by Jim Lindberg
Why do we like toddlers so much when they can be such a struggle to deal with? First of all, they’re just cute as hell. They have none of the repulsive things that come with age; wrinkles, acne, liver spots, back hair, etc. Secondly, their whole existence is about having fun. They just wander around the house looking for things to play with or fun things to explore, and they can get hours of enjoyment out of everyday household objects like a broom or a toilet paper roll. They don’t know anything about war or poverty or death or any of the things that keep us up all night worrying. Imagine if we intelligent adults could keep this mind-set throughout our entire lives. Instead of wanting to go to war with Russia, we would call them up and ask them if they wanted to come over and play instead.
As much fun as the toddler is, though, they can be equally, catastrophically frustrating, to the point that it drives me into the garage looking for the hidden pack of cigarettes I don’t smoke anymore. This is the beginning of a child’s sense of independence when they begin establishing their will to do things their own way, and, like adults, they can become drunk with power. You’re proud when your kid says, “I do it,” the first time they want to open the door themselves or pull up their own trousers, but less so when, from that point on, they insist on pouring their own milk all over the table, buttoning each of the six hundred buttons on their jacket, and taking three hundred years to climb into the car seat and buckle themselves in when you’re in a hurry. I tried to look at these as important growth skills they were developing, and not devious tactics Satan had given them to mess with my head, so I could save my brain and liver a lot of trouble.
I’M GOING FOR A WALK
When our kids were around a year old and had been crawling around on the floor on hands and knees and gingerly pulling themselves up onto coffee tables, of course we started to wonder when they were going to take their first steps. Invariably this was when some a-hole parent would come over with their one-year-old who was walking already and say, “Oh, your little one isn’t walking yet? My little Johnny has been walking since he was six months old. I guess some kids aren’t as advanced as others. I’m sure your little one won’t be crawling around on all fours like a barnyard animal forever.” Did I mention yet that other parents suck?
After going through it with daughter number one, we were never in a huge hurry for our kids to take their first steps, because when they do start walking it’s about one hundred times harder to keep track of them, and walking leads to climbing and falling, and you’ll never be able to take your eye off them again for the next several years. When they are only crawling, you can rest assured they aren’t going to walk over to the stove, reach up, and grab the pot of boiling water or flip on the wall heater because they can’t reach anything too dangerous yet. You also don’t have to worry they’re going to open the front door and walk out into oncoming traffic.
Once our kids finally did get up the nerve to try taking a few steps on their own, it opened up a whole new world for them, and a whole new can of headaches for us, but it’s great seeing their obvious pride at their accomplishment. On the night in our tiny living room when a toddling daughter number one released herself from her mom’s clutches and took her first few shakily balanced steps toward me across the carpet, with an ear-to-ear grin on her face, it was like meeting her for the first time all over again. Kids are somewhat prehuman until they are bipedaling around like the rest of us, and they must sense that groveling around on the floor makes them less than a full-fledged citizen of the household. Daughter number one had this new sense of pride and was soon spending most of her time roaming around the house all self-assured and cocky, looking at all the areas she couldn’t see as lowly floor dweller.
Kid-proofing your house is an ongoing task for parents and probably ends with you securing the liquor cabinet when they’re teenagers and moving all your savings into offshore accounts when they’re looking to buy a house. My kids’ new ambulatory state meant that we needed to keep the house picked up a little more from our usual state of chaos and triple-check all the dangerous areas where they could get into trouble. New walkers don’t just go from crawling on the carpet to strutting like a runway model overnight. They’re always about one wobble away from a face plant. There were months and months of cart-wheeling spills, tumbling falls, and gravity-defying backflips, so keeping their walking area as free from toy debris as possible and padding the sharp edges of the furniture went a long way in reducing our emergency room bill.
“LEARNED TO WALK WHILE I WAS AWAY”
When we’re out on the road doing our own shows, there’s not much to do all day before the show, so instead of hanging around the venue at sound check and listening to the drum tech pound the kick drum over and over until the constant pounding becomes a constant pounding in my head, or being tortured by Fletcher plucking out poorly played renditions of “Crazy Train” and “Enter Sandman,” at earsplitting volume as he tweaks his guitar sound, trying every conceivable variation of distortion only to end up using the exact same settings he uses every night, I like to take a walk around and check out the sights of whatever city we’re in. I usually just wander around and try to pick out a cheap toy or “Hard Rock Amsterdam” T-shirt for the kids and take pictures of anything stupid I see. It doesn’t take long to figure out that this is just another dumb city with the same dumb stores, and no matter where you are on the planet, downtown there’s always a Starbucks, a Subway, and a McDonald’s, then a jewelry store, an arcade, a strip club, a few clothing stores, and, of course, the tourist trap store with postcards and beach towels and rubber sandals and ceramic pineapple ashtrays, and walking around in circles for two hours, I find that the succession of these desperate establishments just repeats itself over and over until I start to feel slightly nauseous.
