This phase, this era of her life will not extend indefinitely. When Sam is three and Olivia starting grade one, she will return to work. So really she has only two more years at home to fill — to enjoy. She should be enjoying them. Olivia and Sam will never be small again.
Already, she is aware of how fast they are changing. Already, she has put away boxes of Olivia’s baby clothes, weeping over them as she folded them up, checking for indelible stains of spit-up milk. The little pink terrycloth sleepers, size three months, she had folded with trembling fingers. It was not the sleepers she was mourning, of course, but Olivia, with her wide drooling grin, her alert round eyes, her tufty hair, dark-brown fading to blonde, as if she’d dyed it as a disguise and was letting it grow out, her clinging warm little body. That baby, subject of her every thought, her needs indistinguishable from her own, attached through every cell of Cleo’s tissue, tuning-station for each of her senses — gone, lost forever. Even in the past few months they have changed, Sam walking now (though not talking — Olivia at his age had talked); Olivia reading a bit. They will grow up so quickly. She ought to learn to love, to fully immerse herself in, each second of this time. Not resist it, feel such panic and guilt about it. And after all, what is required of her, but time?
She carries the folded laundry upstairs to put it away. In the bathroom, she draws up the slatted blind that shields the small window, and sees, over the roofs of other houses, forest, or at least clumps of trees, and beyond them the scrap of silver ribbon that is the river. It’s a view of a far-off land, a land of openness and freedom: Her mind pulls toward it as if it would cajole her body out of the window, into the air.
She lingers, gazing at the far-off treetops, the glimpse of water, thinking of paths and green and birds. And hears, before she’s finished putting away the towels, Sam’s wails from the family room. When she comes around the corner, Cleo sees that Olivia has made a kind of box around Sam with the sofa and armchair seat cushions, the pillows, the throw. He is wedged in, a barnacle in his heap of foam, waving frustrated wet outstretched fingers. Cleo plucks him up, balances him on her hip. Olivia looks at her sideways, her new separate considering look.
Sam doesn’t like to be trapped, Cleo says. Please pick up the cushions now and put them back on the sofa and chairs. She speaks calmly, firmly, as she has taught herself to do. Olivia ignores her, except for in the set of her mouth.
Now, please, she says. Do you need to go to your room? she says.
The sidelong glance, testing her. Olivia will not go to her room without such a flailing and wailing that both of them will be battered, exhausted. And why should she go to her room? Cleo thinks. She has been playing, amusing herself and Sam; now the play has collapsed, but she is not necessarily done with it. Cleo can see into her mood. I have tried to please you, Olivia is thinking. I have been entertaining Sam when I would rather have had your attention. Now I am to be punished.
Cleo can see the scattered furnishings through Olivia’s eyes: great unwieldy blocks. What have they to do with her? How have they got there? Her play has been intruded on; what is it to her that Cleo wants the room tidy? What Olivia wants is for Cleo to retrieve the current of pleasure, to lift her back into that transcendence of play. Cleo can do this, easily, by softening her voice, by entering the game, by suggesting another game, something they can do together.
But she has not finished the laundry, has not (more importantly) had ten minutes to herself, to her own thoughts. The irritation rises in her. She begins, crossly, to put the sofa back together. She has to put Sam down. He clings; he wants to nurse some more. It’s only for comfort, and he has just nursed, not an hour ago, but it’s easier to give in than argue.
She sits on the floor, her back against the stripped sofa. Sam latches on, eases into the space he goes to when he nurses, a right-brain space of complete relaxation, connection, contentment. She relaxes into the letdown, the flow of milk. A child Sam’s age is easy to breastfeed. He knows the ropes. He can do it on his own, practically. She needs only to show up, unhook the front of her bra.
She reaches with her free hand for Olivia. She has to make a great effort to do this sometimes, as if the nerves and muscles in her arm have atrophied, as if she’s suffering from some devastating degenerative disease. She has to speak, too, from a great distance, with great effort. Come, she says. Tell me what you’re building.
