How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane

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How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Page 7

by Johanna Stein


  THREE YEARS, ONE MONTH

  She wore a tutu for five straight days, at which point it started to smell like an old, rotting fish net. And then I caught her wearing my bra. True, she was wearing it on her head, but I attribute this to her poor hand-eye coordination more than anything else.

  Also, the child has become obsessed with wearing makeup. I have tried to express to her that, for me, makeup is primarily for spackling purposes, but this has not swayed her from habitually attempting to paint her face like some two-bit, pull-up-wearing floozy.

  When we moved a few months ago, the husband insisted that the child be allowed input into redecorating her room. As a result, her bedroom now has pink walls, pink sheets, and a pink light fixture. It looks like someone ground up a bunch of flamingos into a paste and flung it on her walls.

  Today she asked me if she looks cute when she’s sleeping. My immediate, unedited response, “No. You’re hideous.” It didn’t hurt her feelings—on the contrary, she simply chose not to believe me. So, on a positive note, her self-esteem is rock solid. On the other hand: GROSS.

  FOUR YEARS AND CHANGE

  On Halloween it really seemed as though we were making progress. Though she’d asked to be Cinderella for her preschool Halloween party (ugh), she also expressed a desire to go trick-or-treating as Spider-Man (yay!). This was a decided win, though in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have shouted, “HELL, YEAH!!!!”

  I made my way to the mall, where I found a top-notch Spider-Man costume, the last one at the store. Another mother tried to wrest it from my hands, but I wasn’t about to give it up. She even made her son ask me for it (seriously, lady, how desperate can you be, shoving your crying kid at me?), but I think the experience will serve him well—he should learn that life is filled with disappointment.

  When I awoke on Halloween morning, the kid was already dressed in a homemade Cinderella outfit she’d cobbled together (blue towel, dishwashing gloves, tinfoil crown, and “magic toilet paper wand”). Unnerved, I held out the Spider-Man outfit, but she shook her head and said she’d “changed her mind.” I bit my tongue and let her wear the damn princess outfit to preschool. It was later, when she got home from school and refused to change into her Spider-Man costume for the evening’s festivities, that I may have lost my cool. I won’t divulge exactly what went down, except to say that strong words were spoken, tears were released, and a twenty-minute time-out was given (to me; by me).

  All of which is to explain how I found myself, the following morning, filled with a form of regret that can be purged only by driving to the mall and purchasing a fully licensed Cinderella costume, complete with a real fake wand and Lucite slippers. Yes, it was a hard pill to swallow, but at least the gown is blue. The look on the kid’s face when I gave it to her—that did help the pill go down. And the 25 percent off post-Halloween discount—that paid for the pill.

  CONCLUSION

  Despite my attempts to mold the girl in my Manly Lady image, it seems that it is not to be. She’s proven herself to be a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess, a fact that baffles me, as all I’ve ever wanted is for her to be her own woman (unless that woman is a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess). So rather than impose my will on her—as righteous and correct as I still believe it to be—I have chosen to stand down and abandon OFTP, and instead will look upon this as a “learning experience”: she may be my daughter—but in the end, she’s her own person.

  We all have dreams for our kids, until the day we discover that their dreams are not ours to have. And though you may pray that your daughter becomes a judo–black belt, multilingual engineering student at Yale, she just may end up the second-highest-paid stripper at “Cheeks’ Bar and Grill.” And I guess, as long as she’s happy, there’s nothing wrong with that.* † ‡

  *I.e., Gender-wise; species-wise we were pretty clear on what to expect.

  *A phrase I like to use when talking about people whose opposing beliefs are both (a) different from mine and (b) 100 percent wrong.

  *I still can’t explain why he used the terminology of Hustler magazine, but I’m just going to stick with the assumption that he thought we were cool enough to handle it.

  *Fact: I am known in some circles as a Manly Lady.

  *Please see Appendix A.

