Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  “And even at the parks now, we as parents are so overinvolved. I mean, I try to stand back, and I see people look at me. I stand back and watch my daughter at the top of the slide and another kid pushes past her and goes ahead. And I just wait. And the mom’s right up there saying, ‘Oh, Johnny, don’t push in front of her, you shouldn’t blah-blah-blah.’ And I feel like, ‘It’s okay. I’m going to let her make that choice.’ And my daughter looks at me, and I say, ‘If you don’t like what he did, you need to tell him.’ I’m not going to solve that problem for her. I mean, I don’t care whether she goes down the slide or not, so why would I solve that? She needs to advocate for herself.

  “But the hanging back is hard to do. Everyone else is right there and hovering, so it’s hard to be the only one who isn’t. But again, I feel like most of the time my parents wouldn’t have even been at the park. There would be parental involvement if someone was injured, or if there was something extreme. But beyond that, the little squabbles, the parents would just say, ‘Work it out.’

  “And the research does show that if you don’t get a chance with peers in particular to do that, to figure out that sharing, that action-reaction, that cause and effect of behavior, then you don’t learn appropriate assertiveness. You don’t learn what is okay and what isn’t, how much is too much to push someone. These interactions are the beginning stages of negotiation and problem-solving and social-emotional development. Even two-year-olds can do it.”

  “And if the parents are managing it, the kids don’t learn it in the same way?”

  “No, they don’t. Because it can’t be taught. It has to be learned experientially. And with all the technology they’re using, they don’t learn the facial expressions of these interactions. They don’t know the tone of voice and the cues. We’re not giving them enough practice because they need to do it in kindergarten, not when they’re twelve. And I think by putting them in all these classes, by being so, so, so present, we’re not giving them time to build that self-esteem because that’s how you build it. When you negotiate. When someone is trying to push you out of the way to go down the slide before you and you tell them to cut it out. And so you got to go down the slide, you learned to speak up, you solved a problem. That’s a good day at the park.”

  “Because they learned something.”

  “Right. Like my son is two now. He climbs up on the stool, falls off, cries. Does he want to try that again? Yes. Yes, he does. One more time. I wonder if that was a fluke, he thinks. He tries it again. Falls. And then the third or fourth time, he gets it. It’s only a step or two. It’s basically safe. But he’s learning from experience. Why would I take that from him?”

  “I wonder,” I said. “If part of the equation is the quantity of products out there we can buy to make it easier. We all want to be good parents, so we buy all these things that are supposed to help, or to protect them, but that really promote a lack of development.”

  Erin offered the example of a new infant chair on the market. “They sit in this little chair where they can’t get into any trouble. But then they’re not learning to use their core muscles; they’re not learning to explore their environment. We have to try to accept that it’s okay for them to have some quiet time, to explore on their own, to get frustrated, to cry. We don’t want it, not even the moment they’re born. We want them to be contained. We want them to be like people. We want them to be like us.”

  I recalled to her those early months, going to the pediatrician and hearing about all the terrible risks—the choking hazards, the dangers of falling, the risk of letting them sleep on their stomachs, and on and on. I recalled to her what a relief it was to strap my child into a bouncy seat and feel like he was contained. “But then I wonder if in solving for that anxiety you create another problem. You manage one risk and produce another.”

  “I think there’s some of this going on across the board,” she said.

  “I feel like more people are starting to go back to their instincts, to the basics. But still, my kids have no one to play with because there’s no one around. They’re all in camp. The streets and the parks are empty.”

  “I know. We moved into our first house a few months ago. We live on a block with single-family homes, thirty kids in a three-block radius. And so often, none of the kids are around. The streets are quiet. Once or twice a year we have a block party and all the kids come out and play and ride their bikes and scooters and have a blast, and I watch them and think, ‘This is how it should be every day. Not once or twice a year. Every afternoon. Every day in summer.’ But that’s a fantasy. It’s not how we live anymore. Everyone’s in their own little pod.

  “Also,” Erin continued, “I feel like we as parents have changed too. I remember my mom having this community of mothers. And they supported each other. They’d talk about crazy stuff their kids did and one would say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. Mine did the same thing. We’ll dye their hair back,’ or whatever. Now I feel like you’re at the park and there’s so much judgment. Constant judgment. I was standing outside my office, which is five minutes from where I live. I had the kids in the stroller and was going in to get the mail and a client was inside the waiting room. I left the kids, two and four, in the double stroller while I ran in to grab the mail. Two o’clock on a Monday. And I got stopped by one of my clients in the waiting room who was very anxious and angry that I had done this. And I said, ‘Well, I was just running in to get the mail. They’re perfectly fine.’ But she was very angry and proceeded to stand outside and wait with my kids who then were screaming because a stranger was frowning over them. And she told me she thought it was irresponsible. I was so shocked. So angry.

