Growing Girls (8 page)

No, the no-sleep issue is not the meat of the problem, I don’t think. Exhaustion as it pertains to motherhood is more specifically related to the fact that it’s so damn constant. As mother, you are the sergeant of an army and most of the time your soldiers don’t do what you tell them to, and not only that but they
fight, pick at each other, a flick of a pea, a stolen potato chip, and then they want more juice, even though you said no more juice they want more juice, so you offer milk because their teeth are going to fall out from all that juice, and then they cry and the negotiations continue and you dig your heels in because
your job is to build character
, and the only way to build character is to set boundaries, and enforce them. Then one of them has to go potty, and the other one has you looking under the sofa for a lost teapot that goes with the little mouse tea party set you knew had too many parts, and so you put your hand under the couch and you find a half-eaten Pop-Tart, which enrages you far more than it should. And so you yell and they cry and you would cry, too, if you stopped to think about how the only hope you have for sanity is a Barney video. You put the Barney video in and they ask for more juice.

Anybody can survive a day of this, of course; anyone can survive a week. But the thing about child rearing is, those children who grow up so fast don’t really, not when you break it down hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute. They don’t stop being children, not even for a day, not even for a weekend, while they are busily growing up so fast, and sooner or later you ask yourself: How is it that I’ve turned into such a cranky foam-at-the-mouth bitch when I was always the fun one, the fun aunt, the lady who would visit my nieces and nephews and be welcomed like a reprieve from the monster my sister somehow turned into? “You’re funny! I wish
you
were my mom!” That’s what they said and so you always thought,
Wow, I’m going to be a great mom
. And now here you are an actual mom with your very own kids and they are finding someone else to say it to—“You’re
funny! I
wish you
were my mom!”—maybe a babysitter, or one of your good friends from college; the thing of it is, you don’t even
care
. Whatever, so your kids think you’re a horrible grouch of a mom and they’d rather have a fun mom, uh-huh, whatever, can we just wrap this up and get on with the business of baths?

Maybe one of the reasons I even had the prison fantasy was because of the notion of already having been convicted. Whew. Done. Now let me get myself into my cell, and, by the way, is there any chance I could upgrade to a padded one?

And so. There we were sitting in our accountant’s office, and John Daller our accountant pointed to the poster of the time share in Aruba, a glorious photo of an azure blue sea with a little coconut-tree hut in the foreground. And that was that.

When we got to Aruba, I sat in one of those very same huts and I wore a big hat and I tried to read a book. That used to be a very enjoyable activity but now it was a war of conscience. The problem is, a lot can happen to a four-and-a-half-year-old child while you are sneaking your way into a chapter, and even more can happen to a two-and-a-half-year-old. Every little paragraph felt like a naughty treat and then I would imagine explaining to the ambulance driver that I just
had
to turn the page to find out if the wife really was cheating or not—it was coming up on the next page!—and that’s all I did, I just read that one tiny next paragraph and then when I looked up my kid was hanging from the jaws of that shark;
I swear I had no idea how she even got into the water in the first place!

It’s not worth it, all the places your imagination takes you when you are stealing your way out of motherhood and into
being a normal person who just wants to read a damn book on the beach.

My friend Nancy told me that going on vacation wasn’t the same once you were a mom, but I think she held back telling me the whole thing. Her husband, Jack, is a good father, and so is my husband. These are not the type of men to go off to the casino or even to put back bourbons. They are “family” men who want nothing more than to be right there in family mode, sticking always by our sides. Even so, it always comes back to the mother to keep the kids from getting bitten by crabs or scorched by the sun or electrocuted by putting their fingers in the sockets of the little speakers put around so the vacationers can enjoy calypso music.