  *Look, I’ve heard about all those studies linking physical attractiveness to professional success, and if she can sail through life on her looks, then I guess that bodes well for my husband and me and the quality of retirement home that she’ll eventually stick us into. But for the sake of her humanity, I’d still rather she were a little more nerdy/awkward/homely/ dorky. Not just because all of those words have described me at one time or another (also now), but because I’ve heard it straight from the mouths of “babes” (i.e., the grown-lady kind) that their striking good looks often make life more—not less—difficult (i.e., problems with female friendships, men feeling intimidated by them, the world not taking them seriously). This being so, two rhetorical questions: (1) Is it too much to hope that my child could learn to get along in life solely on her personality, intelligence, and pluck? And (2) would I be going too far in considering physically disfiguring her? Just wondering.

  *As long as she’s your kid.

  † ( Just kidding.)

  ‡ (No, I’m not)

  ten

  MY BODIES, MYSELF

  She woke up screaming “STEEZIN DA QUOZIT! STEEZIN DA QUOZIT!” After a few minutes of rocking and snot wrangling, I was able to get to the root of it. She’d had a nightmare about Steve. The guy from Blues Clues. She thought he was hiding in her closet.

  This brought me great joy.

  Now, it’s true that I have always been attracted to “Steve”—the host of this mind-numbing Nickelodeon show—to the point that (a) I did place an eBay bid on, and after a hair-raising bidding war did win, the entire series of Blues Clues on DVD, and then (b) summarily discarded the single disc containing the episodes hosted by Steve’s replacement, “Joe,” whose round face and lack of charisma make me want to punch something.

  But the pleasure I felt after my three-year-old’s first night terror had nothing to do with Steve, my not-so-secret future second husband.

  It was all about her and me.

  Until that moment I’d had no sense that she shared any of my genetic material, despite the fact that she was conceived inside my body and did, indeed, shoot out of my loins like a cannonball.

  Back when she was growing in my belly, I’d imagine the little girl she’d become. In my wildest fantasies she was somewhere between Little Miss Sunshine and that kid from Welcome to the Dollhouse: a chubby, nerdy, socially awkward little dork. Sometimes I’d toss in a little deformity, like a clubfoot, a lazy eye, or a third nipple growing out of her face. She would be my Beautiful Little Underdog™.

  Instead, I gave birth to a Disney princess who looks like we stole her from a pair of privileged and well-adjusted Swedish downhill skiers.

  I am on the short side with a laugh like a pellet gun and a head full of frizzy hair that looks like something a cat threw up. And while I find my husband attractive, he frequently describes his appearance as that of a thumb. Our daughter, on the other hand, is gorgeous and girlish, with almond-shaped blue eyes, silky blonde hair, and long, willowy legs that come up to my Adam’s apple. If I hadn’t witnessed with my own two eyes the sight of her punching her way out of my vagina like some character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, I wouldn’t have believed she was ours . . . or, more specifically, mine.

  But that night, after seeing her in the throes of boogeyman terror, I began to see that perhaps she is a bit more like me than I thought.

  My first boogeyman’s name was Norman, and he hid under my bed. I can’t take credit for inventing him—he was not so loosely based on a friend of the family, a mild-mannered tax attorney with long, slender hands. It may sound silly, but trust me: when you’re four years old, the specter of a grown man preparing tax returns under you
r bed while you sleep is terrifying.

  After my parents took me to see Night of the Living Dead—when I was seven (note to self: check statute of limitations with Child Protective Services)—Norman the Boogeyman evolved into a never-ending slew of random dead guys. And the under-my-bed part was replaced by the whole world. That pile of leaves? A cover for a rotting cadaver. That upright freezer by the side of the road? Filled with bodies chopped up and stacked like logs. Attics, closets, crawl spaces, porta-potties—all were fair game for my corpse-based fears.

  Perhaps this is where my daughter and I diverge?

  Perhaps not.

  The kid is in her little girly room, diligently focused on drawing a picture. “What’s that?” I ask. “Is that a kitty and a doggy hugging?”

  “NO,” she says. “IT’S TWO VAMPIRES. THEY’RE EATING EACH OTHER. SEE? THAT’S THE BLOOD!”

