Children: August 2009 Archives

Caleb turns five today. In fact, he was born almost exactly five years ago right now: 10:56 pm on August 24. He doesn't want to be five--or rather, yesterday he didn't want to be five, but this morning he woke me up (6:43) to say that "today is my birthday and i love you mommy and where are my presents?" 

Getting pregnant with Caleb felt a little bit miraculous (after all, I'd had a preemie, a miscarriage, and was pushing forty) and I was hell-bent on the process being as "normal" as possible. I was going natural childbirth, VBAC all the way. I thought about getting myself a varsity letter jacket with those letters across the front, but it was August and too damn hot.

Because of those risk factors, though, when I first got pregnant, I was a mess. I had ongoing nightmares about dead babies and I was sure it meant that Caleb had died in utero: a dream in which a long line of people trolled through shallow waters, looking for a drowned child and then a man came wading towards me, a crumpled boy-body in his arms; a dream in which  I had to watch Liam get electrocuted; a dream in which the baby was falling out the window and I couldn't quite grasp the hem of his little undershirt as he slid through my hands. Those kinds of nightmares: the kind where you have to tiptoe into the room of your sleeping child to make sure he's breathing. The kind of nightmares that felt so ominous I called the long-suffering, amazing Sylvie, who let me come into her office without an appointment so that I could listen to Caleb's hummingbird heartbeat and be reassured that he was still alive and thriving. 

When I finally went into labor,  I didn't know what it was. I hadn't gone into labor with Liam, so I thought at first I was just having standard pregnant-lady digestive issues, the details of which I will leave to your imagination. Finally--after a long night on the couch wondering what the hell was wrong with me, I figured it out: oh right....I'm having a baby. So we were very excited and Husband I and went off to the hospital, sure that in a few hours, we'd have our new little baby and all would be right with the world.

Well okay, so you'd think we'd have learned from almost four years of parenting that nothing goes as planned: Caleb didn't come. He didn't come and I figured out that the whole natural childbirth thing doesn't work if, like me, you're a chickenshit about pain. After an hour or so of contractions, I was all hell yeah, let's get that epidural!  Which I did, and then I spent a lovely five or six hours flipping through magazines, and watching the monitor indicate that I was having a contraction. I even apologized to Husband, who had been prepared for a more active role than that of fetcher-of-Vogue.

And then I don't know what happened--the epidural wore off, maybe? Or maybe what I experienced--the physical enactment of the sound velcro makes when it's peeled apart--was birth on epidural, which means that women who give birth with no drugs are heroic, amazing creatures who could probably do sword-swallowing in their free time. Six oclock, seven oclock, eight oclock, no baby. Then somewhere in the depths of all those squishy birthing sounds, I heard a sharp crack, and then, finally, finally, Caleb came into the world.

My early pregnancy nightmares came back to haunt me one more time, that night, after I'd been wheeled into my hospital room and Caleb had been whisked off to the nursery. Drifting into sleep, I heard two nurses walk by, talking about a problem with my baby. I clambered out of bed and staggered to the nurses station like a lunatic, insisting that something was wrong with my baby. The nurses--perhaps used to this sort of insanity--walked me to the nursery and showed me my little burrito, wrapped in his hospital blanket, sound asleep. I'd completely hallucinated the entire conversation.

The hallucinations didn't return, but it took me a long time to recover from that sharp cracking noise I'd heard during labor: my almost nine-pound child had broken my tailbone in his push to be born, which apparently happens more than you might think. And you know what can be done for a broken tailbone? Absolutely nothing. I now know without a shadow of a doubt that you cannot, in fact, put your ass in a sling.

My tailbone recovered, my nightmares went away, and now here we are, in another hot sweaty August. Caleb doesn't have much toddler left in him, anymore; he's gotten longer this summer, lithe and agile. It's unsettling to look at the set of his shoulders or the curve of his cheek and see glimmers of the man he's going to be--and when he settles into my lap and puts his head on my neck, I realize how much I miss the warm heft of a baby's body, the soft curl of fingers around a hand.

Today Caleb didn't mind that he was turning five--but I did.

Sunday, August 23. 7:13A.M.  I am sound asleep

Sunday, August 23, 7:14A.M. "I DON'WANNA GO TO KINDERGARTEN."

Caleb is standing next to my pillow, bellowing into my ear.

I am awake.

Public school in NYC doesn't start until September 9, almost three weeks away, but Caleb has twigged to the fact that after he turns five (which he does on Monday), kindergarten follows close behind, and he wants to make absolutely clear his resistance to entering the educational pipeline.

I opened one sleepy eye at my still-four-year-old son and offer this really supportive comment: "Don't start the day complaining, please. Go somewhere else. Mommy's sleeping."

Good thing I've started therapy savings accounts for both my children, in lieu of college accounts. I figure they're bright, they'll get into colleges with scholarships (or else Daddy can't ever, ever quit his job at the university, so that we can have get that big-time tuition discount). But  there aren't scholarships for therapy (merit-based? need-based? oh-my-god-your-parents-did-such-a-number-on-you-I-will-pay-you-to-start-therapy-based) so I figured we should start socking away the dineros now.

In an effort to alleviate Caleb's anxieties about kindergarten--and because I'm not really the world's worst mommy, I just play one on TV--when Caleb finished nursery school this June, we tried a little summer day camp program for a few weeks, figuring he could start getting used to new stuff. It seemed to work: he loved his teacher ("Rita is the best teacher in the world!"), made a few new friends, delighted in carrying his own backpack ("I can do it, Mommy!"). Yeah, okay, so Rita said he was a Luca Brasi in training, but other than that, the experiment seemed to be a success.

Plus that, we've read all those going-to-kindergarten picture books: Froggy Goes to School, Franklin goes to School, Yoko...all of 'em. Read so many of them that when I told Caleb that our next-door-neighbor had a new book for him about kindergarten, he said, throwing his arms over his head, "NO! Not another kindergarten book!"  Of course, thirty seconds later, he was all can we go next door and get my book?  Patsy offered him a classic called Will I Have A Friend (first published in 1969) and we've read it a gazillion times.

He liked the books, he liked the day camp, he likes to make friends.

But he's not going to kindergarten.

I said--trying that clever reverse psychology that never works the way you want it to--that he could go back to nursery school, but that all his friends were going to kindergarten, so they wouldn't be there.

He didn't like that idea. So no, no, no he wasn't going back to nursery school. But he wasn't going to kindergarten.

I feel his pain, even though Caleb's temper tantrums are exasperating, to say the least. My semester starts tomorrow, and the idea of going back to classrooms and uninspired (and uninspiring) students in what feels like mid-August makes me seriously crabby.

It's hard to assuage the anxiety of a five-year old: all those "long-term" consolations (you'll make friends, you want to learn to read, you liked the school when we visited it last spring) carry absolutely no weight whatsoever. And then there's the part where a small piece of me can't help thinking that he's right: kindergarten is going to suck, compared to nursery school; and for that matter, aging ain't no picnic either. So maybe he's right to insist that he is not going to turn five but will just remain four, in perpetuity.

Do any of us really rush out to embrace change for its own sake? Don't most of us cling to our little cow-paths of habit for as long as we possibly can, until forced by circumstance into another direction?

Caleb knows that change is coming and he doesn't like it.

I just wish he'd wait until after I've had my coffee to tell me so.