Stockholm syndrome

I read an interview a few months ago with Gregory Maguire, the guy who wrote Wicked (the retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s point of view — now a smash Broadway musical). He and his partner have adopted three children, and are now, he said, basically held hostage by them. Their home lives revolve around making their imprisonment as pleasant as possible (a project, I’m sure, that’s made easier by the many millions of dollars Wicked has — deservedly — raked in for them).

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the hostage situation at our house. I know that in a previous life, even a previous life with one child, I did leave the house for more than an hour at a time by myself, and that the latter 15 minutes of that hour weren’t consumed by a growing sense of anxiety about the baby needing to breastfeed. I know that on all my previous anniversaries, even those with child, Rachel and I went out for dinner, as opposed to this year’s aborted lunch date that proved too ambitious for a carseat-averse six-week-old and his frazzled mothers. I remember walking with Rachel and Rowan to day care in the morning, accompanying them on outings, not staying home to sleep and feed the baby. I know I used to have several hours of calm between kid bedtime and adult bedtime. I know that I used to make plans with people that involved set times, not, “I’ll call you when we’re ready to leave the house” (i.e., when both children — and, I guess, adults — are awake, fed, changed, dressed, packed up, and not crying).

It’s just that I don’t remember those times very clearly right now.

I think about the hostage situation as I pad around our darkened basement, Isaac held close to my chest in the sling. It’s his preferred — nay, pretty much his only — method of going to sleep for naps and at night. We try to transfer him to the crib while he is, as the non-attachment parenting books recommend, “sleepy but not yet asleep.” Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t, and he wakes and cries, and then we put him back in the sling and commence the whole walking around the basement thing again.

What I’m trying to do during these times is revel in them rather than rebel — especially in the moments in which my infant son sleeps snuggled against my chest. I remind myself that he is so small; that these unsettled, trusting basement walks are the merest sliver of his life and mine together. That this is the only summer of his infancy, that my freedom will return in time, and that I will likely look back and think, the way I so often do about situations that seem problematic at the time, “What was the big deal about that?”

“There’s no place like home,” said Glinda, Good Witch of the East. That’s true, but you’ll notice the ambivalence inherent in that statement. For the time being, I’m stuck at home a lot, waltzing and waiting with Isaac, following his dictates rather than my (admittedly conflicted) desires. And I’m trying — and sometimes, even often, succeeding — in seeing my captors as allies.

Where’s Isaac?

There’s a new game at our house: “Where’s Isaac?” It goes like this:

“Where’s Isaac?” Rowan will ask, usually when the baby is in my lap, nursing.

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. “Is Isaac at the market?”

“No,” Rowan will say. “Is Isaac upstairs?”

“Is Isaac at the park?”

“Is Isaac in the fridge?”

“Is Isaac at the store?”

“Is Isaac on the fan?” (This one of Rowan’s always cracks me up, as I imagine the sleepy lump of the baby whirling around, one-handed, on the ceiling fan above our heads. Yee-ha!)

This goes on for awhile, with increasing hilarity, until Rowan eventually says, “Is Isaac on your lap?” At which point, I exclaim, “There he is!” and Rowan says, “He’s drinking milk. From your breast.”

So, at some point, our two-and-a-half-year-old mastered the concept of irony. He gets the difference between what is said and what is meant, or (I’m playing fast and loose with literary and other terms here, but what the hell) what is and what we say is, and why that’s sometimes funny. And I am somewhat in awe — and thrilled — that he gets this already.

And that difference — the difference between what is and what we say is — sums up a lot of what parenting is about for me the second time around. You could call it perspective. When Rowan was born, and through much of his infancy, everything seems so much bigger than it was, so much more important, so much scarier. If we didn’t sleep now, we weren’t ever going to sleep. If he cried, it was disaster. If we made one mistake, handled him at all incorrectly, we’d ruin the baby for ever more. (“Where’s Rowan?” “In therapy.”)

And with Isaac, it feels as though what is and what we say is going on seem a little bit closer to each other. If Isaac cries, he’s crying, period. And while we don’t enjoy it, we do our best to comfort him and get on with things. If we’re tired, or awakened, it’s more or less simply that, and eventually we’ll all get some sleep.

So, where is Isaac? Isaac is here, now — all 11 pounds and counting of him — and not in some imaginary land of worry and disaster. Isaac is adorable. Isaac is starting to smile, prefers to be held rather than put down, is losing his hair, and sometimes sleeps three hours at a stretch. It’s tiring, definitely, and often challenging, but here, ironically, is a better place than there.

Heart-shaped family

There is so much more to tell — the birth, for example — that it’s overwhelming. So I’m giving you a paragraph:

The morning after Isaac’s first full night, a mostly wakeful affair, as they have been. Rowan woke up earlier than usual, about 5:45 a.m. Rachel, bless her, tried to steer him downstairs so that I could sleep, but he wanted to come in to see me and baby Isaac, curled up like an apostrophe next to me. Rowan, enormous, piled in next to his brother, and Rachel next to him. And we lay there for awhile, two parents with our two sons between us, awash in exhaustion and sweetness. I stretched my toes towards Rachel’s, she her toes toward mine, and they met at the bottom of the bed, the tip of a heart.

