Vignettes

I.

Tonight after dinner, Clara made Simon and I a picnic in her play kitchen with her plastic food. It was a very carb-heavy picnic. We had donuts, cookies and several slices of plastic bread. Then she requested we sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," two or three times in a row. The upper octaves of that song are nearly always out of reach for me.

Eventually, Clara said, "Ok, just Daddy sing it."

"I want to sing something else," Simon said.

"Don't you want me to sing 'Bobby Magee'?" I asked Clara. It's a rare day when she says 'yes' to Bobby Magee. Usually when I wallow into it, she starts to cry in distress. My voice tends to strain a bit, and I do have a tendency to sing through my nose on the high notes. The effect can be startlingly submarine, like the sounds a pod of whales conversing in the depths of the ocean might make. But I do so love to sing that song, and it's the only one I know that remains within my approximately five-note range.

"No!" Clara said, looking at me with alarm.

"Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin' for a train, and I was feelin' oh as faded as my jeans," I began, hoping she was bluffing. Or hoping maybe she would suddenly perceive the true, colorful, shall we say "distinctive" quality of my voice and, entranced, let me finish the dang song.

"No! No! Not this! Mickey Mouse!" she said. Anything, anything to shut me up.

"If you're going to sing 'Bobby Magee,' I may as well sing 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,'" Simon said. But he finally ended up singing, "Home on the Range" for her. I was politely asked not to join in.

I pulled up my maternity shirt partway to feel the air on my skin, and the baby started kicking around. Clara put her little hands on my belly and felt him move a few times. Then she started playing with a musical card my mom got me for Mother's Day, one that she'd immediately claimed for her own and dragged to the basement playroom. The card urges moms everywhere to take a break from housewifery and put their feet up. When you open the card, there's a picture of a lady relaxing on her bed while Etta James belts out, "At Last."

Clara sang along softly with the card, but instead of singing, "At Laaaaaaaaaast," she sang, "A Laaaaaammmmmb."

Then she put the card close to my belly so the baby could hear it. She pretended to read the card, saying, "Baby brother will be born in the sand in the river. And there will be crocs."

"There will be crocodiles?" Simon clarified.

"There will be crocodiles and they will bite him."

"Oh, no!" we protested. "Although," I reconsidered. "He would be quite the tender morsel."

"The crocodile will open his mouth and baby brother will crawl inside! And he will eat him! Haha!" Clara said, and she flashed her pearly white baby teeth.

II.


Yesterday Clara and I went grocery shopping. She had three sample bites of watermelon. Then, while I was inspecting the bananas, she attempted to deconstruct the toothpick dispenser near the sample tray. It was a minor faux pas compared to our past experiences with the sample counter. I have seen her reach into the plastic dome covering the cheese samples and grab a whole handful of cheese cubes and stuff them in her mouth before I can say a peep. "Sample" is apparently not yet in her lexicon.

She's just tall enough to reach the bottom of the fruit displays, and yesterday I caught her gratuitously kissing a plum. It occurred to me that she often sees me holding fruit close to my lips at the store. Really I'm sniffing it to check for ripeness, but I could see how, from her perspective, it might look as though I were kissing it. Of course, yesterday I felt obliged to buy the plum she'd mauled, which was fine, because she gobbled it up as soon as I had paid for it.

At the end of our shopping, we used the restroom. As we were leaving, a whole bevy of women came in, and Clara asked, "Are these ladies going to go pee?"

"Probably," I answered. "Everyone pees."

As if to clarify that this was indeed true, Clara squatted and ducked her head under the nearest stall, which was, unfortunately, occupied. The lady in there didn't say anything, so I hope she didn't notice the little girl with blue eyes and braids staring up at her while she indulged in a nice, relaxing bathroom break.

III.

Lately I've been having a lot of shortness of breath. No doubt it's because the baby is growing and pushing up against my windpipe. Usually the shortness of breath occurs when I'm excited. Like, if there's a big plate of delicious food in front of me, I'll start panting and wheezing and Simon has to talk me down, remind me to breathe, the food's not going anywhere, I can take breaks, etc.

A few weeks ago the shortness of breath happened while we were getting ready to rent a paddleboat to float out on one of Boise's ponds. I have always, ALWAYS wanted to go on a paddleboat, but never had the chance. While we were getting out of our car in the parking lot, I saw a large family also getting out of their car and heading towards the paddleboat rental office. It suddenly seemed like I had to get there first because, what if they took all the paddleboats?

