Intimations of Mortality

Occasionally, I have that dream where suddenly my teeth start falling out. I clutch my mouth, trying to catch them and force them back in, horrified by the sudden, unexpected loss of so necessary and useful a part of my body. I've been told this is a common nightmare, and I've always assumed that it is a haunting reminder of our mortality, our sheer helplessness in the face of our bodies' slow and inevitable decay.

This, roughly, has been Bub's reaction to his first loose tooth. He was morose and subdued all day Sunday, but our first hint of the reason for his mood came during dinner, when he bit into a pickle and suddenly let out a wail of anguish. His bottom middle tooth was tilting wildly back and forth, and Bub was grief-stricken at the news that it was going to come out.

"I love my teeth!" he wailed. "I need my teeth! I just want them to go back to normal!"

Adult attempts at reassurance proved to make matters worse. "I lost my teeth when I was your age," hubby assured him. "And look what I've got now!" Bub took one look at his giant grin and let out another shriek of despair.

"You know what's worse than losing your teeth?" my father-in-law asked. "Losing your hair!" Bub quickly raised a hand to his head and tugged on his hair to make sure it was still firmly rooted, tears tumbling down his cheeks. It was a half hour at least before he could be calmed sufficiently to choke down a bit of applesauce for his supper.

Like everything about Bub, this reaction seems both unusual and eminently reasonable. He is concerned less about the pain or inconvenience of the missing tooth than about the broader implications. His comfortable, friendly body, so apparently stable and unchanging, has betrayed him. He does not fully grasp the meaning of death, but he is glimpsing its hideous visage every time he wobbles that tooth with his tongue. Mutability and change are his enemies already, but now they are hitting closer to home, an invasion that is deeply unsettling. When I look at his tear-stained face I find myself thinking of cultures without dentistry where the loss of one's teeth (in old age rather than youth) means bidding a final farewell to food.

This most ordinary childhood rite of passage would be comical and endearing if it weren't so sad. After one joyful week of summer vacation, Bub is depressed. "It's a no good, very bad day," he announced this morning before dragging his feet to the breakfast table.

At swimming lessons, though, we finally caught a break. Less than forty-eight hours after the first wobble, Bub's tooth came out in the pool. Bub was thrown but cheerful, especially when we explained that the tooth fairy will still come, even though the tooth itself is somewhere at the bottom of the pool. The wobbly tooth gone, Bub's spirit is rising to the task of embracing the new, big-boy reality that these bodies aren't ours for keeps.

The Power of No

"Stop following me!"

"I'm playing by myself. You're not my friend."

"Go away. I don't want you."

These are the phrases that punctuate Bub's play lately. Every so often I have to barge in and mop up the Pie's heartbroken tears as Bub flexes his muscles, experimenting with the newly discovered power of rejection.

It's a skill he's learned the hard way, in the piranha pool of the McDonald's PlayPlace Friday afternoon, when he spent half an hour playing enthusiastically, happily, with a pair of slightly bigger boys who plotted strategies to get rid of him, like telling him there was pizza at the bottom of the slide. "Pizza?" Bub exclaimed delightedly, and then raced down to gobble up the imaginary snack before rejoining his "friends," who I could hear grumbling, "Does he have to keep following us all the time?"

I looked on, paralyzed by the tunnel-structures that make direct intervention difficult, if not impossible. The younger of the two boys seemed friendly enough, but the older boy scowled at Bub, shoving him out of the way whenever he tried to join in. Bub took all of this as playful roughhousing, reacting only when the older boy turned to him and said, in a serious tone, "Stop following us. We don't want you."

"Oh! Sorry!" Bub replied immediately, scampering off to the opposite end of the PlayPlace. Moments later a howl of pain went up from somewhere in the bowels of the tunnel structure. "You stay away from me, you dangerous boys!" Bub yelled. When he emerged, clutching his arm, the younger boy confirmed that the bigger one had hit him. It's hard to say how Bub would have reacted to the "Stop following us" remark by itself, but the physical attack left no doubt in his mind. He had been rejected, violently, by dangerous yet compellingly powerful adversaries.

