by Mary Padilla
Recently I came across a first novel by a contemporary playwright that consisted largely, and not surprisingly, of dialogue. It seemed an appropriate format in which to explore two opposing perspectives on what seemed at the time to be life, the universe, and everything.
I refer to a contretemps with our preverbal child. At this point I already knew that I was outclassed in our interactions. There seemed to be a desperate need for independence on her part, and I was later to learn not to exacerbate matters, confining my interventions to health and safety issues like tackling her when she was inspired to dart out into traffic. But I was a new mother, and this happened at an early point in my learning curve, when I had idealistically well-intentioned hopes of understanding and communicating by sharing our thoughts and feelings.
But how to convey her point of view? This wasn’t going to work as an opportunity to use dialogue, for I had been on the receiving end of unintelligible ejaculations that conveyed primarily rage. It was equally clear that she was far from comprehending me. Stream of consciousness, then? But if I could have understood her thought processes in the first place there wouldn’t be a story here. And she clearly appeared neither capable of nor interested in understanding mine.
I decided to see if I could find examples of young toddlers’ communication styles to refresh my possibly repressed memory. YouTube, I discovered, is rife with calm experts in Early Childhood dispensing analysis and advice to overwhelmed parents. Tantrums happen when the child’s prefrontal cortex goes off-line in response to what appear to be life-threatening challenges to autonomy, so perceived by the amygdala at the least hint of frustration. You can’t try to talk them down, as their brains aren’t listening, and they don’t understand words anyway.
All this rational counsel was delivered as voice-overs accompanying videos of little kids energetically and loudly losing it in a variety of contexts. It was such a vivid reminder of what it had been like trying and failing to cope with this situation that it transported me instantly back to that time and how it had felt. And it came as an immensely gratifying relief to be able make it all go away immediately with a single click and to know that it wasn’t part of my reality anymore.
So mesmerizing was it to watch these clips that I’m certain that had they been around then that I would have become addicted to binge-watching them, however disheartening it would have been if – no, when – trying to put their advice into practice didn’t pan out in the real world. I know I would have kept searching for the clue that was going to crack this seemingly insoluble conundrum, because I hadn’t found it in all those books on parenting.
But after all this preamble, now on to the actual incident, first from my perspective. Our daughter slept in a crib. It was the same one that she had used since coming home from the hospital. Nothing had changed. Except that something clearly had, since one night a while after putting her to bed there came a THUMP from her room. Rushing back to determine the source of the sound, I found her on the floor. She had climbed up and launched herself over the guard rails.
What could she have been thinking, I wondered. There was no point in asking, and anyway she was too busy screaming to have spoken, had she been capable of speech. After much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of incipient teeth and with her having evinced no evidence of being willing to be held and comforted, I put her back in the crib and tucked her under the covers.
All was quiet, briefly… until, not long after, there came another THUMP. Same story – child on the floor, expostulating inconsolably and, of course, unintelligibly, but LOUDLY. Nothing wrong with the bars. What would YouTube say? Well, at this time there was no internet, so Early Childhood experts not being so accessible in the middle of the night, and in the absence of other obvious options, back she went into the crib.
But shortly thereafter, and not surprisingly, there ensued yet another escape. It being unlikely that I could produce a different result by repeating the same response, I capitulated, took the mattress out of the crib, placed it on the floor, and put her and her blanket on top of that. How else, after all, was she ever going to develop a sense of agency? We built her a bed the next day.
That’s how it appeared from my perspecive. Hers I can only imagine. Based on what I was to learn about her sense of justice and self-worth over the next 45 years, here is my reconstruction of her likely thoughts:
She is so clueless. To get through to her you definitely have to take the direct approach. And it takes her more than one repetition to get it. I go to all the trouble to break out of this jail and what does she do – put me right back in! So, at significant peril to life and limb, I’m forced to escape again and again to get the point across. And while this is going on, all she can do is to make those annoying unintelligible noises at me, as if that’s supposed to convey some justification for this gross injustice. She seems incapable of learning. How could I not be indignant over such disrespectful treatment – putting me back where I so clearly don’t want to be and then expecting me to stay there just because she’s bigger than I am and happens to know how to walk. That’s blatant discrimination and an unjustifiable power play. I’ll show her. Once I learn the local language and get some steps in gear, I’m outa here. And it starts right here, right now. I refuse to acquiesce to incarceration just because I’m not considered developmentally mature enough to make my own decision in this matter. Give me a place to stand on the floor, and I can move the world!
In the interest of fairness when preparing this piece, I asked my former antagonist for her recollection of this particular incident, arising out of what seemed at the time to be a continuous maelstrom of clashing perspectives. She remembered climbing, but not falling, and not her rationale. And she also volunteered that other people’s perspectives didn’t figure highly in her world view at the time, adding the parenthetical “unfortunately.”
After this was written, I sent her a copy. Here was her response:
Highly amusing. I think it was probably something more along the lines of “Wait, it IS possible to be over there and not here. All I have to do is… Wait, wtf just happened, and why am I on the floor?” Repeat.
I write to think things through.