"There are probably thirty paddleboats here, each one of which seats three people, and we are the only two groups of people going to rent paddleboats," Simon pointed out as I hurriedly waddled, red-faced, down the sidewalk with Clara on my hip.

I beat the other family to the rental office, but realized just as I got there I had to pee something fierce. The nearest bathroom was across the park. I broke out in a sweat. As I huffed and gasped towards the distant cinderblock bathroom, dragging Clara by the hand through flocks of lounging geese and ducks, Simon tried to keep apace and murmured soothing things like, "There are enough paddleboats for everybody. We will all get a chance to ride the paddleboat."

Last night I had a very different kind of shortness of breath. It started when I was lying in bed, thinking of Clara sitting across from me at lunch yesterday, with her long, curly hair tucked behind her ears. She'd dexterously wielded her fork through mounds of gourmet macaroni and cheese and broccoli. We'd been at a restaurant, and a little boy at a nearby table had stood up on his chair and pretended to shoot her with his index finger. She'd smiled at him cheekily, and would have shot him back, except just then his mother said, "Lincoln, sit down on your bottom. Little girls do not like to be shot at."

As I lay in bed thinking about all this last night, my chest got really tight. It was because of something indefinable in the way she had looked, the way she ate. She was ravenous for the food, ravenous to look at the people around us, interested in what they were eating and what they were doing, what they were talking about, excited to be drinking water from a glass instead of a sippy cup.

A lot of the time, from day to day, she'll ask me endless streams of questions about how things work and why people do what they do. Sometimes I feel like it'll drive me crazy. At lunch yesterday, though, she hadn't said anything, just drank up everything with her eyes and started to confidently grasp at her own conclusions. I felt sad because I knew she would need me less and less as time went on. Her curiosity would eventually lead her to places I couldn't go.

Thinking about this in my bed last night, I started to lose my breath again, and had to call Simon upstairs.

Unable to articulate what I really felt just then, I said, "She likes you better than me! She doesn't like me anymore! I can't keep up and do fun things anymore because I'm so big and pregnant! And soon I'll have a new baby and things will change forever!"

"She doesn't like me better," Simon said. "Whenever you're at work or gone shopping, she talks about you constantly."

"I feel like I'm losing her. I'm losing my baby!"

"She's two-and-a-half. She's not a baby anymore," Simon said.

"She can't even sit on my lap anymore," I said. "It's like, when you have a kid, your heart is outside you, running around, playing in the sandbox, on the swings. And now, we're going to have ANOTHER kid?!? So now, what, I'll have TWO hearts running around outside me??!! How am I going to do it? I feel like I'm going to split in half!!"

"I don't know how it all works, but I think we'll figure it out. It's going to be fine," Simon said.

After Simon left, I comforted myself with the thought that other people do it--other people have two kids, and it works out alright.

Floppy the stuffed dog: mascot of revolt

When I picked Clara up from daycare today, there were small hints of an impending storm. Throwing aside a tiny play aluminum pot, she came at me like a hurricane of lime-striped leggings and pigtails tied with sparkling pink jelly-bands. Her eyes, I noticed as I picked her up for a hug and a kiss, matched her Crocs: they were bright pink with exhaustion. She moaned as she buried her face in my neck. She shuddered wordlessly--a kind of tearless, inner weeping she employs when she wants to portray to me how rotten and unjust the world is even though I just saw her having a blast with the other kids in the play kitchenette and I know she got to do all sorts of fun things today at school.

"Do you want to climb into the car seat yourself, or would you like me to put you in?" I asked her as we left the building.

"Me do it!" she yelled, then instantly became absorbed in balancing on the concrete border of some raised flowerbeds along the sidewalk. She shot me a few coquettish looks; she was toying with my patience and she knew it. Finally, after giving her a few chances to get into the car on her own, I grabbed her and deposited her in her seat. "Me do it!" she howled. "Mommy, I want to do this!"

"Nope, you had your chance. We gotta go," I said. She wept the bitter tears of those who look back on their lives and see only regret and missed opportunities. However, her mood brightened considerably when we turned onto a main thoroughfare and passed a construction site with a bright orange porta-potty. Maybe there were new avenues of joy to be found in this lifetime.