  “And at the park, I often have to explain to parents my approach and stop them from going over if my kids are in some kind of socially challenging situation. My daughter’s very shy and petite, and kids test her. And I talk to her about her options, but I don’t do it for her. And I typically have to ask parents not to intervene because their MO is that they’ll go and stop their kid from doing anything that reflects badly. Some are okay when I tell them not to, but plenty give me looks or they just do it anyway.”

  I interrupted Erin, speaking from experience. “It’s like they can’t help themselves. Part of it is that they’re concerned for your kid, but part of it is people being self-conscious about how they look as a parent. No one wants to be the parent who’s inattentive or more interested in their book or their phone than their child.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But then I wonder, isn’t it incubating a sort of narcissism? Being a part of a family or a community is learning, ‘Okay, I have needs, you have needs, the other people have needs, we all have to negotiate our needs.’ But if we’re constantly sending kids the signal that their needs are the most important, that they are the center of our emotional universe, that their needs are more important than the needs of the family as a whole—that’s not a great message to send, right?”

  Erin tells me about some of the teenagers she works with as volunteers, students interested in becoming OTs. “They schedule with me and then they cancel. It’s disheartening. They don’t seem to have a strong sense of personal responsibility or commitment or even a sense that their actions affect others. Sometimes the parents want to make their schedule with me, and I say, ‘You know what, I need to hear from your daughter. She’s a senior in high school, so I need to hear from her.’ That’s just how I was raised. My parents passed away young, my dad when I was twenty-one and my mom when I was twenty-nine. But they taught me to take care of myself, to navigate the world. And I wish they were here for me to say that to them—though of course I complained about it the whole time they were alive.”

  “Well, it’s a balance, isn’t it? I mean, we want our kids to know that we see them. I see you, and I understand your needs, and your needs matter to me. I think for my parents’ generation, kids were less visible, parents less present. And so everyone wants to correct for that. We want to show our k
ids that we’re there for them, we’re in the game with them and we care. Which is all good. But it seems like we’ve gone so far in that direction.”

  “It does. But I’m hoping that now it’s coming back a little. I feel like I’ve found a few parents who are similar to me, who believe in not doing things for their kids all the time, in letting them have some experiences, and that having them struggle now is better than having them struggle for the first time when they’re ten or twelve.”

  “Or twenty.”

  “Exactly. I mean, the experience of going off to college or moving away from home for the first time is hard enough; it shouldn’t also be the first time a child learns that sometimes in life, you struggle.”

  * * *

  In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt describes a process called natality. “Natality,” she says, stems from “the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.” She writes how “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew.” Arendt argues that this fact of natality is “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, natural ruin.” It is not, in the end, our connection to children that saves us and offers humanity, faith, and hope; it’s our ability to separate from children, to let them separate from us. Their ability to escape and transcend us, to discover their own way of being with all the pain and danger that entails, leaving us behind as they try to do better, to fail better, is what can make the world anew.

  Arendt’s argument on natality reminds me, oddly, of my favorite episode of The Simpsons, a show I watched first with my father, then with my husband, and which I will soon watch with my kids. My favorite episode, the one that still makes me cry, is the episode when an x-ray reveals that Homer Simpson has been living for years with a crayon lodged in his brain; it is this crayon that’s led to his chronic and unfathomable stupidity. The crayon is removed. His IQ soars. For the first time in his life, he is able to truly see and understand and connect with his fiercely intelligent daughter, Lisa. For a few beautiful days, he is not just her father but her mentor, her friend. Of course, it can’t last. To be a smart man in a stupid world is too painful for Homer. The crayon is reinserted. His stupidity returns in full force. But before it does, he leaves a note behind for Lisa, telling her that no matter how great the distance between them becomes, he’ll always love her, and he’ll always be grateful for the time they had together.

  In the end, it’s the only promise any of us can keep.

  9

  SMALL ANIMALS

  Recently, I was looking through an old family photo album with my daughter when I noticed a snapshot of myself at about her age, five or six. In the center of the frame is a thin blue diving board stretching above the pool where my parents used to take us, and just beyond the board, a few feet over the water, I’m suspended in midair, a blurry streak of soggy girl tilted forward, arms bent, body angled right between a jump and a flop.

  “That’s me!” Violet said.

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s Mommy! It’s me.”

  I took the picture out of the album and set it on my dresser. It felt strange to see myself in it, this single moment of suspension and excitement, because I have absolutely no memory of the experience. What I remember instead from that summer was what led up to it—wanting to jump off the diving board but feeling too afraid, walking up the ladder, then back again, walking to the edge of the board, then back, over and over, all summer long, my parents watching, encouraging, urging me forward, then soothing my disappointment when I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t remember the jump, but I remember the fear, how it felt like something holding me back, a code I couldn’t crack. Until one day, apparently, I could.

  Later that evening, after the kids were in bed, I told Pete I wanted to take a vacation.

  “There are no vacations once you have kids,” he reminded me. “There are only trips.”

  “Okay,” I said. “A trip, then. Let’s go on a trip.”

  “A road trip?”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s fly.”