I get back to the hotel and see the pamphlets in the lobby for all the fun things I should be doing in the city. Ride the rapids in an inflatable boat! Take a tram up to the mountaintop for fabulous views of the city! Careen around the lake on a hovercraft! Visit the wax museum! Rent a convertible Jeep and tour the area looking like a total asshole! All these things would take time and effort and money and waiting in lines and cab rides and interacting with humanity, and I consider for a second if the one minute of exhilaration would be worth the investment of time and money as I’m pushing the elevator button to my floor to go lay down and watch Oprah dubbed into German.
Eventually I call my wife at home and even though it’s midday for me, it’s bed time for them and she tells me I missed quite a lot today. Daughter number two had a soccer game and scored all three goals for her team, and afterward, when my wife asked her if she was proud of herself she said, “Yeah, but I wish Daddy was here to see it.” Even better, though, after the game they were in the living room and number three took her first few steps unassisted! Instantly the words to that old Harry Chapin song, “…learned to walk while I was away,” started echoing in my head, about a guy being too busy with work and missing out on his kids’ childhood. I used to listen to the song over and over as a kid myself when my own dad was off on business and missed one of my little league games, and while Jennifer’s talking about how great it was and how proud she was of herself walking across the room for the first time, the lyrics keep repeating in my head, until my heart sinks like a heavy rock into my stomach and doesn’t leave there for the rest of the day.
Then the oldest daughter picks up the phone and she’s reading a book but she says that her sister kicked her today, but in the background number two screams that “SHE SCRATCHED ME FIRST!” and then number one says, “DID NOT,” and then they repeat “DID NOT!” “DID TOO!” “DID NOT!” “DID TOO!” “DID NOT!” “DID TOO!” about fifty times. I coax her back onto the phone and remind her of our deal that if they get along real good for Mommy while I’m gone, I’ll take them to Disneyland or Lego Land or something with a land on the end of it when I get back, but if they fight a lot, well, then I’ll just take the toys I bought them while I’ve
been traveling and give them to some orphan kids. They both scream, “NO!” and promise me they’ll be good and won’t fight. I ask where Mom is and they say she’s unloading the dryer or the dishwasher and then say the little one really wants to talk to me, and she grabs the phone and starts saying, “Da-da, Da-da” into the listening end and then her voice kind of trails off as something else catches her eye and she forgets that I’m on the phone and just drops it on the carpet and wanders off somewhere. I sit on the carpet for a while and listen to her talking to her Barbies and note that the older two have stopped fighting and I can hear they’re watching That’s So Raven in the background. From ten thousand miles away I close my eyes and pretend I’m sitting in the room with them and try to see if I can telepathically materialize myself home like in Star Trek, but after a while I open them and look around and I’m still in the crappy hotel room watching Oprah and wondering what the hell I’m doing here.
Later on that day I have to do a radio interview with some young asshole scenester guy in perfectly unkempt thrift store clothes, mod hair, and unironic 1970s sideburns, who keeps commenting about how “the band has been at it a long time,” and that “we’re still going,” and that “we’ve “been around for years,” and while he’s talking, I start to wonder if Picasso, when he entered his blue period, had to endure some smug, indie-scene guy in corduroy pants continually making note of the fact that he didn’t just pick up a paintbrush for the first time yesterday. He gets all the information about the band wrong, saying we have a new album out when it actually came out a year and a half ago, he gives the wrong tour dates, calls the song of ours he played by the wrong name, and then says unapologetically that he’s not familiar with our music, really, and that someone else was supposed to do the interview and that he’s just filling in. You can tell he desperately wishes he was interviewing the latest trendy male-model-poster-boy band of the month in their vintage clothes that he dresses exactly like and who play watered-down versions of U2, the Cure, and Gang of Four, and have a big hit on the radio today, but will be completely forgotten a year from now. When he asks me for the twelfth time what it’s like still being up there playing at the Warped Tour ten years later, I stifle the urge to scream, “LOOK, I JUST MISSED SEEING MY ONE-YEAR-OLD TAKE HER FIRST STEPS AND MY FIVE-YEAR-OLD SCORE THREE GOALS AT HER SOCCER GAME, AND NOW I’VE GOT THIS “CAT’S IN THE CRADLE” SONG PLAYING IN MY HEAD ALL DAY, SO I REALLY COULDN’T GIVE ONE SMALL, DEEP-FRIED TURD ABOUT YOUR GOD DAMNED RADIO SHOW AND YOUR STUPID INDIE HAIRCUT!”
Instead, I smile politely and answer the question that yes, it is amazing that we’re still playing after all these years, and no, we won’t change our style to keep up with the latest trends on the radio because wouldn’t that be like asking Muddy Waters to stop playing the blues or Pavarotti to stop singing operas, and yes, the shows have been going well, and no, we don’t have anything new planned for the show tonight, and yes, I do have a few final words to say to our fans in Belgium. “Never give up hope, and always be there for your kids’ soccer games!”