Nothing, says Olivia. She has evidently decided to sulk, to punish Cleo. But she is not good at this yet. It will take her time to develop that distance. For now, she can’t resist watching Cleo out of her round grey eyes. She can’t resist crawling over to Cleo, to sit next to her. Her hair is light, wispy, falling in fine loops to her shoulders. Trent’s fine hair. Baby hair. Some of the girls in the preschool class have thick, glossy hair falling to their waists, already.
A cave? A house for a mouse? A space ship? Her brain aches, as if she is forcing it through a too-small aperture.
Olivia shakes her head. But she is drawn in, she can’t resist Cleo’s playfulness. Even when it is given with half of Cleo’s attention, even when Cleo is not really trying, Olivia will be pulled in, opened, to Cleo’s attempts.
It’s a prison, Cleo guesses. For a big bad baby brother.
Olivia nods, happily. He kept knocking over my house.
He does that.
I told him not to. He did it on purpose.
What should we do with him?
She can see Olivia considering. Sell him, Olivia says. At a garage sale.
The distance between them annihilated. This time.
Should we sell you, Sam? She asks. How much could we get for you?
Olivia can be seen to be reflecting. Too little, and she’ll lose the drama; too much, and she risks overvaluing the thing she is rejecting. It’s as if Olivia was born understanding economics. Five dollars, she says, finally.
Wow, that much, Cleo says.
Sam falls asleep, and Olivia says, Read to me, and she leaves the ironing, the folding of clothes, to lie on Olivia’s bed with her and read.
She reads to Olivia, and to Sam, every day, for hours. She buys books when she can afford it, and goes to the library and to garage sales and thrift stores. She gets a complete set of Dr. Seuss and Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen and Are You My Mother? They acquire all of the Disney copies of Snow White and Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp and The Aristocats — the classic fairy tales and the other movies, which are also classics, she supposes — and VHS tapes, which are also useful on long rainy days. Mandalay and other people she knows do not approve of the Disney books, but they are easy to come by. She also acquires more beautiful, imaginative, elegantly retold and fabulously illustrated versions of the classic stories, and of new ones. She buys Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and Scuppers the Sailor Dog and The Runaway Bunny.
Olivia wants the same books over and over, and she learns her letters, and by her third birthday can say the alphabet and identify any capital letter she sees, and by her fourth birthday can print her name and words like cat, Mom, Sam, Dad, and can read Green Eggs and Ham, though everyone says she has just memorized it, which she has, but she recognizes all of the words from the story if she sees them elsewhere. (These accomplishments please Trent very much.) More than this, her vocabulary is varied, complex, plastic. In her play, in her interactions, her conversations, Cleo hears empathy, flexibility of perspective, self-awareness.
It is astonishing to see language and cognition unfold in her children.
She has nobody with whom she can talk about it. She has lost track of most of her friends from university. A couple of them have email, but their communications are always along the lines of Crazy busy here! She is not close to either her foster parents or her biological mother. And Mandalay isn’t married, doesn’t have kids: She doesn’t get it. But she feels, intuitively, that she is right. About this one thing, she is right.
The rest, the complicated business of how to raise children, is a myst
ery. More than a mystery: a quest, a journey of delicate importance, for she knows, she has read, that mistakes can be fatal. It is not that there is too little known, but rather too much: too many books and articles and conversations and pieces of overheard, remembered advice. She is lost in a forest of conflicting information. And at the same time, she is all alone. She has nobody to talk to, for Trent won’t talk about the details of it; he’s bored by it.
Her sister Mandalay says: Why do you live out there? Those houses are terrible. They’re a waste of space and resources, with their own little yards. You don’t even play in the yard. You have to go everywhere by car! There’s no sense of community. Wouldn’t it be more fun somewhere like Kits, where there are lots of playgrounds, and a library, and cafés?
We can’t afford a house in Kits on one income.
Really? I see lots of young women with strollers and babies, in the café.
Probably nannies.
Anyway, why not an apartment? You don’t need so much living space if you get out more.
But she wants space. She wants space around her sometimes.
When Olivia was a baby, before Sam, they had lived in two different apartments. One, the upstairs of an older house, had been lovely, with original mouldings, leaded glass windows, a turret with a window seat. The kitchen had been a bit funky, built into a closet, but she had loved that place, had loved the neighbourhood, the walks to the library, meeting friends.
