Benjamin Penguin

Dear Benjamin,

I’ve decided to do something a little different here. In the past, I wrote you a monthly letter at the start of a new month of your life. So, for example, when you turned 16 months, I wrote a letter about all the things you did when you were 15 months old, but I called it your 16 month letter because you were now 16 months old. I got all lost in the admittedly easy math and it threw me into a whirl of confusion that was excessive in relation to the simplicity of the issue. To reduce the number of mini-migraines this has caused me throughout your life, I am going to change things up just a bit. This is your Month Seventeen letter. Chronicling the things you have done during the seventeenth month of your life. Even though you are now eighteen months. But that doesn’t really matter under the new schema. Doesn’t this have a nice, inherent logic to it? I’d like to think it does. So here we go.

Now that the weather is nice, there is scarcely a day that we are not out and about doing something. I mean, there are periods throughout every day when we are eating and resting and relaxing at home, but we spend a lot of time on outings.  This is all fine and good, but I mention this because, in this past month, you’ve increasingly become rather enjoyable company on our outings. When you were very little, I took you out all the time. It is the one constant in our life. But you also did very little. You would sit in your car seat stroller attachment and gaze around. You might smile and coo, but mostly you just chilled. When you grew out of the car seat attachment, you sat in your stroller and gazed forward. I would often come around the side to look at you and you would always turn and smile, but it still felt like a very solitary excursion. When you began to walk, that was nice, because then I could take you places and let you walk around without the stroller standing as a barrier between us. Now, though, you’re fun to bring places. Let me clarify. MOST places. Places that allow you to walk or run or throw things at will. So, not the post office or most restaurants or the library or the grocery store. But places like the zoo and the museum and parks and nature preserves. These are right up our alley. And you really enjoy them. You like to walk around, explore, crawl over things, on things, grab things, pull things, move things and show me things. Last month was really one of the first times that I felt like I was going out with someone when we would go out. It’s not that we can walk leisurely down the street talking about the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Peter Singer while swigging overpriced coffees, an activity that Daddy and I would often partake in prior to your birth. But you and I can share experiences when we go out now. I can point out an interesting thing to you and you take notice. You can point out something to me and I take notice. There is a social give-and-take in our exchanges that bring a real sense of fun and wonder to our days and evenings out. It feels less like I am dragging you someplace to assuage my restless spirit and more like I am helping to create an event for us to experience together.

But if I may, Benjamin, let me tell you about a little experience that I could have done without. Every parent goes through this and it is both unavoidable and necessary in the development of a toddler’s sense of self and independence. I speak, of course, of the temper tantrum. Not A temper tantrum. THE temper tantrum. The one that makes you stop in your tracks and acknowledge that the little gentleman next to you is rapidly becoming their own person.

One day, during your seventeen month of life, I decided to take you to the park and then mosey on over to the post office to mail a package. It had been a little while since lunch and was still awhile before dinner and bedtime, so I thought it a perfect way to wile away the hours. I popped you in the stroller and wheeled you over to the park. You ran and giggled and fell and then ran some more. It was great fun and we almost lost track of time, having been there for almost an hour. I popped you back into the stroller and crossed the street to the post office. I pushed us over to a counter and began to prepare my package for mailing. You began to make sounds. They were not necessarily unpleasant sounds, nor were they unhappy sounds. They were just these indistinguishable little mutterings. “Mmmmfff.”  “Ehhhhhhnnn.” They were quiet at first, so I set back to work carefully hand labeling the address on the package. You then started kicking a bit, getting a little louder with your sounds. “UUUUNGG.” “SOOOFFFF.” I turned to look at you with the dawning realization that you might be, in the very near future, making a fuss. I opened my mouth and made some non-committal “There, there now” statement. I seem to have offended you greatly in the process because you grabbed the tray on your stroller, planted both hands down and pushed against it, red-faced and screeching. I’m pretty sure that I can pinpoint that as the first in a series of subsequent moments in which I debated scrapping the visit to the post office, but I had to mail the package that day. In an attempt to quell the brewing storm, I started quickly rattling off all the luxuries in the world that would be yours if you would just remain patient for a few more minutes. Just five. Five more minutes and we’ll get through this line. I rolled us over to the line and you started crying loudly. I gave you my purse, thinking that you might amuse yourself by sprinkling the contents of it all over the floor, but that only seemed to enrage you more. You screamed and threw the purse. I picked it up quickly, keeping my eyes cast downward towards my shoes in a blatant attempt to not look anyone in the eye, and I quickly rooted around for a pen. A nice, clicky pen that you could use to scribble on your leg, my dress, your stroller. ANYTHING that would prevent further screaming.  I handed you the pen and you began to cry very loudly, thrashing around in your stroller, kicking your legs and slapping your hands against the tray. By this point, I could see people in front of us turning around to stare at us and I could see people behind us shifting their weight from side to side to catch a glimpse of the rising cacophony. Were they perturbed? Sympathetic? I can’t say because, mentally, I had passed out, the sheer force of my mortification keeping my body erect while the rest of me desired to slide into a pool of flop sweat on the floor. I decided to try picking you up out of the stroller and bouncing you around a bit in my arms, thinking solemnly, “hey, this never worked when you were a baby, but you are verging on the hysterical here and I’d attempt to relactate if it would just make this end.”  So I unhooked the seat belt and gathered you into my arms. By this point, even my eyebrows were sweating. I was attempting to push my hair away from my face, which had been plastered to my forehead with a mixture of perspiration and some random food substance that you had deposited there earlier, and just as I cleared a patch for vision, your body stilled – eerily – and you leaned back, and with a gracefulness I’d have easily admired had it not been happening to me, slapped me clean across my check with an audible “smack.” …………………  It took me a few seconds to gather myself after that most magnificent bitch slap. I’m pretty sure I stood there gape-jawed for a moment or two. Then you snapped us both out of it by screaming and struggling to be put down. I started to gather our things and was going to wheel away as fast as my legs could carry me when THE MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN ALIVE (aka, the woman standing behind me) said, “Oh, honey. Don’t leave. They’re a handful. Why don’t you go out there in the lobby and I’ll call you when it’s your turn.” I don’t think I spoke, or maybe I was able to squeak out a feeble “thank you,” but I took her up on her offer. We went out into the hall and I feigned a pleasantness in my voice that I hoped was masking the wavering, warbling sounds of embarrassment and frustration. You seemed much calmer once we got into the lobby and began smiling again and saying “Mama, mama, mama.” When it was my turn, THE MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN ALIVE poked her head into the lobby and pointed me towards the waiting postal worker. You sassed him a little bit; when he asked you a question, you said “no” and made a pouty face. I placed you in the stroller, you squirmed and screamed, I completed the transaction as quickly as possible and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief as I started making my way away from the counter and towards the side exit. I got about three steps away from the doors before I felt the tears building and my lip trembling and I managed to make it outside and around the corner before bursting into tears.

