Magnetism

When I dropped Pie off at day-care this morning, Maddy came up to give her a big hug. Maddy is around eighteen months old, one of several children Pie refers to dismissively as "the babies." In reaction to her greeting, Pie shrugged off her embrace and glared.

This is typical of my daughter's response to other human beings. She mostly doesn't like them and wishes they would leave her alone. There are a few exceptions to this rule: her immediate family, her grandmothers (though decidedly NOT her grandfathers), and all five-year-old girls, whom she worships and admires. The other exception is Claudia.

We met Claudia at Pie's Little Gym class. She is just Pie's height, but all chubby belly and crinkly eyes. She takes everything at a run, giggling irrepressibly. I have never met a more contagiously happy person. She radiates joy and no one can resist her, including the Pie. If Claudia jumps off a cliff (or a stack of gym mats), Pie will follow.

After dropping my antisocial daughter off at daycare, I moved on to Bub's nursery school, where he approached a group of children playing with blocks. "Hi, Bub!" a friendly girl greeted him as he brushed by.

"We're building a house for the aminals!" another boy explained jovially. No response.

Suddenly Bub's face lit up. "Look who came to play!" he announced ecstatically. "It's Robert! Let's go tap him on the shoulder!" Recalling his sessions on social communication with his speech therapist, Bub approached and tapped him on the shoulder, saying his name as he'd been taught. "Hi Robert!"

Unimpressed, Robert shrugged his shoulders. As he turned, I could see that his lip was swollen - a souvenir of his latest mischief, I suspect. (When his mother was telling stories about him at the last parent meeting, they tended to begin with comments like, "Have I told you the one about the chandelier?") Robert is not quite four, but he is undeniably cool. His dad is a firefighter and he has inherited his adventurous spirit. His is the only name that elicits anecdotes from Bub when I ask about his day. Robert wore a lion suit! Robert was funny.

It amazes me how easy they are to identify, the Roberts and Claudias - people with a powerful magnetism that can't help but reach everyone around them, even my own prickly, oblivious children.

Piranhas and Snakes

Awhile back, during one of those postless weeks I've been having, I was brewing up a post about Hurt Feelings, and The Importance of Not Having Them. It was going to go something like this:

• My Dad is impossible to offend. You can insult him to his face and he'll smile genially, your insults rolling like water off a duck's back. This makes him exceptionally easy to live with.
  
• Not getting offended - it's the gift that keeps on giving. It makes you happier (because you're not nursing wounded feelings over real or imagined insults), and it makes everybody else happy too (because they don't have to walk on eggshells around you).
  
• Do we actually have a choice about how sensitive we are to feelings of rejection and hurt? Are there mental choices (such as giving the benefit of the doubt) that we can cultivate in order to become less easily wounded?

And so on and so on. You can see why I didn't bother posting it - because no matter how many anecdotes or theories I try to pack in there, the underlying smugness is unmistakable. I'm awesome! If only everybody were more like meeeee!

I thought of that yesterday when Bub started screaming in agony. I was reading Pie her pre-nap stories, but his wails of despair could not be ignored. I headed downstairs and found him locked in the bathroom, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. There was no open wound on his forehead, no signs that immediate hospitalization would be necessary. "What's the matter, Bub? Why are you crying?"

Bub drew a shuddering breath. "Because you said, 'Don't touch the TV, please, Bub'" - fresh tears breaking forth - "and it hurt my feelings!"

In some ways, Bub is startlingly like my genial, extraverted father. He has a friendly hello for everyone, even if he has no real idea of how to continue a conversation beyond that scripted greeting. He isn't a shy child, like the Pie; he doesn't hide under the piano bench when visitors arrive, but instead adopts one of two modes - cheerful attention or total immersion in his own activities. Either way, he is unperturbed. His new capacity for hurt feeling - one he has been demonstrating several times per day - feels like a form of growing pains. Not the dull, comfortable achiness of growing bones, but a snakelike growth, a raw new skin quivering in the breeze of his new social awareness. His old imperviousness has been stripped away, and he has not yet become used to his new skin.

We were at McDonald's the other night, hanging out at the PlayPlace while the buyers of our home did their inspection. Bub latched on to the only other child present, approaching her confidently. "Are you my friend?" he asked. "Are you my best friend?"

The girl gave him a quizzical look before responding honestly, "No."