  * * *

  Soon after, along with Pete’s parents and brother and sister-in-law and three small nieces, we flew to New York City for a long weekend. The plane ride there was perfectly smooth and uneventful, but of course that didn’t stop me from descending into my usual panic-disorder panorama of nausea, hyperventilation, clutching of armrests, and superstitious obsessive-compulsive silent counting. It must have worked, because our plane did not crash! We landed. We piled into cabs, inched our way into the city, checked our large and rowdy party into the boutique SoHo hotel that Pete had read about on TripAdvisor. Pete is the designated travel agent in our family, the one who is usually most adept at making arrangements, and so I looked at him askance as we crossed the threshold into the stainless-steel, sparkling-glass lobby, a lobby crowded with arrangements of rare orchids, bowls of exotic fruit, freestanding displays of geometric steel sculptures and European fashion models who leaned and teetered on their laser-smooth, flamingo-thin legs. We entered the holy hipness and glamour of this hotel with our brigade of poorly behaved children. All at once, they charged the elevator, sullied the glass walls with their jelly-smeared hands, initiated loud negotiations about who was going to sleep in whose room and in which bed and whether we were going to go to the Museum of Natural History first or the puppet theater in Central Park. The fashion models frowned at one another. The concierge rushed toward us with open arms, as though preparing to smother a fire.

  “You said the hotel was kid-friendly,” I whispered to Pete.

  “It said on the website it was the most kid-friendly hotel in SoHo. You told me anything but Times Square. You said anything with a pool.”

  The pool, I thought. Yes, surely the pool area would be more child-friendly than the lobby. I could take the kids swimming while Pete unpacked and planned the evening. Swimming would wear them out, make them more docile and adult-like. I donned the only swimsuit I’d brought with me. It wasn’t exactly a maternity swimsuit, but it wasn’t exactly not a maternity swimsuit. I think maybe it was a standard swimsuit I’d worn often enough during pregnancy for the elastic in the middle section of the suit to just kind of give up. It was black nylon with a dark blue, diagonal stripe that was supposed to be slimming but wasn’t slimming at all. It was not a sleek or stylish swimsuit, but really, nothing about me as I rode the elevator to the roof of the hotel with five small children buzzing around me was sleek or stylish—not my big Trader Joe’s canvas bag that I was using to carry sunscreen and lip balm and pool toys and goggles; not the soft, gray half-moons beneath my eyes, larger than ever after my sleepless night thinking about the trip ahead; not my frizzy ponytail or the stubbly legs I hadn’t had time to shave. Certainly not the children surrounding me, these small bodies that seemed somehow to occupy every inch of occupiable space in the very-slow-moving elevator that claimed a capacity of twenty adult humans. Nothing about me looked as though it belonged at this SoHo hotel, but what did I care, I thought. It’s just a pool.

  The elevator doors parted. At first, I suspected we had arrived at the wrong floor; there was no pool in sight, just a crowd of partygoers. Only as the doors opened fully did I see the open sky of lower Manhattan, the rooftop railing’s sharp impression against the skyline, and on the far side of the building, past the bar, past the cocktail lounge, past the DJ and more fashion models and men in skinny pants and tailored sport jackets and the small cocktail tables made of reclaimed industrial materials, and the twenty-dollar cocktails in vintage glassware covering these tables—only then did I see that there was, indeed, a small square space of wavering blue water that I suppose could be called a pool by a person with an imagination. It was more like a jet-less Jacuzzi, really, or a very large fish tank. It was a pool for dipping or plunging. It was a pool as an accessory to drinking Prosecco or reading a Bret Easton Ellis novel or smoking some good hashish or
just being seen by other people doing the same. It was not a pool for swimming. The guests surrounding it, even those in swimsuits, seemed to have no intention of getting wet. They slouched across a platform of spa-inspired birchwood, fondled their drinks and books and backgammon boards, flexed their artful and understated tattoos. The DJ began to play. Cocktails proliferated. A woman with severely cut black bangs teetered toward us in dominatrix stilettos.

  “Oh no,” I said, trying to hold back the children, trying to herd them back into the elevator. “We can’t go swimming here, kids. Change of plans.”

  “Why?” they cried.

  “We just can’t,” I said. “I think the pool is closed.”

  “It’s not closed!” they shouted, and they rushed forward. Then they were running, charging, leaping toward the tiny speck of water. They didn’t give a shit about who was wearing what bathing suit or drinking what cocktail or dancing to what music. They just wanted to swim, to play, to be submerged, to dive and float and splash. And they weren’t going to apologize for wanting it, for not caring, for being kids. There was no stopping them, and so, reluctantly, I followed. I passed the DJ, the bartender, the waitress, a sophisticated-looking French couple with a stylish baby of their own. My not-quite-but-pretty-much-a-maternity bathing suit’s straps slipped down as I crossed the roof. Fixing them, random ChapSticks and change fell out of my Trader Joe’s pool bag. Oops, oops, excuse me, sorry.

  “Can I help you?” a waiter asked as I passed.