Clara likes to slam doors. She thunders down the hall into my bedroom, her bedroom, the bathroom--wherever there's a door--and slams it with all her baby might. Then she laughs diabolically behind the closed door.
After a moment, when her chuckling subsides, she says, "Mommy! Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Do' suht! Do' o-pin!"
This is my cue to come open the door. She can reach the door handle, but she can't open it by herself yet. She paws at it, and fingers the little screws that hold in the knob, and the strike plate where the lockset goes.
This morning, she ran into the bathroom, slammed the bathroom door, and then reached up and locked herself inside. She has never done that before. I didn't think she'd ever noticed the lock until this morning.
"Mommy! Mommy Mommy Mommy!"
My heart nearly stopped when I tested the knob and found the door locked.
"Uh, Clara, can you twist the button on the knob again?"
"Butt-ton. Butt-ton. Mommy o-pin. Mommy do' suht."
"Honey, stay there, okay?"
As if she could have gone anywhere.
Still, I had visions of her drowning in the toilet, or somehow finagling her little hand past the baby-proofing on the cupboards and getting to my leg razors.
What should I do? This was not a door that could be opened by sticking a credit card in the doorjamb. Who could I call that would come over STAT? Our neighbor, Joe, is out of town. I could call the cops, or maybe my boss, who I knew was rather handy, to come over and open it. (I noticed a tiny hole in the knob on my side of the door and had a vague sense it might be important. Later, a coworker told me there would be an Allen wrench on top of the door sill that you inserted into the hole to open it from the outside. Wonders never cease.)
Instead, I ran downstairs and grabbed a screwdriver. By this time, Clara had figured out she was stuck and began to wail.
"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" She listened briefly to me cursing at the screws on the other side of the door as I tried to place the screwdriver and decided I was incompetent: "Daddy! Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy!"
Finally I got the knob on my side off. Much to my horror, there was some sort of mechanism on the inside of the door that actually held the lockset. I'd thought I could take off the knob and everything would just fall apart.
Who knew doors were so complicated?
The knob on the other side of the door fell off, too, and I could see Clara's big blue eyes staring at me over the lockset mechanism and through the hole where the knobs had been. Her terror at being trapped inside the bathroom was quickly overtaken by her terror of disorder. She tried to replace the knob on her side of the door.
"Mess! Oh, mess, Mommy!" she said.
"It's okay, Honey, no big deal. No biggie."
The lockset seemed to be well-made, much to my chagrin. I pushed at it and whacked it with the screwdriver. Just as I was about to give up, it magically slipped open. I thought Clara would come rushing through the door and into my arms, but she had long since stopped crying and seemed interested in the doorknob. She hugged me, more to placate me than anything else.
She grappled with the loose knob and peered inside it. Then she looked at me and smacked her chest.
"Mommy. Bee-bee [chest smack] 'side do'."
"Yes. You were stuck inside the door."
"Mommy o-pin...Bee-bee [chest smack]."
"Yes. I opened the door for my baby."
No comments:
Post a Comment