The post I would have written on Friday about this incident would have focused on my bewildering realization that motherly love doesn't actually help all that much in the face of peer rejection. Bub and I had been having a wonderful morning. He had been putting on a clinic in cute remarks; I had spent the morning exchanging amused glances with other adults as Bub received his Ice Age II: Dawn of the Dinosaurs toy with the words, "I'm a lucky man!" or greeted the little girl at the next table with the words, "I'm so happy to meet you!" Bub is a happy, extraverted child. His teachers rave about how polite he is; adults are invariably charmed by his artless optimism. Unfortunately, what works with grown-ups does not necessarily work with peers. Perhaps I should be teaching him to greet new acquaintances by pretending to fart on them.

As traumatic as I found Friday's drive-by bullying, I couldn't quite shake the glow from the rest of the morning, my gratitude and pleasure in the companionable little chap my grouchy baby has grown into. And it seemed startling, somehow, to remember how little my own pangs of childhood rejection were relieved by the balm of motherly love.

After three days of watching Bub process his feelings by rejecting his sister, I'm less interested in my own trauma than in his mysterious learning processes. Learning to recognize when you're being rejected is an important social skill. Even more important, perhaps, is figuring out what to do with that experience. Before my very eyes, my son has become ever-so-slightly less trusting, visibly determined to do the rejecting before he can be rejected again. It strikes me that the most magical and unlikely moment in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is not the owl mail or Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, but rather Harry's decision, after a lifetime of being bullied, not to join Draco's incipient gang of bullies but to befriend the underdog Ron instead.

Grouch

I am very cross right now. Here's why:

1) Several months ago, I signed my kids up for soccer, having been promised (a) that they would be on the same team, and (b) that Bub's friend Jake would also be on their team. I had visions of warm summer evenings, sitting around with Jake's mom on a blanket and eating the kids' watermelon while they ran around on the field. Instead, Pie and Bub were placed in entirely separate leagues, and although the two leagues play on the same night, they are in opposite corners of the high school field, so I sit by myself watching one team while hubby sits by himself watching the other team. Meanwhile, Jake's mom hangs out with all our other friends who signed up late but managed to be placed on the same team.

2) I have so had it with soccer already. The universal consensus (and by "universal" I mean "the consensus between my husband and my mother") is that this makes me a bad mother, unwilling to sacrifice an hour of my time once or twice a week so that my children can Get Exercise and Have Fun. What I see, on Monday and Wednesday nights, is not children having fun. It is children being miserable and being forced by parents to "get back on the field" with arguments like "we paid good money for this" and "if you don't get back out there we're not coming back" and "if you don't start playing right now we're not getting any ice cream!" Why, exactly, are we doing this again?

3) Several months ago, I signed Pie up for kindergarten, filling out multiple forms both at the school and at day-care so that Pie can be placed in a morning class, with on-site care after school. Then, a few weeks ago, with no warning or consultation with anyone, the principal decided to scrap the morning and afternoon classes and move all kindergarten classes to the alternate day system. Not Mondays, Wednesdays and alternate Fridays or anything like that - alternate day: Monday, Wednesday, Friday one week; Tuesday and Thursday the next. As far as I can tell, nobody except the principal actually likes this system, but as an added bonus, Pie has been assigned to a class that conflicts with the on-site day-care, so every other day we have to drop her off at the Catholic school on the other side of town, while all her friends from day-care this year remain together in the on-site class.

4) The courses I've been offered to teach for the fall are in conflicting time slots, and after two weeks I am still unable to get any clear information about whether the schedule can be modified. Textbook orders are due on Monday, and I still don't know for sure which courses I'm teaching or what my schedule will be.

Why must I continually be subjected to minor inconveniences? All I ask is for sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their heads!

Spring Fever

I'm restless, lately. My days are busy, so much so that I've been finding it a bit overwhelming when the weekend, also, is filled with plans: a trip out of town to visit friends, an outing to "Family Camp" to toast marshmallows and watch fireworks while huddling around the fire to escape the freezing-cold temperatures. It's a relief, almost, when plans get cancelled due to the inevitable sickness of one of the children (in the last week and a half, for instance, there have been only two days when all four members of my family were healthy). But that relief is followed, almost instantly, by restlessness. I can smell other people's barbecues, hear their children playing on the lawn, and it feels like I'm missing something, that life is happening somewhere, out there, and I'm stuck inside reading magazines, grading essays, and stroking my children's feverish brows.

