Growing Girls (12 page)

“Yeah…”

“He doesn’t believe in hair sheep. He doesn’t want to mix.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Are you okay?”

“You know what, I really need to go watch TV,” I said.

I got in my pajamas. I put on
The Bachelorette
. I watched Jen weep her brains out over whether to pick Jerry or John Paul, the two men she had fallen in love with, and then in the end she didn’t pick either. I considered throwing a brick at the TV, but instead I turned off the TV and the light and I put a blanket over my head, leaving only a tiny passageway—a meager but necessary invitation—for oxygen.

fever all through the night

I’m reporting live, from a cozy blue room generously appointed with trains and toy mice dressed in tutus. I’m here on a sliver of an edge of a too-small bed, but I do have this bit of quilt cover, so I’m, ouch, good. Really I am.

The rest of the bed, and the rest of my life, is taken up entirely by my daughter, a three-year-old with the heaviest and hottest head imaginable. Her head, featuring a 102-degree fever, is resting on my belly, somewhere around my spleen, I’d guess. But this is really just a guess. I don’t know where my spleen is, or what, really, it even does, but at 4:05 in the morning you think about things like spleens. I am thinking that human spleens can’t take this kind of sustained weight; I am really starting to think they can’t.

My daughter is going to wake up any moment now, as she
has been doing all night long. She is going to wake up in a kind of dreamy panic, she is going to lift her head and say, “Where are you, Mommy? Where did you go?” And I’m going to stroke her cheek gently. I’m going to say, “I’m here, sweetie. Me and my spleen are right here.” And she will drop her head,
thunk
, like a bowling ball on my belly, and fall instantly back to sleep.

The virus that has hold of her is a particularly tenacious one; the doctor said I should give it a good ten days.

“Good?” I said.

“Do what you can do,” he said. “Just make her comfortable.”

Ordinarily, I don’t spend the night in my daughter’s room. Oh, the parent police say to never sleep with your kid. But when your kid is sick, all the rules go out the window. Breaking rules is a catalyst for healing. I remember milk shakes when I was sick, I remember my mom wheeling the TV into my room. I remember no vegetables and no meat, just noodles and milk shakes and noodles.

But mostly I remember my mother’s hand on my cheek. First my forehead, then one cheek, then the next, where it would rest awhile. Her cool, worried hand. The hand that said, “Oh, no! You’re sick!”

The virus that has hold of my daughter is going around. Adults seem to get the two-to-three-day version; kids the seven-to-ten. So I’ve already been in one side and out the other of this one. A few days ago, I could barely lift my head. My fever shot to 103, and many doses of Tylenol brought it down to a still-miserable 101.1 called my mother. She did what she could do, from three hundred miles away. She said, “Oh, no!” She said, “You’re sick!”

My husband tried to pick up the slack. Of course, a husband is handicapped at a time like this: He is not, no matter how hard he tries, your mother. He needs instructions. “Here, like this,” I said, taking his hand and placing it on my forehead, then round to one cheek, then the other. “Just come by and do this every hour or so, and I will probably survive.” I was too weak to tell him about the milk shakes, the TV, the noodles. Too weak and pathetic and miserable and, underneath it all, disappointed in him for not being my mother.

A sick child and a mother. There’s an electricity. Up until recently, I understood it only from the child’s point of view. I understood it in my skin. I simply felt better if my mom’s hand was on my cheek. I understood its absence as pure hunger.

Now, from a mother’s point of view, I understand the reverse. For the mother, the sick child offers completion. The child needs what the mother has, what the mother is. She needs worry and sorrow and tenderness. The sick child makes the mother whole.

All night long, every hour at least, my daughter had been calling. So eventually, about two hours ago, I climbed into this little bed. I set myself up here, with a book and a night-light, and I’ve been fighting for more space and more quilt coverage, yanking and pulling as subtly as I can while she lies sleeping. I’m cold. I’m an old lady flying coach on a transatlantic flight. I’m getting a spleen-ache. And yet I’m so comfortable in this moment I could cry.

She is stirring again. She lifts her head. I can actually feel the heat move briefly away. “Where are you, Mommy?” she says, her eyes still closed. “Where did you go?”

“I’m right here, sweetie,” I say, placing my hand on her forehead, then one cheek, then the other. “Me and my spleen are right here.”

Thunk
.

Ugh.

What strange joy.

apraxia

There came a day when Anna announced that she did not wish to be called Anna anymore.

“No?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Because I am Princess Kitty Cat Butterfly.”

“Princess Kitty Cat Butterfly,” I said, generously. “A name of distinction.”

Then she looked at Sasha. “Her name isn’t Sasha,” she said.

“No?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Her name is Ed.”

So for a while this is how it went. Sasha did not mind being called Ed, although she herself pronounced it “Et.” We’d be in the grocery store and one of those grandfathers would come up to her, coochie coochie coo and say, “What is your name, sweetie?”

“Et.”

“Ed!” I would chime in. “But that’s not really her name; her sister changed it…”

Oh, never mind.

Some months after we all got used to the linguistic work involved in addressing our child as Princess Kitty Cat Butterfly, Anna had a new announcement: “I’m dropping the ‘Butterfly.’”

“Okay,” Alex said. “Just Princess Kitty Cat, then?”

“Yep,” she said. “But my nickname is Kitty.”

All of this came as some relief to Sasha, whose challenge to put together even two syllables was sometimes overwhelming. She could never say “Anna,” in the first place. The sound “n” was, for her, utterly unattainable. “Anna” came out as “Alia,” which is exactly how “Ellen,” the name of the babysitter, came out. “I’m not Ellen!” Anna would say.