  My immediate instinct is to correct her and point out that she’s way off base with this one: vampires are not the same as zombies—they don’t eat flesh; they suck blood. Everybody knows that—it’s a pretty basic distinction. And even if they did eat flesh, how could they eat each other simultaneously? It doesn’t even make sense. Then I remember—she’s only three. Such subtleties would only be lost on her. Instead, I praise her for how well she’s coloring inside the lines.

  I grew up in Winnipeg, which is a Cree word meaning “Mucky Waters,” in a house on the banks of the Red River, the very mucky waters for which the city was named.

  Friends were in short supply the summer after seventh grade. I was no longer speaking with Theresa Spak, not since she’d disputed my claim that I’d invented the euphemisms “Number One” and “Number Two” for discussing bodily functions. “Somebody invented it. Why is it so hard to believe it was me?” I’d screamed over mayonnaise sandwiches. (Years later I would come to realize that I was wrong, but by then there was too much Number One under the bridge to do anything about it.)

  Then there was Elena Hrabiuk, a girl I’d met at orchestra camp. Elena had wide-set eyes and usually smelled of fried pierogi. Seeing that my only alternative was to spend the afternoon with my brother Aaron while he belched “This Land Is Your Land” at my face, I called Elena and invited her over.

  We hung out in my room for forty-five minutes or so, crying to the greatest hits of Air Supply. After the batteries in my boom box died, we went out to the backyard, where my dad was standing over the barbecue, swearing at a plate of raw hamburger. My dad was once a radical hippie, and back in the day he had marched at Berkeley, but now he was living on the Canadian prairies and the only remnants of his hippie past were the three hits of acid chilling in the refrigerator crisper. He suggested we “go play down by the river.” Since Elena was raised in eastern Europe and unfamiliar with the concept of sarcasm, she led the way.

  We climbed down the bank through the slimy grass and muck and jumped onto our neighbor’s dock.

  The Paddlewheel Queen chugged past for its daily afternoon cruise. We jumped up and down, waving and yelling obscenities at the boat whose passengers consisted of a few drunken old ladies and some handicapped kids from a nearby group home. The boat sent a ripple of waves toward the dock, disturbing the dark water. My eye caught something floating, maybe fifty feet out. I picked up a rock and threw it at the object, nailing it.*

  The object pitched and bobbed slowly with the weight of something dense.

  I decided instantly that it was a human head.

  I opened my mouth to call for my father, then stopped. Instinctively, I knew that this would go over like a lead turd due to my reputation as “The Little Girl Who Cried Corpse.”

  I looked again. There was no way I was imagining this one. That floating head was so obviously the real deal, it made all my other dead-body hunches seem like the ramblings of a madwoman.

  I yelled for him. “Dad!”

  No answer.

  I called again. “Dad!”

  Finally, a response. “Fuck off, I’m cooking!”

  Elena looked confused—there was no time to explain to her the intricacies of my family, or the fact that my father was likely stoned at that very moment. She took off in the direction of her house while I ran up the grassy slope, up to the barbecue, where my father was attempting to swat a bug with a greasy spatula.

  I spoke carefully, “Dad, I need to show you something. We—I . . . I found a head.”

  A tiny piece of hamburger flew off his fly-swatting spatula and hit me in the cheek. I gave him a serious look, the kind I’d seen Lucy Ewing give J. R. numerous times.

  “Dad. Please.”

  “Oh, for chrissake—all right, let’s go.”

  I led him down to the dock and pointed to the bobbing head in the water.

  My dad squinted at it. “That? It’s just a piece of driftwood. Probably upturned by that fascist with the speedboat.” I begged him to look again.

  My dad considered it. “I guess I could call the River Patrol. It’ll give me a chance to register a complaint about that fascist bastard.”

  He called, and in twenty minutes two mustachioed officers pulled up in a motorboat. I waved frantically, pointing to the spot where my detached head was bobbing. Mustache Number One drove the boat, circling around my soon-to-be-validated discovery. Mustache Number Two lowered a length of rope into the murky sludge and then, hand over hand, pulled the rope back into the boat.