Bub was not deterred. "Come on!" he prompted and dived into one of the tunnels. After a moment's hesitation, the girl followed right behind him. For half an hour, they stuck together like glue, chatting and squealing as they climbed up and slid down. We never discovered this new best friend's name; when necessary, Bub addressed her as "you." Their alliance lasted until it was time to go home.

Bub's skin is still thick enough that he can take some initial rejection. His pursuit is open and frank, difficult to resist. But when he comes home it's as if he's practicing for the ordeals that he dimly perceives ahead of him, toying with feelings of rejection before sticking his toe further into the piranha-infested waters of friendship. I am amazed, delighted, at his new capacity for social interaction. So why do I feel almost breathless with fear?

The Anti-Dora

We turned the TV on last night for the first time in weeks. Our vacation from the world of PBS Kids and Treehouse was not an extension of Turn Off Your Screens week or the result of some new, ambitious model of parenting. It was the fallout from my children's discovery of their grandmother's stash of Disney videos and DVDs. For weeks I have been subjected to a continuous round of Brother Bear (dreck), The Lion King (in which the cuteness of toddler voices singing "Hakuna Matata" only partially compensates for the traumatic storyline and violent plot), and Lilo and Stitch (which, I must confess, I absolutely love - it's Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden with the roles of Yorkshire and India taken by Hawaii and, um, outer space).

So when we conceded to a half hour of TV before bedtime last night, it was the first time I had come across Ni Hao, Kai Lan. Have you seen this show? It follows the formula of Dora the Explorer - plucky heroine surrounded by animal friends, interactive second-person dialogue, and end-of-episode recaps - but instead of riding zip cords across Emerald Canyon, Kai Lan directs her problem-solving abilities towards dilemmas like a koala bear who doesn't want to share his toys, or a little monkey who has a hard time waiting. Instead of teaching Spanish, Ni Hao, Kai Lan introduces Mandarin Chinese, and instead of celebrating adventure and independence, it promotes empathy and friendship.

"Look at his face," Kai Lan beseeches her viewers. "What is he feeling?" Tolee looks angry and miserable. "WHY is he feeling sad?" Kai-lan asks. Tolee clutches his panda bear possessively, confirming Kai Lan's theory that he's sad because he doesn't want to share. Kai Lan sympathizes with his feelings - sometimes it's really hard to share - and stays with him until he "gets it": when you share, everybody gets to play!

It's hard to imagine a show better suited to the kind of learning Bub is working on right now. Facial expressions, "why" questions, episodic memory - it's all there. According to the Nickelodeon website, the show's Chinese-culture-based curriculum promotes perspective-taking and awareness of the physical sensations associated with emotional states. Hubby's favourite part is the emphasis on calm. Where Western culture (and most children's programming) focuses on states of excitement and enthusiasm, Chinese culture values the state of calm. Hubby, I suspect, would feel far more at home in East Asia than he does here, since his natural inclination is towards courtesy, moderation, and calm.

The show's format, with its obvious debts to Dora the Explorer, makes its message all the more startling. Habituated as I am to Dora's trademark confidence and independence, I find the plot lines of Ni Hao, Kai Lan an almost comical change. The episode list on Wikipedia highlights themes like bragging and competition. It's okay to lose sometimes. Bragging makes your friends feel bad. Where Dora voyages triumphantly across the seven seas and through the dark forest, Kai Lan faces dilemmas such as "Kai Lan and Lulu can't agree on what games to play together" and "Rintoo gets mad when Hoho copies his hat."

Dora is a show about power and success; Kai Lan is a show about deference and wisdom. The irony, perhaps, is that the latter does far more than the former to arm my son with the skills he needs to succeed.

Test Subject

Back when Bub was little more than a year old, I stumbled across an article about toddler behaviour. Toddlers are scientists, the writers claimed, and much of their behaviour - defiance, tantrum-throwing, boundary-testing - should really be understood as a kind of scientific experiment, with their mothers being the primary test subjects. Toddlers carefully observe their parents, assessing their changing responses to a variety of stimuli. Throw food on the floor once, and watch mama laugh as if it's a joke; throw it on the floor again, and watch mama frown warningly; throw it on the floor a third time, and watch mama lose her temper. Like all good scientists, toddlers take care to repeat their experiments under a variety of conditions so as to control all the variables and attain the most reliable results.

Bub didn't experience the terrible twos in the quite the same way other children do: he had so little receptive language that defiance was not really an option for him (you have to understand a request before you can willfully disobey it). But I am beginning to see that spirit of scientific inquiry developing in him now that he is four. He has outgrown the emotional volatility of his toddler days, and thus his investigation is all the more detached and objective.