SMALL MAN, BIG MOUTH
As soon as we were done worrying about when our kids were going to walk like everyone else, then we started worrying about when they were going to talk like everyone else. They start making all kinds of gurgling sounds and various noises from an early age, but once we started reading books to them at night, they started mimicking the sounds we were making and pointing to things and saying, “Whusssat?” From then on, our home became one big speech-training class with us teaching them new words every day just by talking to them, instructing them on the right way to pronounce things, and carrying on mindless conversations with them about “Why is purple?”
The two-year-old is still learning her way around the grammatical inflections of the English language, and during a quiet interlude at a recent third-grade symphony recital, when we sat in the cramped bleachers at the high school gymnasium with hundreds of other sweating parents, she shouted out, “DADDY, MY JUST FARTED!” I tried to quiet her but she insists I acknowledge her accomplishment. “DADDY! DADDY! MY JUST FARTED!! MY JUST FARTED!!” Another time she was padding around with no clothes on after a bath when a sock became lodged in her gluteal crevice. Her older sisters screamed in delight, “Look at her butt-crack!” We all laughed hysterically at the sight of the little sock dangling like a tail behind her. She then deduced that anytime you needed a good laugh, you just need to yell, “Butt-crack,” and everyone would love it. This proved problematic when at grocery stores she would respond to checkers who asked her name by replying, “Butt-crack!” or when our two elderly neighbors walked away down the sidewalk after a polite evening conversation, she called out after them, “BYE-BYE, BUTT-CRACKS!”
It takes so long for them to start stringing actual sentences together you may become convinced your child has a speech problem. Daughter number one stuttered when she was about three years old like a motor that wouldn’t start. “Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-what is that, Mommy?” We, of course, made a big deal about it and worried that she’d never grow out of it, but after a few months, it eventually went away. Daughter number three started doing it and we ignored it and it was gone within a week. Daughter number two, however, had a lot of earaches as a child and had to have tubes put in her ears, which affected her hearing and speech. She said “geel” for “girl” and had trouble with her R’s and L’s as if she was a little native Japanese person. Eventually, after a few sessions with the speech therapist, the problem was resolved and we never had to have a Cindy Brady episode where I had to hire a five-year-old hit man to beat up the kid who was teasing my kids about talking baby talk.
We tried not to let our kids’ peculiar speech issues bother us unless the problem didn’t correct itself or seemed like it needed expert attention. Our kids were soon talking incessantly, especially in the seven-to nine-year-old range when they rarely, if ever, stop jabbering away nonsensically and singing strange songs and gossiping and complaining and teasing and whining and are just basically going on and on about anything until I have a dull ache between my ears from all the constant blabbering. Now I wonder why I ever worried about them talking at all.
POTTY TRAINING
I define becoming a toddler as when your kid is walking and talking, but some people might include taking a crap in a toilet instead of in a cloth in between their legs in that definition. Getting your child to go from someone who relieves themselves while sitting on your living room couch to someone who does it while sitting on a commode can either be a simple process or one that takes months of torment. We started the girls on the potty training train by trying to get them to agree how gross and smelly and yucky it is to have a diaper full of warm dung between their legs and then casually mentioned that people were starting to talk behind their back about it.
What usually caused me to exclaim in a loud voice to my wife that “POTTY TRAINING BEGINS NOW” was an episode that happened to varying degrees with all three of my children in my experience as a diaper changer. I would be changing the kids’ fully loaded diaper like any other time, but suddenly, before I could scream, “NO!” they’d reach down and sink their hands knuckles-deep down into the mess between their legs. My fight-or-flight reflexes won’t allow me to wait the time it would take to find an appropriate cloth or baby wipe to get rid of it, so I’ll wipe it on my shirt or the baby clothes or the changing pad sheet or anything within reaching distance. Within the space of five seconds everything around me, myself, the baby, most of both of our clothing, and all the furniture, will have a dollop of fresh poo on it. It’s never about when the baby is ready to be potty trained, it’s when you are.
Thus begins the messiest few weeks of your entire life. It will be a veritable shit storm. Once we made the huge mistake of trying to house-train a puppy while potty training a two-year-old, and walking in our family room was like following an equestrian parade down Main Street on New Year’s Day. This is because pretty much the only way we’ve come up with to get a ch
ild to start using the toilet is to take away their diaper and tell them that now they get to wear “big kid” underwear. As much as they will be thrilled with this news, it will take several weeks of them standing there playing at their plastic kitchen with pee running down their leg to get them to realize they aren’t wearing the diaper anymore.
The period of time when we were teaching our kids to use the toilet took a lot of patience just like everything else in parenting. Basically it was all about keeping a lot of industrial-strength carpet cleaner handy, and when an exploded diaper leaked all over my imitation leather car seat and seeped down into the seams and I had to have it professionally cleaned but the smell never completely went away, I tried to channel my frustration into an acceptable outlet that didn’t become the biological equivalent of pounding my head against a brick wall. Before I knew it, they were potty trained and I didn’t have to relive the drama of the two fistfuls of poo, at least until my next kid.
PEE BREAK