Slouching toward Achievement

This has been a good learning curve for me. I speak, of course, of swimming with Matteo.

He swam effortlessly last winter, though the toddler swim lessons I signed us up for in the spring weren’t so great. Marin and I would ponder this on a weekly basis, and from this distance I think it’s that Teo just has a built in skepticism (or self-doubt) which requires him to resist trying something he has just learned so that he can do it on his own when nobody’s watching, and then come back to do it when nobody’s expecting it.

This happens in singing – he demands that I not sing “his” songs in the car – and then later, in the silence, he’s singing them. Well, I might add. I inwardly rejoice, and sometimes try to join him, but he erupts again in fury. “NO. STOP.”

It happens in yoga moves that we do at “Sing and Dance” class. He refuses to do the frog, instead does the down-dog, and when everyone is doing the down-dog, he’s curled up in the rabbit. Cat? Yup, he’s doing the frog. If it’s a song when all the kids are siting in laps to get a bouncy horsey ride, he’s sitting beside me and won’t let me touch him. If it’s holding hands in a circle, he’s leading the boy-break-out, running highly “illegal” circles around the room.

I’ve recently taken to simply picking him up out of sleep at the waking hour in the morning. He actually embraces me around the neck, warm and sweetly surfacing from sleep, and we talk softly back and forth as I carry him upstairs to the couch. By then Marin is getting his first sippy cup of dilute juice-n-nurse (big deal is whether the added water is warm or cold, he’ll reject either if it arrives without consultation – he wears gloves to handle the stainless container if it’s a cold variety). There, recently, an instant transformation happens. He becomes almost violent, demanding that I go away. In the past two weeks, he’s grown remarkably rude, he claws himself off me, if I try to continue our conversation, he’s all “NO!” and pushing me off the couch, descending into inconsolable tears.

After a particularly egregious encounter Monday morning, which resulted, predictably, in tears of fury, I realized I’d had it. Firmly, quietly, I took him back down to his crib.

Five minutes later when I went down to retrieve him, he was saying, “I’m better, Papa.” And, “I’m sorry, Papa.” Very affecting. The rest of the morning was pretty good, he was gentle and thoughtful.

Drawing a boundary seems to awaken a different part of him. The controlling, demanding, nonverbal or shouty part of him may be unsettling even to Matteo when he gets a pass on it. “Can I be mean and sassy to my parents, and get away with it? No? Whew, great! Though I’m not in charge, these people I can mostly trust are.”

Learning, learning.

Anyway, later in the morning, when we got to swimming, he was leading with “I DON’T want to swim without my noodle.” Despite the fact that Marin and I had celebrated his Friday swimming accomplishments all weekend. (Friday he’d had significant jaunts off the noodle, though in the middle of the time there was a lot of unhappy clinging to me who had appropriated the noodle.)

We got into the water, Matteo scoping out and claiming the pink noodle. But I was determined that the noodle no longer be a symbol of “independence.” Want noodle? Get Papa. So I hung him around my neck and put my arms over his noodle, and that was the way I stayed the rest of the forty five minute swim.

And Teo swam away again and again, sometimes to the wall for a rest. But generally all over the place. It was clear he was beginning to realize that he floats whether he’s motivating or not, due to his fatty fanny pack of styrofoam.

The one time I tried to get off the noodle, since I really didn’t need it, depositing it on the side of the pool when he was looking the other direction, he immediately noticed my incipient deception, and went back into weepy mode. “My NOODLE. I WANT it.” So I had to go back on. I discovered that, with a noodle under my arms and a floaty ball between my knees, I tend to roll over on my face. I had to learn to do “kayak” rolls, by... oh who cares?

Anyway, there was the one time, like a ref, I decided he’d had enough time in the “penalty box” (i.e. hanging off the side watching other kids, doing nothing), and I invented the tickle fish. This creature of the deep hangs on a pink noodle and approaches prey with finger-like protrusions just visible above the water line. Once we got our interactive narrative worked out, instead of protesting and crying that I was invading his sacred personal space whenever I touched him, he started laughing hysterically and protesting dramatically, all in the frame of the story we were working on.

We spent most of the last 20 minutes playing out this story of tickle fish and Teo, laughing hysterically. We didn’t want to get out when the time was up.

Who knows if it’s a breakthrough for Teo. It was for me.

Poopy Party Politics and Pool

Obama’s taken the bait, Bill Clinton’s goal to roil O’s visionary campaign is working. Bob Sheer admonishes Arianna Huffington on (Santa Monica NPR) KCRW’s Left Right and Center never to imagine that anything those two Clintons do is random, unscripted. Will voters get sick when they realize they’re in for at least four more years of this Washington insider crap if the Dems win? Mitt Romney says the worst thing of it would be having Bill rattling around the White House with nothing to do. Think of it.

Will America then (lacking a “change” candidate in the Dem’s Obama) go for the yellow-ribbons-of-patriotism candidate, McCain, just to “avoid admitting we were wrong after all in Iraq,” yielding another version of the Washington as usual game. See Frank Rich on Clinton/McCain.

Certainly it’s good news that Guiliani is running way behind, if not down and out, in Florida. The New York Times outed him today as vindictive and mean spirited. Whew, just in the nick of time. Even as the NYT threw support to McCain and Clinton. What?!

Looks like it’s all downhill from here. I feel like I felt after 2004 when Bush was swiftboating Kerry. What a mean spirited country we live in. While we do terrible things in Iraq, and to the environment, and to the poor, and to the Mexicans, and to the economy.

More than ever, we need someone who could bring us a New Deal.

Well, how about my other fixation, Matteo? He goes into swimming this morning giving no quarter to those of us who hope he’ll get off the noodle and swim with arms free.