In Aruba, Sasha wore a pink bikini with pictures of turtles on it. She wasn’t talking yet but I wasn’t worried. When people asked me how old she was, I said two, leaving out the “and a half” part, and I think that little slip, that omission, was probably a good indicator of the denial I was in. Kids at two and a half are supposed to have a vocabulary of about three hundred words. Sasha had seven, but only if you really stretched it. She had three reliable sounds: “Ma,” meaning “Mom,” “Dat,” meaning “Dad,” and “Iss,” meaning “this,” and which she would use while pointing to get whatever she needed. “Iss” was a refined version of her former “sss” sound she would use as her one and only all-purpose word.

No, I told myself, I really wasn’t worried. After all, Anna had
been very slow to talk, too. Anna said nothing but “ch” for an entire year. I was used to this, to Lisa, the speech therapist who would come to our house with her Pooh toys two times a week and clap as Anna learned new sounds. Plenty of kids who come out of orphanages from China don’t have speech delays at all, but plenty do. Lisa had seen her share. Her theory was simple and shared by many of those experts who write in language-acquisition journals: disruption at about a year old is at a critical stage in language development—the very time the child is starting to mimic the people in the world around her. So, imagine, one day it’s all music and tone and
ee-ow
, and then, bam, the next it’s a strange nasal mess of clicks and clacks. The development shuts down, while the pathways in the brain rejigger themselves. But soon enough, with patience and some speech therapy to boost and encourage, language emerges again, and anew.

By the time Anna was three she was well on her way to speaking, although her path to language was the weirdest Lisa and her colleagues had ever observed. Rather than imitating sounds, the key for Anna was the alphabet. The actual symbols. She loved those things. We’d be at the grocery store and see a sign for grapes and Anna would run up and point. “G!” she’d say, looking at the sign and giving me a look of “Can you believe it? G is here!”

The symbols were her friends. When Lisa couldn’t get her to say “ball,” she finally picked up a block with a “B” on it. “Buh buh buh,” she said, pointing to the letter. That got Anna’s attention. (“Yay! B is here!”) And so she would mimic “buh” and
that got her revved up to go all the way into “ball.” And so came word after word.

I was eager for Anna to speak because I felt she would have so much to say. I felt I would get to know her better when she finally had a spoken form for her thoughts. What, anyway, is a person without language? Who is a girl with nothing more to offer than “ch” or “sss”?

When Anna finally started talking, the thing I learned was how much she loved the alphabet, the actual symbols, and she also loved numbers, the actual symbols, she loved them in blue and in pink and in red and in combinations aplenty.

The thing is, she was the same girl she was when all she said was “ch.” She was just… a little more so. She was growing up and into herself. I’m not convinced words changed anything, even though the thought disappoints me. I wanted language to be the key, not for Anna so much as my exalted sense of language. I spend my days with words, putting my thoughts into written form. Giving language to my thoughts is the only way I even know what my thoughts are. Anyone knows that words are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surely language is where people
begin
being people.

This, anyway, is the indoctrination. This is the assumption you walk around with, having been schooled on the principle of words as the building blocks of communication. True enough. But what about the stuff underneath the building blocks? The rocks and the dirt and the mud of emotion? Like all babies, Anna laughed long before she spoke; she laughed in my arms the first day I held her. Jokes are funny in Chinese and
in Arabic and in French and in Infant-ese. A bassoon can tell a joke and so can a flute and a cat can do something very, very funny. But among creatures, only people can laugh. Laughter, I think, is where people begin being people.

I wanted Sasha to have a breakthrough just as Anna had had with the alphabet. Lisa started coming to our house in May of that year, when Sasha was twenty-six months old, and she tested Sasha every which way. Sasha proved to be on target for cognitive development as well as fine-motor development, while ahead of the game, testing at the level of a twenty-nine-month-old, for gross-motor skills.
Today Sasha was observed to throw a ball at least three feet and walked along a line of tape on the floor. Sasha can do a somersault with ease
.

Language acquisition in children is divided into two components: receptive, meaning the words the child comprehends, and expressive, the words she can actually say. Sasha scored on target for receptive.
She is beginning to respond to basic prepositions such as “in,” “out,” “on.” Sasha also can identify several body parts and will point to pictures in a book when asked
. But her expressive-language development was placed at a paltry fourteen months. She was a toddler with the communication skills of an infant.