Take, for instance, the other morning. Pie was eating some applesauce. She had loaded up her spoon but decided partway through to switch to the hand-to-mouth method. Her spoon dangled precipitously over the side of the table, a glob of applesauce slowly forming on the bottom into a big, fat drip. "In your mouth!" I coached, and Pie obediently stuffed her applesauce-laden fist into her mouth just as the glob finally detached and hit the floor.

As I jumped up for a paper towel, Bub carefully imitated my exasperated sigh. "Are you mad at Pie because she dripped the applesauce on the floor?" he inquired. "You should try saying, 'Please stop dripping the applesauce on the floor, Pie,'" he advised.

Each outburst of temper is carefully assessed. Bub guesses what emotion I'm feeling and then checks his intuition with me, often offering some helpful words of advice on how to handle my emotions more politely.

So I was not entirely surprised at his response this morning when Pie dropped an entire glass of orange juice (with extra pulp) into a soggy bowl of Special K cereal. As I leapt to sop up the mess, he looked up with that familiar expression of animated interest, his metaphorical pencil almost visibly poised over his metaphorical notepad. "Mama," he asked, "how are you feeling right now?"

He has a future as a clinical psychologist, that boy of mine.

What I've Been Doing

Mad guessed it: my new obsession with paint chips means that I am no longer obsessed with blogging. It turns out that my mind runs on two tracks at a time: on one track, I shop for groceries, grade exams, and pick up my kids from day-care; on the other track, which runs alongside the first one, I simultaneously do one other thing. Until recently, that other thing was blogging: I crafted posts in my head, thought about posts I had read, brooded over traffic, and relished the various kudos that came my way. Then I discovered paint chips. And now I find myself flipping through a mental fandeck as I go about my business, trying to combine the bits of conflicting advice I've received about paint into some kind of coherent whole.

For instance. Here is what I've learned about the science of paint-colour selection:

• The colours people love the most on their walls are usually ones they hated on the chip. This means that when you go to the paint store, you should especially seek out the colours that give you a visceral reaction of nausea.
  
• A good, safe choice is to use several shades of a single colour so that the rooms of your house flow together. Of course, what that means is that you may end up with a house in which every single room is yellow.
  
• It's best to choose a palette of soft, neutral colours so that you can bring vivid colour into the room through fabrics and accents.
  
• Don't be influenced by trends: pick the colours you love, the ones that make you feel good. If four shades of beige is not going to bring you joy, ignore the experts and go with what you like.
  
• If you like a colour on the chip, go two shades lighter (unless it's a bright colour - then go two shades darker).
  
• If you Google the name of the colour you're interested in, you can find plenty of people on message boards describing what it looks like on the walls (often with photos).
  
• If a colour is popular and well-liked, that means everybody will be sick of it in ten years' time.

I've done my best to moderate my paint-colour obsession with other home decor related interests (especially ones that allow me to spruce up the house I actually live in so we can put it on the market). I've redecorated my bedroom:


and purchased a new credenza:


...but so detached have I become from my blogging identity that I didn't even take any "before" pictures to demonstrate the hideousness of my old Canadian-Tire entertainment unit before we dismantled it and put it in the basement. The best I could come up with was this:


If you look into the background at the right of that photo, you'll see me in my former incarnation, blogging away at the kitchen table. The most relevant "after" photo may not be the one of the new credenza but rather this one:


My new front-runners: Whitall Brown, Hiking Trail, Moccasin (thanks for the suggestion, Janet!), and Semolina (a step down from the more vivid Nacho Cheese). The red is for the accents, not the walls, though I may do the front door in Sangria if I have the choice.

What's the best cure for a one-track mind? New episodes of Lost? A good book? Finding ways to work the word "credenza" into polite conversation? Help a poor (former?) blogger out.

One-Track Mind

My husband is bored of me.

That may be an understatement. When he sees me coming he gets a kind of twitch, and if I corner him for a conversation, at the first pause he literally runs.

The problem is paint chips. I can't stop talking about them.

Hubby would be more sympathetic, I think, if we actually had to make a decision about paint colours anytime within, say, the next two months. But ground-breaking for the new house starts today: right now the house I am so assiduously decorating in my mind is little more than a few sheets of paper and a big hole full of muddy water.