“Soddy, Kikki,” Sasha would say. Translation: “I’m sorry, Kitty.”

Eventually, “Kikki” proved more fun for all of us to say than “Kitty,” and the new names settled on our tongues and found their rhythmic homes.

And so my girls, Kikki and Et.

You could look at the evolution of a lot of languages and I’ll bet they started as simply and logically as this.

“When Sasha turns four, will she start talking right?” Anna asked one day.

It was an obvious question for a girl whose sister says “gilk”
instead of “milk,” no matter how many times you correct her. But it was one of the few times Anna made reference to being frustrated with Sasha’s inability to speak intelligibly. Usually, Anna works as interpreter. She understands Sasha when no one else can.

“Mee zee too wow!” Sasha said in the car on the way to school one morning.

“What, sweetie?” I said.

“Mee zee
too wow,”
she declared emphatically.

“Mom, she thinks the music is too loud,” Anna chimed in.

Oh. And, of course.

The two spend their days together, so Anna has easily picked up Sasha-speak. The rest of us are still learning.

Lately I’ve been thinking I should be making a bigger deal out of Sasha’s problem. I am too blasé about it. I wonder if some switch has turned off in me that keeps me from grieving over the fact that my preschooler has so little language.

Sasha chose McDonald’s as the magical land of her birthday party. “Whoa!” she said, the first time we went there. And, could it be true? Six of her friends at the McDonald’s PlayLand and presents and balloons all
at the same time)

She managed to communicate this wish to me with her eyes and her broken sounds and both of her arms gripping my thigh with joy. So much of language has nothing to do with words. Perhaps this is why I’m not more worried about Sasha’s speech disorder: I
forget
. Her lack of intelligible talking doesn’t get in the way of my knowing her, or loving her, or enjoying her company, or laughing at her jokes. When it comes to sociability, a language disorder is a remarkably surmountable obstacle.

The party at McDonald’s went off without a hitch, a dream come true enhanced with the unicorn balloons and unicorn plates and unicorn napkins we brought. We played pin-the-horn-on-the-unicorn and Sasha wore a birthday-girl tiara and for lunch she ordered cleek-en luggets and choco gilk.

When we got home I put a blindfold on her and brought her outside and when she opened her eyes there was her surprise: a small brown donkey wearing a giant red ribbon.

“Foh me?” she said.

“For you, sweetie,” I said.

“My gon-key?”

“Your very own gon-key.”

“Oh, I luff it…
so much!”

I love the way she says “so much.” It comes out with almost a Russian accent. Very emphatic. More like, Zo
mutch!
I’ve come to incorporate the phrase in many of my own declarations of happiness.

The donkey stood thirty-five inches tall, a registered “miniature” that was pregnant, which the donkey farmer we bought her from swore was a good thing. “Two for one!” he said. But he really didn’t need to give me the hard sell. That donkey had been following me around all day while I went about the donkey farm looking for just the right surprise for Sasha. I thought a miniature donkey would be a good starter equine for her. Something just her size she could groom and feed and practice picking hooves. I wanted a white spotted one, something with some pizzazz. There were so many gorgeous little donkeys at that farm, all of them milling about and some of them munching on a round bale and a few huddled with their backs to me
as if gossiping. I went from beautiful donkey to adorable donkey, trying to choose, and all the while there was this little brown, nondescript, dirty dirtbag of a donkey following me, like a little caboose. I finally faced the animal and said
“What?”
She looked up at me. She blinked. Then she tilted her head, as if questioning. It was not a pleading question, but more of a bored one. Like, “I’m ready? I’ve been waiting an hour?” That was pretty much that. I wouldn’t get a gorgeous white spotted donkey. I would get a dumpy fat girl donkey because some things are just meant to be.

“My gon-key?” Sasha was saying. “She is my gon-key?” This was a very good reception, in my view, even better than I had hoped for. A miniature donkey had not, after all, had a chance to appear on Sasha’s lifetime wish list.

“She’s just your size,” I said. “You can brush her, feed her, take care of her.”

Sasha hugged the donkey and Alex took pictures. We walked the donkey around the yard and talked about naming her.

“Elise?” Sasha said.

“Um…”

“Woo yike ‘Elise’?” she said.

I had nothing against the name. It was just that Sasha’s every doll and every stuffed animal was named Elise. I suppose a lot of kids go through stages where they have default names like this.

“Oh, I don’t know, sweetie,” I said, turning to Alex, hoping for some help. “Woo yike ‘Elise’?”

“Sure!” he said.

“No woo don’t!”
I said. “Listen, Sash, it might get confusing if your gonkey has the same name as your kitties.”

She thought about that. Anna suggested other names. We worked on the chocolate theme because of the donkey’s deep brown coat, eventually settling on “Choco,” a character in one of our favorite adoption story books. The added benefit of the name was that it was one Sasha could actually say.

“I luff woo, Choco,” she said, as she led the donkey into the barnyard. “Choco iss
my
gonkey!”

It was February and it was cold so we gave Choco some hay and then we went inside and ate pock-horn and we played Go Shish, the card game.

The thing is, my child is disabled. That’s what I need to admit. We certainly don’t treat her as disabled. We don’t tiptoe around the issue or overcompensate with gushy praise or behave in a way that masks fear. This is not by design so much as that we really don’t think of her as disabled. I don’t know which came first, the not thinking or the not behaving, but I’m sure one feeds into the other. Recently I’ve started wondering when the benefits of that way of dealing with a disabled child lean and finally tip over into denial.