Then that house had been sold, and they’d moved to a townhouse complex, in a good location, but where the units were narrow dark spaces with open stairs, where the baby gate hadn’t really worked, and the complex had a communal playground where the tough preschoolers, beefy, foul-mouthed four- and five-year-olds, appropriated Olivia’s toys, her sandbox bucket and shovel, her ride-on tricycle, her rubber balls and her miniature plastic shopping cart, before Cleo could stop them, and broke them.
In that playground she could sit — on the grass; there were no benches — and talk sometimes to other parents. She had been hopeful.
She remembers a woman with a boy Olivia’s age and a girl a little younger — a woman who had seemed educated and normal, but then had asked Olivia’s gender (Olivia dressed, at two, in her OshKosh denim overalls, a green sweater) and said that her son played with trucks and her daughter with dolls, and that’s the way she liked it.
Then a woman with two small girls, one around Olivia’s age, the other a little older, who was planning to home-school. Cleo was interested in the possibilities of home-schooling, had wanted to talk about pedagogical theories, but the woman explained that she was a Christian, and she was afraid of the values that her daughters might pick up in the public school system. Do you know, she said, solemnly, in the hushed voice women sometimes use to mention sexual deviance, they even expose the children to meditation?
Later a new family moved in, and there were two bright and gentle children around Olivia’s age who played nicely with Olivia in the play area on the weekends, and whose father would sit on the railway ties and talk to Cleo. The father told Cleo all about his job as an archeological consultant to the city, about the quirky strange things that happened. She knew a little about the field, from her grad work, and up the long stairs from the cellar of her brain she had dragged the ability to ask semi-intelligent questions about policy and ethics and legalities. He was a good storyteller, and a good conversationalist, and it brightened the weekends, or an hour or two of the weekends, to sit and watch the children. She’d looked forward to it. She’d thought of this neighbour, Mark, as a friend. That he was a guy was kind of awkward, but it was all just friendship, a meeting of the minds.
Then he wasn’t there, and when she saw the children outside again with a woman, obviously their mother, Cleo talked to her instead. She mentioned the children’s dad, that he’d told her about his job. The woman said, pretty calmly, that her ex-husband wasn’t an archeologist at all. He worked as a stock boy at RadioShack and was a pathological liar. He’d had visitation rights with the children but he was working weekends now and never made it over.
She still thinks of Mark, sometimes, not with rancour or concern, but with curiosity. His own version of himself, oddly, seems more real to her than his ex-wife’s.
She’d been already very pregnant, loaded with Sam, when the resident caretaker had mentioned to her the four-year-old boy, James, who was left outside in the playground sometimes for hours on end, sometimes while his single mother went off by herself. The caretaker lived next door to the boy and his mom; the caretaker’s wife brought the boy inside sometimes, if his mother wasn’t home, fed him, let him warm up. The caretaker said, sometimes when she’s home, and the boy’s outside, we see several different men come to visit the mother in one afternoon. They stay about fifteen minutes and then leave.
Fifteen minutes! Cleo had said. The caretaker, in his sixties, had seemed embarrassed then, said no more. Cleo had taken to bringing out Olivia’s lunch, sharing it with the boy. She noticed other moms did too. But she had said to Trent: We need to move. We have to have our own house and yard. And so they had emigrated far out of the city.
ON THIS FEBRUARY AFTERNOON she reads to Olivia and then starts supper while Olivia draws at the table and talks to her: there is more time to fill entertaining Olivia. They have read a new book, one picked up at the library on Saturday and hoarded for this day. It’s a folktale Cleo remembers having heard sometime in her own childhood — at school? — called, she thinks, The Crowded Noisy House. In this version it’s called It Could Always Be Worse. In it, a man complains about the crowding and noise his wife and mother and children make in the house, and is advised by the rabbi (in Cleo’s memory, it was a wise old woman) to take in the chickens, the pig, the goat, the cow — until the house is unbearable — and then toss them all out, at which point his house with only his family in it seems spacious and peaceful.