With classes over for the year, paint has rushed in to fill the vacuum left by literature and grammar. Sure I've got exams to mark, but I also have magazines to read and important decisions to consider. Is Whitall Brown too dark for all four walls of the Master Bedroom? And if I pair it with Natural Wicker, can I put the lighter colour on just one wall, or would that look weird?

This is by no means the first obsession I've encountered in my life, though it is one that clings with a certain tenacity. I went through a phase where all I wanted to talk about was the Turin Shroud. That one gave hubby the twitches too, but at least it had a certain appealing improbability, a quirky charm. At one time, figure skating was my obsession: I would cancel social events just so I could watch the latest in that post-Nancy-Kerrigan era of tacky professional competitions dubbed "U.S.A. vs. the World" or "Battle of the Sexes."

Bub is the same way: he latches onto a single interest with obsessive intensity, but then moves on in a week or two. At one time it was The Cat in the Hat, then Thomas trains, and now closure devices: buttons, zippers, backpack latches, watch closures. I can readily imagine this trait in him developing one day into the specialized interest characteristic of autism, but right now it seems more like evidence that he is my son, heir to the genetic traits that I'm currently inflicting on my restless, long-suffering spouse.

I am comforted, though, to discover (through the magic of Google Image) that I am not alone in my appreciation for paint chips. People have turned paint chips into graphic art posters, ribbon holders, business-card holders, and wallets. It's like there's a whole blogosphere out there devoted to turning paint chips into fun craft projects. (Do they call the craft-blog world the craftosphere?) For those of us who specialize more in wordcraft than in arts and crafts, paint chips are equally compelling. I, for instance, am slightly embarrassed that the current front-runner for my kitchen is called "Nacho Cheese," but I love the fact that my living-room colour is "Kennebunkport Green" (I'm a sucker for the pseudo-elitist New England glamour of the Benjamin Moore Historical Colours line. And I will insist on spelling "Colours" with a "u" just so I can retain my Canadian citizenship.)

Needless to say, my blogging is suffering from this diversion of my mental energy. So humour me, if you will, and tell me: What do you think of these colours?


Any advice/horror stories/anecdotes to share about the wonderful world of paint-colour selection?

Part of This Morning's Lecture

(It's the last day of classes: time for a little nihilistic despair!)

Bub has been going through a boundary-testing period lately, flatly refusing to carry out basic instructions. If I say, "Time to go to the car, Bub!" he replies, "No, I don't think so. Not now. I will never, never do it. I'm not going."

Fortunately, children are easy to trick. "Bub, would you like to wear your boots to the car, or your Shrek shoes?"

"No boots!" Bub hollers, grabbing his Shrek shoes and sprinting to the car with them.

Perhaps more noticeably than the rest of us, Bub has a powerful need to believe that his actions are self-initiated, that the things he does are done freely, in pursuit of his own ends. The classic parental gambit of giving him choices allows me to hijack that trait and use it to control his behaviour.

In the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, the title character (who will grow up to become a Columbine-style high-school shooter) has many clinically significant traits of sociopathy, but at least as important is his preternatural ability to see through these gambits. He is a difficult child to raise in part because he utterly rejects the counterfeit freedom that most of us learn to accept in place of the real thing.

In that way, Kevin is like Bartleby and Sarah (the French Lieutenant's Woman), characters who can also be dismissed as insane because they see the bait for what it is and opt not to take it. (They prefer not to.) Charles continually offers Sarah the illusion of choice: he will arrange a governess position for her in London OR Dr. Grogan can find her a post somewhere else. The giddy freedom! The whole world is open to her if only she will stop asking for anything beyond a life of petty domestic drudgery, educating other women's children under conditions that render her conveniently invisible. Sarah is understood to be acting in a way that is irrationally contrary to her own interests when she rejects these tempting choices and insists instead not only on doing nothing, but doing it - like Bartleby - in a highly visible way.

At the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Sam (Charles's former valet) moves up in the world by becoming a window-dresser in Mr. Freeman's large department store. His breakthrough innovation is to arrange the ties in a striking array, using them to spell out the words FREEMAN'S FOR CHOICE. An enterprising young capitalist, Sam instinctively grasps the substitution upon which our society depends: our willingness to accept choices (of ties, jobs, or footwear) in exchange for freedom.

So which do you like better - mothers as the new gentry, or mothers as the front-line workers from whom our children first learn to accept the illusion of freedom in place of the real thing?