sharks

Alice comes running from her room and tells me she is scared.

Scared of dinosaurs.

Scared of motorcycles.

Scared of ghosts and monsters.

“Scared of ghosts? Who told you about ghosts?” I wonder aloud. “What do you think ghosts are?”

I catch myself about to tell her that ghosts aren’t real, knowing full well that whether ghosts are real has almost nothing to do with whether they scare her. So I pick her up. “You know what? I’ll take care of you. I promise. I’ll take care of you.”

She tells me she is scared of sharks. “Sharks live in the ocean and you live in a house. No sharks here.”

She talks about sharks all the time, and I start to think that, sometimes at least, when she tells us she is scared, she is really asking us to tell her more. So we talk about sharks. What they eat. How they move. Where they live. And in the bathtub, she says, “I swimming like a shark.”

Over the holiday weekend, we met my parents in Monterey and took Alice to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I knew she would love it. She pressed her palms against the glass and screamed out her delight. “A shark!” “A feesh!” “A seahorse!” “A sea cu-cum-ber.”

When she is feeling confident, or very proud or happy, Alice walks around with her body tilted forward and her arms thrown back. Like she’s jet-propelled.

She darted around the aquarium that way, uninterested in whether the rest of us could keep up. “Come ON,” she said. “Show you more feesh.”

The next day, on the way back home, we stopped at a beach off Highway 1. Alice didn’t like the way the sand felt – maybe the grit, or maybe the way her feet sunk. She clung and we had to carry her to the water.

Within ten minutes, she wouldn’t even hold my hand. She wanted to stay forever.

looking up

One evening a couple of weeks ago, we were invited to a baseball game with a group of people I work with. It was a kids-allowed function, so we smeared some sunscreen on Alice, packed her into the stroller and crossed our fingers that the funny-charming toddler would prevail over the cranky-tired one. It’s always a little risky at the end of a weekday.

When we got to the ballpark, three boys were rolling down a grassy hill along the right field line : a 5-year-old and 6-year-old twins.

When she’s not at day care, Alice spends almost all her time with adults – with us, or with our friends. She’s easy with grownups, most of the time. But she can be slow to warm up to other kids. David tells me that when he drops her off in the morning, the day care supervisors remind the other children, “Give her space. Let her have her space.”

She needs to stand back awhile, to size things up before she is willing to jump in. (She is like me in ways that don’t seem possible).

But those bigger boys rolling down the hill? She wanted in on that in a way I’ve never seen from her. She wanted to be where they were and to do what they did.

They were kind, and they were patient. But they were not interested in a 2-year-old girl. Not even a little bit.

And that was OK because she was too young and too happy to have any idea she was on the outside.

It happens more often now – but it still catches me by surprise – to see the glow of her admiration land on new faces.

mothering

I was in third or fourth grade when friendship bracelets became really important.

I cannot remember the friendship bracelet economy – Did we trade them? Or were they were strictly gifts? – but I remember the urgency, on one night in particular, to have one.

“Everyone has a friendship bracelet.”

“I need a friendship bracelet.”

“How am I going to get a friendship bracelet?”

Maybe I had promised to give one away. Maybe I just wanted to be seen wearing one. Or maybe I had told someone I had dozens of friendship bracelets. At home. That I had never brought to school before (because they were so special?). Anyway, it was important, and I went to sleep that night pretty sure that the whole thing was just about hopeless.

We didn’t have the stuff you need to make friendship bracelets. We didn’t even know what that stuff was, first of all. And if we had it, we wouldn’t have known what to do with it My mom – and I don’t think she would mind me saying this – isn’t super crafty. Also, her left-handedness tended to make the braiding arts a challenge.

She’s creative, definitely. Just not in a way that leans toward hot-glue and puffy-paint.

She often left for work before the rest of us were awake. My brothers and I would come downstairs to find our breakfasts in the fridge and our lunches on the kitchen table.

The morning after my macrame meltdown, there was a friendship bracelet on top of my lunch bag. No note, no explanation. Just the bracelet, a skinny braid made out of sewing thread. It wasn’t quite right – you don’t make friendship bracelets out of sewing thread. But even then, I understood the bracelet as a work of love.

Can you imagine sitting at the kitchen table at 4 or 5 a.m., trying to braid strands of thread? In the middle of packing lunches and getting dressed and everything else that has to happen in a morning?

I could.

I got it. I cared, so she cared.

My mom is an expert at knowing when a silly little thing is actually a great big deal. And I think that’s a lot of what it takes. That’s what saves the day.

pardee

It was David’s idea to drive to the foothills last weekend when his sister, Anne, was visiting.

We thought that we could maybe escape the terrible allergies we were all fighting if we traveled to a higher elevation. And for a little while, anyway, we did feel better. It was working, we thought.

But then we took a mile-long hike through knee-high grass and wildflowers. Alice held up well for an impressive 30 minutes before she wanted to be carried. Not on her dad’s shoulders. Not piggy back. But on my left hip. A lump. 30 pounds of drowsy toddler.

“Hey, Alice, can you hold yourself up nice and straight for me?”

“No, Mommy.”

Honestly, though. She’s the greatest.

She chased families of geese along the shoreline and spotted wildflowers.

“A purple one!”

“A yellow one!”

Pardee Reservoir isn’t far from the place where the three of us took Alice for her first swim almost two years ago.

This time, she could say, “Anne.” It comes out “Eeen.”

“No, Eeen! No silly faces!” she scolded all weekend long.

Even now, three days later, she shakes her head and tells me very seriously, “Eeen make silly faces.” And then she sticks out her tongue.

manicure

Alice loves to wear nail polish.

At the risk of over-sharing here, I will tell you that we’ve been using it as a toilet-training incentive. Aaaaannndd that Alice isn’t managing to get her nails painted very often these days.

Anyway.

We were in the backyard over the weekend, and I sat her down with some watercolors while I worked on another project.  She got into a nice rhythm: Dip the brush in water, dip the brush in paint.

A few minutes later, though, I looked up and noticed she had the paints in her lap, and I couldn’t tell what she was doing with them. Imagining watercolored streaks running down her shirt, I walked over to where she was sitting and saw that she had painted each one of her fingernails bright blue. With the paint brush. And pretty well, considering.

They are so clever in ways that are so unexpected.

It might have been a good time, just then, to remind her of what she needs to do in order to have her nails really painted. But I couldn’t get over her resourcefulness.

“Oh, wow,” I told her. “That’s pretty good.”

sunshine

When David came home and turned the sprinklers on the other evening, Alice snuck a hand under the water, and we let her because it was so warm outside.

And then her whole arm. And then both feet. And then she ran to the middle of the lawn and let the spray hit her until she was soaked and crying because it was time to go inside for dinner.

She’s a summer girl. It’s just a fact.

 

sleepwalk

A few times a week at least, around 3 or so in the morning, Alice wakes up and gets out of bed and comes looking for me.

I’m a pretty light sleeper. I hear her before she gets very far.

Still, it always startles me to find her stumbling, half-blind, down the hallway. Not where I left her.

“Mama? Hold you?”

We meet in the middle. I bring her back to bed. And she sleeps soundly for a few more hours.

This morning, I asked whether something scares her at night.

Yes, she said. Dinosaurs.

“Dinosaurs try to scare me.”

“Dinosaurs scare you?”

“Yes. Dinosaurs scare me.”

“Wow. Yeah. I can see that. How come they scare you? Is it because they’re big? Or because they’re loud? Or because they eat little girls?”

“Really loud. Raaawr! Try to scare me.”