Piranha

We’ve reached a key parenting milestone: the last baby tooth. Last week I managed to get a glimpse inside Rowan’s laughing mouth and saw it: the top, left, two-year-old molar, half emerged. I thought he’d been little grumpy.

When he was eight months old and cutting his first tooth, waking screaming, inconsolable in the night, I remember my own panic and despair, at the thought of this helplessness multiplied by 20 teeth. According to my calculations, he’d never not be teething, never not be this unpredictable, screaming, drooling bundle with bright red cheeks. I’m pretty sure that’s when we became big advocates of the Children’s Advil, with interim doses of Tempra. And gin.

And, like pretty much everything else I’ve despaired over thus far with parenting, the teeth arrived more or less just fine. Some were cause for wakeful nights, multiple nursing sessions in the rocker. Some popped out like popcorn, two and three at a time, with barely a cranky moment to show for the effort. “Hey,” one of the other of us would say, “I think he’s got another one.” As he transitioned from the grab-everything-and-stick-it-in-my-mouth baby stage to the toddler who refused to open his mouth when we asked, it became a guessing game. “Can you tell?” “Nope, can’t see a thing.”

And now, we’re done. Just like we’re done worrying about whether we’ll ever sleep again (until, that is, this babe in utero is born; I keep telling myself that we’ll have more perspective this time around), read a novel again, see a movie again, feel well rested. Just like we’ll be done diapers, kindergarten, high school. (The gin was for us, just in case you were worried.)

Now that Rowan has 20 teeth, big kid that he is, he wants to use them. Fortunately, most of the time he wants to talk about using them, although we’ve both been nipped now, and some of the furniture is suffering. Yesterday morning, it was my turn to sleep in (another luxury that will disappear for a while once we have two), and as I lay in bed I could hear bits of conversation between Rowan Rachel downstairs:

“I want to bite Mommy.”

“No, no biting Mommy.”

“I bite other Mommy.”

“No Rowan, no biting other Mommy. Just kissing, not biting.” Pause. “Oh, thank you for my kiss. What a nice kiss. No biting couch.”

Later that evening, we were having one of those “Rowan is going to be a big brother” conversations. Currently, he thinks he’s going to have a sister, and her name is going to be Jack.

“When you’re a big brother,” Rachel asked him, “what are you going to do with the baby?”

We went through some of the options: big brothers play with the baby, read to the baby, pat the baby gently on the head, sing to the baby, show the baby trains.

“Bite the baby?” asked Rowan.

Our current anti-biting strategy is to sit him down firmly on his butt and tell him, “No biting!” before walking away. I’ll get back to you on whether it works. This, too, will pass. Until then, pass the Tempra.

Hairy

It takes several days and two mothers to cut Rowan’s hair. I begin the process in the bathtub, slicking down his hair with a wet washcloth and baby comb while he plays with Styrofoam Dora letters — “Oh! This one S!” he says. “For Tico!” “Yes,” I say, “Tico is a squirrel.”

The trick is not to let him know he’s getting a haircut, to hide the scissors quickly behind my back whenever he turns around. The trick is also, of course, not to draw blood while at the same time making it look as though a reasonable adult with a steady hand — and not, say, another two-year-old — gave him a trim. We’ve learned the secret of cutting up, not across, but that doesn’t work so well for getting things straight at the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears. Mostly, I cut relatively blind. “Well,” I say to Rachel, later that night in bed, “he has a lot less hair now.” We’ll see in the morning, when it dries, if there are any overly egregious bald spots or wavy lines.

I am mostly concerned with cutting before Rowan develops a full-on mullet, before the hair grows so thick at the sides of his head that he begins to resemble a football — what I now term wide head. Rachel is more concerned about his bangs growing over his eyes, so she takes over the next day while Rowan circles the coffee table with his toy trains. She manages several passes with the scissors before he runs away. And now we can see his eyes and his forehead again. His head is once again suitably, sweetly narrowed. I’m struck, as I always am whenever we give him a trim, of both how tiny and how grown up he is. The back of his neck is a bit of a hash: we’ll need to find a way to even up the hairline, get rid of the fine down — monkey hair, I call it — beneath it. A razor? Do we dare?

A little while ago, I was pondering a blog entry called “The day before you get a haircut”: when you’re so excited to finally get to your stylist, only to look in the mirror and realize that your hair looks fantastic and you don’t want to get it cut. With the new baby due in six weeks, Rowan suddenly became even sweeter, sunnier, more fun, and I found myself wishing we had more time with him alone before forever altering the dynamic.

Fortunately, however, things seem to have shifted. Our sunny toddler has become recently, rabidly passionate about most decisions: putting on a hat, sunscreen, his shoes, going inside. As I sat on the sidewalk yesterday, holding him in my lap while pinning down his arms so that Rachel could wrestle his (carefully chosen, 100% organic cotton) hat on his wailing head (only to have him rip it off repeatedly, yelling “No no no no no no no no no!”), I got a close-up view of the back of his sweaty, sunburned, messy little neck. We’ll need to fix it up one of these days.