  On the end of the rope was not a head, but an entire friggin body.

  I held my breath while they lifted the old man’s corpse into the boat and then drove it over to the dock, where they laid him out. Pressing every wrinkly crease of my brain into service, I recorded the details of the unfolding event: The red-and-white-plaid shirt. The bald head that held a few soggy wisps, just above each ear. The brown leather shoe and leg brace on the right foot, and the shoeless black sock on the left.

  One of the officers pulled a wallet from the dead guy’s pocket. He opened it and retrieved a water-logged driver’s license that showed an address just three blocks away. I caught sight of a huge wad of cash, possibly as much as twenty dollars, then wondered if my “finder’s keepers” status would be legally binding when it came to claiming the money.

  A couple of houses over was a tiny strip of public land where they found a cane and some muddy footprints at the river’s edge. “Looks like he just fell in, eh?” said Mustache Number Two. As his partner radioed a call back to the precinct, my family started back up to the house to eat dinner. I was stunned. “How can you eat? There’s a dead man in our yard!” My dad shrugged. “Ask him what he wants on his burger,” he said as he walked up the steps and then pulled the sliding screen door shut behind him.

  I stayed with the River Patrol until two more official-looking men with mustaches showed up, put the body onto a stretcher, and carried it to a plain white van in our driveway.

  As the van pulled away I sat on the curb and pondered my future. Surely, I’d be getting a call from the police for my minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the whole body-finding event. Then I’d probably hear from Sylvia Kuzyk, the anchor lady from CKY-TV, with a request for an interview. I ran my fingers through my hair and silently cursed my mother for not letting me get my ears pierced now that I was going to be famous.

  Sylvia didn’t call. The police didn’t call. Nobody called.

  But that was okay. I didn’t need their public recognition. I had something better and more lasting: sweet vindication. I wasn’t weird for thinking dead bodies were everywhere. Turns out I was right all along.

  So back to my Steve-fearing toddler. Maybe it was a onetime deal. Maybe a nightmare about a sexy, balding children’s TV host is just that: a nightmare about a sexy, balding children’s TV host. And yeah, maybe it’s premature to be connecting the dots from a three-year-old’s vision of a Nickelodeon television star with oddly sensual sloping shoulders to a lifetime of searching for corpses.

  Or maybe it’s a sign. A sign that she carries my gene. The body-finding one.


  And maybe that’s all she inherited from me. She may not share the disturbingly long, three-knuckled second toe that I possess, or my irrational fear of pigeons, but these differences don’t make me love her any less. I can promise one thing: when she says, “Mom, I think there’s a face staring up at me from the toilet,” she’s going to find me standing by her side with an understanding ear. And a camera, just in case she’s right. Because it’s a big world out there, and it’s filled with corpses. And they’re not going to find themselves. They need us, my daughter and me.

  *Which is odd for me, since I throw like a girl with no arms.

  eleven

  TWENTY-NINE THINGS I HAVE LOST SINCE BECOMING A PARENT

  1.Nipples that point in the same direction.

  2.Bladder control when I sneeze, laugh, do jumping jacks, or stand up from a seated position.

  3.The desire to party, unless said partying involves lying on a couch watching old episodes of Hart to Hart while spraying a can of Redi-Whip into my mouth in short, steady bursts.

  4.The nail on my big toe, after angrily kicking a semifunctional Diaper Genie and telling it (unironically) to “EAT SHIT!”

  5.My memory of the last time my bras were washed. (Nearest estimate, spring 2011.)

  6.The ability to stay awake in a movie theater. Or while watching a TV show after six o’clock. Or while reading an e-mail. Or right now . . .

  7.My virginity. (Just making sure at least one of us is paying attention.)

  8.The capacity to wake up at 5 a.m. to go for a jog.

  9.All credibility for implying that there was ever a time that I woke up at 5 a.m. to go for a jog.

  10.The combination to locker 623 at the gym that I have been paying forty-five dollars a month since November 2007 to use, but which I have not actually set foot inside since March 2008.

 

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