pants down, took his shirt off, pissed me off so much that I took him by the arm and sat him in the other room for ten minutes. (It takes a lot for me to discipline somebody else's child.) There was nothing I could say that could persuade him to behave. When I sent all the kids out to burn off some steam on the hill--a great sledding hill, and we had supplies--Dylan pulls his shirt up and slides down the hill on his bare skin. Etc.
My cousin Oona came as well, and brought her two daughters. They're lovely kids; the elder, Aidan, is brilliant, and socially awkward. The younger one is one of the crowd, and also the prettier child; it's always that way, isn't it? I'm partial to Aidan; she reads college-level work in 6th grade, and if you can get her talking she's so interesting. So all the kids are flying down the hill on plastic saucers, and it's completely safe: there's a long stretch of flat ground for them to slow and stop at the end of the hill, and the hill itself is only dramatic because the snow is a little icy--not because the grade is particularly steep. But Aidan doesn't want to get on a sled. She stands off to the side, kicking snow, looking at trees, a few years older than the other kids and a bit detached. Oona is bothered by this, and begins to prod her to get on a sled. "It's fun--try it!" Aidan resists. And so Oona betakes herself up the hill to sit on a sled herself and to keep pushing Aidan to sit on her mother's lap and go down the hill that way. I was wincing at this point: how embarrassed the child must be feeling--being pushed to confront this fear in front of a bunch of 1st graders--being pushed to take the hill in her mother's lap. Ultimately she did it: sat on Oona's legs but kept her own heels firmly planted on the ground all the way down, so ten seconds after they began she'd stopped the sled.
I applauded. "Well done!" She grinned and went back to looking at the trees.
Aidan's grandmother--my aunt Maura--would probably fail any contemporary measure of sanity. When her children were young she planted them with her mother and took off to Saudia Arabia to work as a nurse for years. She recounted her adventures there in long letters to my mother, written on that transparent onion skin paper in scrawlings I couldn't decipher despite my best efforts. I knew there was something worth reading there because my mother would keep them in her bag and read them again and again--my mother, who married at 20 and raised five children on a carpenter's salary, and I couldn't begin to imagine the kinds of costs it all entailed, but at the very least I know my mother has an adventurer's soul.
Maura's daughter, Oona, is zany, too. She was the one who would concoct the edgy pranks when we played together as children--the first one out the door for any fun. She was afraid of nothing, like her mother. But she married a very proper guy--an attorney, like her--and they live a fairly conventional life. I think it's a good marriage--her husband's a wonderful father. But I can see, too, Oona as the consumate utilitarian, making choices that would ground her life in ways her mother never did. It's not that she's cautious, exactly--Oona, I mean--but that she's living for her children. Her mother never did that.
Aidan is a step further: afraid of a sled, quiet and careful and proper. Guarded. When I think of how far that line of women has traveled--from Maura, who would leave her children for years to experience the world, to Aidan, who will be extraordinary, I'm sure, but her adventures may be confined to her mind--I think that we are raising cautious children, and the Leif Ericsons of the world are a thing of the past.
Unless, of course, they're among us, manifesting as Dylan.
5 comments:
What an awesome idea for a party! I'd have never dreamed!
I wonder where those letters are today...if they've survived on that old "airmail paper" I wonder if they'd mean so much more...
A Happy Belated Birthday to L, though I know the best present is you for a Mom!
so glad you're up again. what was L's response to the naughty boy? so curious.
He stared at him the way a librarian looks at a kid with a whistle. Nobody does the stare of disapprobation like my son.
Aidan. Sounds like my Zoë.
Used to be terrified of dogs. Got over it herself, when she was ready.
With some kids, you just have to wait till it's their time. Aidan might surprise everyone some day.
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