But we get to the pool early, and Carolyn, the staff person who gives him candy canes, is in the water instead of on the side. Of course, he won’t come in to her. “Papa!”

After he gets his floaty pack on, he demands the green noodle. And kicks around for a while.

But then, somehow, after five minutes, he lets me eject him out on the side, he drops the noodle beside him at his feet, and jumps in, into my arms. He doesn’t instantly freak out. So I set him loose – noodle-free – as Carolyn (now on the side above us) and I both gush our amazement. He tools around like a sea captain in his element, not a care in the world. Carolyn catches my eye, and we’re both like, what just happened, anyway?

It doesn’t last. The noodle is called for, and recovered, and he reattaches. I play with the big ball, splashing like a whale as I leap out to make stunning catches. I get bored, and decide it’s time to re-engage. I move in.

There’s a teary interregnum during which he refuses to give up the noodle, and I stick to him. We become a poopy-party of sorrow and doom. It doesn’t end up being much fun having the noodle anymore, if it comes with a Papa clinging to it. This state of affairs lasts 20 minutes, half the pool time. During which I extricate him from the noodle. But it’s only when another mom and baby claim it, that the loss results in more tears and hopelessness.

And ends abruptly. “I’m better now,” he announces, and pushes off to swim to a ball floating by. He gets it, and swims around with a ducky in one hand, the green ball in the other, for the rest of the time.

New Deal?

Sterling Courage / Christmas Day 7

Sterling, my Papa, was born this last day of the year, in 1918. He’d be eighty-nine today. He died of complications related to Alzheimers in 2000. You could say, complications related to motorcycling. He and my mom banged their heads big time in 1991, running their BMW into another biker at a rural stop sign my dad missed. I am thinking about him, I guess, because my Mom just died in October (see blog entry, November 9), same ailment, same complications.

And the end of the year is here, an assessment of things.

I’m in the pool at Mary Siah. Matteo is clinging to my shoulders, and I’m trying to dislodge my disappointment. Last two times in the pool, he let me pull him by the two hands on his styro-noodle. Those times I’ve gotten him to let go of my neck by coaxing him to jump from the side of the pool.

This time he won’t let go. For thirty minutes, I sing Christmas carols bouncing in a dizzying circle, with Matteo clinging to me. One by one the other families come in, one-year-olds letting their moms pull them around and laughing. Two-year-olds paddling around (like Teo did last winter, totally ignoring me) either with a noodle under their arms, or not.

In the back of my head I hear Scott Noelle reminding me to celebrate what Matteo comes up with, instead of clutching what I was hoping for. I hear other parents telling me I’ll miss it when Matteo finally dumps me, I’ll miss him cheek-to-cheek with me in the pool singing songs, laughing, licking each others faces, blowing farts on his neck when he isn’t looking.

I tell him to be brave, come on, climb up on the side, jump in the water. He won’t. "Float with papa." No!

I’m thinking, okay, why am I so disappointed. I guess because I’m so proud of him when he takes risks, and so,,, anxious? when he seems to doubt his abilities. He was doing this so easily and with confident gusto last year, totally without a noodle, swimming all the way across the pool. I worry, I guess. Does this regression mean something?

"Be brave," I urge him. "Look the little girl is being brave, she’s jumping in, watch, one, two, three, there she goes." He did this last Friday. Not today, apparently.

What did my father do that helped me be brave? Was my father brave? Am I brave? Are there any pools I’m standing on the side of, courageously jumping into? There’s the second child we’re preparing for, but that’s something nearly everyone manages. Sure, it takes gumption, but there’s a lot of support out there as well.

When I was talking to friends on the phone last night, thinking out loud whether it’s worth the investment of time to keep up on current events and current thinking about the state of our country and our outlook for the future, both of them responded instantly, "It’s all about local." It reminded me of how much a role one can play as an individual in these small Alaskan communities, and their hometown of Sitka is probably less than a tenth of the size of Fairbanks. And both of them are very engaged in Sitka’s future.

I do care deeply about our nation, and how things have skidded off track. But I’m doing little more than talking about what’s wrong and what could change. I’m not changing anything.

Bob Herbert, columnist for the New York Times, had a piece today, "the American Dream, Betrayed." It turns out that people used to expect to do as well as or better than their parents, economically, but for the young, it’s not an expectation anymore. I sense this happening, not just in terms of jobs and housing, but also in terms of the land, the sea, the air. Plus, there’s a lot more questionable chemistry going into Matteo as a 3-year-old than ever went into me at the same age.

And then there’s the big question about what will come after Peak Oil. Marin and I hosted some best friends for Christmas brunch a couple days ago, and while Marin and Teo napped, a subset of the party, Jen and Ian, Al and Michelle, and I continued talking about our take on things. In their mid thirties, both couples have built their own homes, and both couples are thinking of building again. Al and Michelle have some gorgeous land outside Healy, and Jen and Ian were thinking of buying closer in to Fairbanks.

Now both are re-thinking, because of Peak Oil, the soft economy, and the challenge of a future in a very cold (warming, actually) place, where food costs could easily soar out of reach of the middle class since every morsel has to be flown in from 3,000 miles away. There’s a certain pioneer courageousness to look directly at the radical changes which will likely result, and begin to plan.

We talked and talked. Soon, Marin, Teo and I had to leave for a dinner engagement, so we turned our house over to our friends, and it turned out that they continued the conversation about the challenging future and how their plans and hopes were eroding, and changing for another three hours.

What kind of courage Teo will need! He eventually kicked backed off from clinging to the side of the pool, and said, "lookit, Papa, I’m floating." Soon he let me pull him around by the hands, and he was grinning. "You’re swimming, Matteo! Wait till we tell Mama!"

What a challenge, raising kids. Thanks, Papa Sterling.