I never feel this way during the winter. Winter provides a splendid, blanket permission to do nothing. There is no pressure to seek excitement or fill the days with activity. I may be vaguely aware that other families are out there skiing or tobogganing, but mostly I'm content to shrug my shoulders at such madness. A cup of hot chocolate and a good round of Guitar Hero are all I need to keep me happy.

Spring, on the other hand, seems to transform me into a glum thirteen-year-old, cringing in embarrassment at the dullness of my life, even though there's no one around to see it except my inner audience of imaginary spectators, that group of old high-school frenemies who pop up in my consciousness now and then to pass judgment on the narrow predictability of my life.

Part of the problem, this year, is that we still have no grass. Our builder promised us sod and a paved driveway somewhere around the end of May, but as the end of May approaches with nothing but the occasional breeze to disturb the knee-high weeds surrounding our house, I'm becoming increasingly agitated. I can look out my windows at the outdoor world, but there's a sea of mud and weeds between me and it.

On the other side of that barrier lie the normal people: the ones whose children ride bikes up and down their paved driveways, whose backyards feature things like swingsets and decks. My children seem to share my own ineptitude for outdoor life: they can't quite seem to get the hang of their bicycles, preferring to squabble over whose turn it is to ride the toddler trike. They show up to the first soccer practice of the year, the only kids wearing plain runners instead of soccer cleats and shinpads. But oh wait, that's me again, the one for whom the world beyond my doorstep is a foreign land, one I visit from time to time, but without a map and not speaking the language.

Praise Junkie

"You thrive on praise," my husband accused last night. It's true. There are few things I enjoy more than praise.

That's why I'm so fortunate to have a son who is not afraid to dish out a few wholehearted compliments now and then. After I helped him with something this morning he turned to me and said, "Thanks mom. You're really great."

I must have looked as pleased as I felt because he went on to elaborate: "You're really good at wiping bums!"

You Go to School to Learn, Not for a Fashion Show

Incarnation

My three-year-old daughter doesn't like God.

Thanks to my inept attempts at early-childhood religious education, she seems to regard him as a kind of creepy intruder who hangs around in her bedroom. "I don't want him here!" she scowled when I explained that God is everywhere, even right here in her room. Omnipresence, apparently, is not her favourite doctrine.

Invisibility is also a problem. We've been in the habit of nightly prayer for quite some time now, but only recently has Pie realized that "saying prayers" means "talking to God." She is not pleased.

"But what does God look like?" she demands. I am tempted to foster this instinct of idolatry and reply, "He is pink. And fluffy." Instead I embark upon an explanation of incorporeality. "But," I add, grasping at straws, "did you know that God invented pink? He invented pink knowing that you, Pie, would like it!" We're on stronger ground here, so I add some references to flowers, rainbows, and sunsets, all created by God especially for her. (I'm willing to permit a little egocentrism if it will foster her acceptance of theism.)

But we're moving onto shaky ground. I am impressed, in a way, with Pie's insistence that she will not love or pray to a God she doesn't know. Even peer pressure is of no avail: when all the kids in Sunday School made cards saying, "God loves me," I asked Pie if God loved her. She shook her head adamantly. She can't love God, she explains, because she still doesn't know who he is.

I can't recall having any such reservations as a child. I accepted that God loved me and was extremely useful at times when I was scared of big dogs. I never demanded proof of his nature before inviting him into my heart. Pie is of a much more suspicious nature. This God who creeps around people's rooms uninvited seems a bit of a shady character - someone who seems an awful lot like a stranger, and she knows better than to talk to strangers.

She has anticipated a key question all religious believers must face. Who is this God you worship? And what makes you think that he is worth worshipping?

God, the inventor of rainbows and butterflies, must also inevitably become God, inventor of cancer and tsunamis. The God we infer from the world as we know it is not the same God I worship. The central claim of my faith is that the world around us is a most imperfect reflection of the God who created it, that the touchstone for our knowledge of God must always be Christ's claim that "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

So we pulled out the children's Bible again last night, and I read Pie the story of Mary and Martha (she likes that one because there are women in it), and the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus she will grudgingly accept. He is a man and an adult, as alien to her as the first-century Galilean must in some ways be to us all. Sin and atonement are doctrines far beyond her reach, as are incarnation and immortality. She can begin only with a man who, when approached by an irate Martha, chose not to make Mary run along and do some housework.