"Mommy, I want to go potty in this potty," she said, pointing to the porta-potty.

"Sorry, no can do. But you can go potty when we get to the store," I replied.

"I want to go potty in this," she groused. I tried to think of an interesting way to explain why she couldn't, something that would sate her. Unfortunately, my lane was also merging and a white Volvo was lolly-gagging in my blind spot. Alas, my pregnancy brain cannot multitask. Clara started making a weird, high-pitched fake-crying sound. Startled, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she was baring her teeth at her reflection in the window.

I made the turn and said, "We can't go potty in the orange potty because it's out in the sun all day, so the inside's really, really hot. And it's very stinky."

"Oh, needs a shower," Clara muttered. Then she erupted into a series of sharp, high-pitched meows. Her impression of an indignant cat.

We pulled into the store. Clara had been cuddling her stuffed dog, Floppy, in the crook of her arm since leaving daycare, so I asked if she wanted to bring him in. She didn't, but she did want to snap him into her car seat and bundle him in a blanket and fiddle interminably with his ears.

"He's the best baby I ever seen and he gettin' bigger," she said, smoothing his ears back.

I asked her again as we finally left the car if she was sure she didn't want to bring Floppy into the store. She said no.

Just inside the sliding doors, all hell broke loose. Because guess what? Clara really had wanted to bring Floppy into the store.

While we were dithering about Floppy, a little boy took the last grocery cart with a red car attached to the front. We waited a moment for another, which unfortunately also gave Clara time to arpeggio up to the highest, loudest shriek of her sobs. I was determined to ignore her crying, get in the store, get the few items we needed, and get out.

"Honey, I gave you a choice about bringing Floppy into the store while we were at the car, remember? And you said, 'No,'" I said.

"Let's go get Floppy!" she vibratto-ed.

"No, Honey. We parked way, way out in the parking lot. Mommy is tired and I don't want to go back for Floppy. We're only going to be in here for a minute. Hey, look, there's a red car cart! Here, let me put you in."

Sobbing, inconsolable sobbing. My experience thus far with Clara crying in a store is that she soon stops after we get going down an aisle, both because she is emotionally labile and also interested in what's going on around her. But today her cries only intensified. As we rounded the deli counter, an elderly lady said, "Oh, Sweetie, what's the matter? Why you cryin' poor Baby Girl?"

"I want my Floppy!" Clara sobbed from where I'd strapped her inside the red plastic car.

"Oh, is Floppy a stuffed animal?" the elderly lady asked me.

"Stuffed dog," I replied. "We had to leave him in the car."

"Oh, poor baby," said the lady. She followed us into produce. I chalked it up to the effect of Clara's pigtails and big, blue, tear-filled eyes, and so didn't get too irritated with the lady.

But then we were bottle-necked next to the bananas by an unusually large, roving herd of after-work shoppers.

Clara was still sobbing. People began to watch.

"She misses her stuffed dog, Floppy," the elderly lady explained to our spectators. "They had to leave him in the car" After a dramatic pause, presumably to let the effect of her words sink in, she continued: "I say go get Floppy!"

There were murmurs of agreement from the other shoppers: "Yeah, go get Floppy!" People nodded and looked at me expectantly.

"If you don't shut up and stop inciting the mob against me, I'm going to punt you over that pyramid of apples," I told the elderly lady. Just kidding. I didn't say anything. I just blushed really hard and swallowed. Then I parked the cart, unstrapped Clara from the plastic car attachment and put her on my hip. I wiped her tears with my fingers and walked away. She had stopped crying by the time we rounded the corner into frozen foods.



It bears mentioning that Floppy has many roles besides that of insurrectionist. He is also a potty tester, bravely sitting on a potty before Clara to make sure there's no tomfoolery (automatic flushers, super-loud suction systems, rotating hygienic plastic wrap). And this morning he briefly served as a pregnancy surrogate. Clara performed a cesarean of sorts, pretending to scoop "baby brudder" from my stomach with cupped hands (small fingernails sporting chipped polish in the hue "Verve.") She gave "baby brudder" several kisses and carefully deposited him into the outstretched, supine body of Floppy.

Oh, Floppy, if only you could carry this baby for me.