There was one line in Lisa’s report that none of us made a big enough deal of at the time:
Sasha tends to point and use gestures creatively to express her wants/needs
.

Creatively.

In Aruba there was a playground on the beach near the little coconut-tree hut and my girls were playing and so were two older girls, maybe eight and ten, both with long blonde
hair. Anna was busy smushing wet sand through her toes and fingers and then painting her legs with “A,” “B,” and “C” and then making designs on her cheeks like war paint. Anna has always been this way. She can entertain herself with a stone and a feather.

Sasha was watching the blonde-haired girls. At first I thought it was their acrobatics that caught her attention. The older girls had mastered the swinging bridge made of hanging tires and soon enough they took to leaping off it and then diving into somersaults in the sand. Sasha watched and watched with those eyes that held so much, those eyes that held so much in China when she was in my arms for the first time, a frozen little girl with a bald head and arms curled into her chest in fear. And now here she was a nineteen-pound peanut in a pink bikini.

In one swift motion, Sasha picked up a shell and walked over to the smaller of the two girls. She offered the shell to the girl. “Oh, thank you,” the girl said, taking it. And so Sasha picked up another shell and offered it to the other girl, who likewise took it.

“Aw, she’s so cute!” said one to the other.

Sasha did not smile. Instead, she held out her hands and demanded both shells back.

The girls obliged, giggling.

All three stood there for a moment.

“Iss!” Sasha said, looking at the shells. Then she dropped them, one in front of each girl. She pointed to the ground. Iss!

“She-is-so-cute!” the taller girl said to the other, both
seeming to instinctively understand the order to bend down and pick up the shells. And so they obeyed.

I felt as if I was watching some sort of mating dance, with Sasha in charge. All action, no language. And yet she was so willing and so able to communicate an invitation for friendship—a friendship on her terms.

In time the girls were at the bottom of the sliding board, encouraging Sasha, who was at the top of it. “Come on! You can do it! We’ll catch you!”

Sasha sat up there and pondered. Then she waved her hand in a wiping motion. “Iss!” she shouted.

“You want us to wipe off the slide?” the short one asked her.

Sasha nodded in the affirmative.

“There’s
sand on
the slide!” the tall one said. “We have to get it
off
!”

So they did, while the little peanut in the pink turtle bikini sat on high and watched and waited. A queen. A ruler. A girl for whom language was a royal waste of time.

Eventually, the girls approached me. They told me they were cousins, Julia and Jennifer. “Will you be here tomorrow?” asked Julia. “Because we would like to play with her after Bingo.”

I told them we would be and they jumped with happiness. “High five?” Jennifer said to Sasha, holding up her hand for a slap. Sasha had no clue what this meant and so the girls taught her.

After that, we spent every afternoon in Aruba with Jennifer and Julia, both of them waiting on Sasha and occasionally waiting on Anna but just to be polite. The thing that got me was the realization that Sasha would spend her life being popular
demanding it, getting it. I figured Anna would or wouldn’t be, but probably wouldn’t care.

It was easy to see that Sasha’s claim on the world predated her mastery of spoken words. I wondered how much of that was true of all of us. Before we learn to say hello, have we learned how to be, how to manage who we are? I always thought language was the key to knowing, to understanding, and maybe that’s true except when it comes to knowing the self. We all cry and we all laugh before we speak. We are emotion first, thought second. And I suppose word whenever we get around to it.

That summer Sasha said her first sentence. “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” This means, “May I please be excused?” We all knew it the minute she said it, thanks to her posture and beckoning with her eyes, but mostly because Anna confirmed it. Further complicating Sasha’s attempt to talk was the fact that Anna understood much of what she said. When you have an interpreter, you aren’t as motivated to learn the local lingo.

There was still a lot of summer left so I decided to have the girls help me cut a path through the woods. Together we would snip, snip, snip through the sticker bushes and make it to the top of the hill.