I can and do laugh about it now because you’ve had numerous meltdowns and tantrums since then and I’ve become seasoned following the initial shock felt by my inability to comfort you or just make the tantrum go away. Now, I feel wholly prepared for the unavoidable toddler sass you sling our way on a near daily basis. Whether it is the cruelty we inflict upon you when  we won’t let you beat the dog, pull the cat’s tail, draw on the wall, throw uncooked pasta around the room, eat Mama’s shoe or other such activities, you’re quick with a reminder of how insularly insufferable we are to you. And I understand. Really I do. You are smart and clever and your language ability has not caught up to your imagination. It’s as though you view me as a foreigner in your little land – the less I seem to understand the language, the louder you shout at me. Most days, I remind myself that your ability to express anger and frustration stems from your maturing recognition of your own wants and needs. Wants and needs that are separate from what Daddy and I think is best for you. There are other days, of course, when the tantrum is so spectacular that I, too, want to throw myself on the floor and roll around and scream and tell you “no!” But such is the stuff of life: a series of negotiations and compromises made with the hope that while everyone may not walk away elated, at least we’ll all be fairly content. I think it is truly great that you are becoming your own little person with interests all of your own. I enjoy watching you discover new things that you claim as personally awesome. Trains, for example. I find it rather touching that you are so enamored of them. Without any prompting from us, they have become your thing, and I can’t hear a train, watch a train roll by or sit in the subway car without thinking about how much you would love the experience.

Aside from your impressive advances in screaming and flailing, you’ve become very adept at mimicking us now, and I sometimes have to stop myself from doing something that I would not want you to repeat. I am thinking of the times I licked something off a sharp knife, ran with scissors, perched precariously on a rickety wood chair to reach chocolate chips on a high shelf (which I then shoveled into my mouth by the handful and nearly choked on), drank orange juice from the carton (so gross, I know) or balanced five glass plates in a slippery, wet hand. None of these actions were at all intelligent and all of them could have resulted in some rather nasty scrapes, cuts and contusions. But mostly, thankfully, you mimic the more sedate activities in the household. You pretend to feed the dog by grabbing the dog food scoop and pretending to pour kibble in her bowl. You pretend to cook and stir various soups and sauces in your little toy pots. You attempt to push your own stroller, pretend to brush your teeth, pretend to wash your hands when holding bottles that look like soap, attempt to comb your own hair and pretend to talk on my cell phone when you steal it from my purse.

This mimicry has had the effect of making me more aware of myself and my presence in this world than I ever was before. How often I have to catch myself about to do something without thinking and rethink my plans to model safer, saner behavior. Being something of an anxious hypochondriac, I’ve been acutely aware of my need to provide guidance and watchfulness over you in an effort to keep you safe since before you were born. It’s in my nature to obsess about health and it’s even more in my nature to panic incredibly over my fears of said health being taken away. I envisioned myself as the all-seeing eye that would be five steps ahead of any danger that could ever cross your path. And you would think that someone with these tendencies would be the most risk-averse person on earth, but in my case, you would be wrong. Truthfully, I sometimes think it is you that is helping to take care of me. When forced to stop and really think about the various behaviors and actions that I could undertake in a day, I choose to model the ones that will keep you healthy and safe and, as a result, benefit myself greatly. I’m eating less junk food. I’m getting more sun and fresh air and walking more. I point Daddy to the savory sweets on high shelves and request that he fetch them from me instead of constructing a wobbly ladder from a stack of books and some plastic totes. I am trying to eat slower and take smaller bites. I am trying to spend less time sitting in front of the television and more time moving around.

Thanks for helping me be a healthier, happier, saner, safer person.

Love,

Mama