What is passed down in folktales, Cleo thinks, is that it could always be worse.
Olivia draws the animals from the story; she still draws as a young child does, impressionistically, not symbolically, and her drawings are strange and dreamlike in their figures and composition. She has drawn a cut-away diagram of a house with many separate rooms, each containing one human or farmyard animal figure. There is room for all. It’s optimistic.
Then Sam wakes up, and nurses — he is down to three times a day now — and she and Olivia read some board books to him. (He remembers what comes next, Olivia says, and she thinks Olivia is right: They are lucky to have each other, Olivia and Sam. They see each other as full people, already.)
She cleans up after supper so that Trent will have time to play with the kids but he doesn’t, really; he turns on the TV and keeps half an eye on them. Once she has finished the dishes and wiping the counters and sweeping the floor, he takes his attention from them completely, like a teenager released from a babysitting stint, and she gets them ready for bed. If she asks Trent to put Olivia to bed, he forgets to brush her teeth or read her a story, leaves her clothes where they fall. If she reminds him, his voice gets hard and petulant: Why is she always criticising the way he does things? She doesn’t need to control everything. Don’t sweat the small stuff, he says. Let it go. But that just means she’ll have to do whatever it is herself, when Trent has gone to bed or is watching TV. Or she’ll have to deal with the consequences.
If she puts Olivia to bed first and leaves Trent to take care of Sam, he just ignores Sam, lets him get sleepy, doze off without nursing or a diaper change, so that he’ll then wake up around midnight, hungry and wet, and Cleo will have to wake up and look after him and try to get him to go back to sleep. When she remonstrates with Trent, he says: My mother put me to bed at Sam’s age with a bottle and didn’t hear a peep out of me for twelve hours.
She doesn’t say that this sounds like child abuse to her. She doesn’t want to fight in front of the kids. There is nowhere in the house that a raised voice cannot be heard.
Sometimes it seems
that Trent is missing some important organ or part of his brain. He doesn’t really seem to pick up on the needs, the emotional tenor, of the kids.
One of the books she has read says: If you want your man to help out more, don’t criticize his efforts when he does. Another one says, like Trent: Don’t sweat the small stuff. This is not helpful.
If she complains about things when they happen, he says she is picking on minutia. If she waits until something escalates into a pattern, a problem, and then mentions it, he says: Show me examples, and then, You should have mentioned that at the time, not waited until you were mad and then ambushed me.
She reminds herself that Trent is working hard, that he has long and demanding days, that the weight of the mortgage and car loan, everything they spend, rests on him.
She nurses Sam until he gets sleepy, sucks only sporadically. His mouth finally relaxes. She puts him into his bed, his little crib. Soon he will try to climb the bars, and they will have to take off the side rails and convert the crib to a tot bed.
Then she goes back downstairs and finds Olivia leaning up against Trent, both watching a crime drama in which characters are assaulted and shot and in which the dialogue is violent, full not only of adult language, but hate-filled, vicious.
Do you think she should watch this?
Ah, if she’s old enough to understand it, she’s old enough to deal with it, Trent says.
She puts Olivia to bed, which requires forty-five more minutes of stories and singing: Olivia is nervous, anxious.
When she goes back downstairs, she says: Don’t let Olivia and Sam watch that crap. They understand more than you think.
Trent gets up, puts his arms around her. You’re right, he says. I was just zoning out, I didn’t think.
Come and watch TV, he says. I haven’t seen you all day. Let’s watch some TV.
But she doesn’t want to watch TV. Her mind has been in a crowded and cold shed all day, harnessed to work that tires but doesn’t satisfy. She needs to read. She has a new book, one she had requested for Christmas, and she climbs into bed and delves into the book, which is thick and full of theory for her mind to chew over, and references that she will write down and follow up. The book is on urban theory, a subject which is not (she thinks) connected with her life in any way, but which takes her out of it, transforms her so that she is once again whole and autonomous, and can forget her maternal role. She feels her brain stretch and leap and forget itself: It is just seamless graceful movement through the landscape of the book, its ideas and examples, its language.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 3