This is most of what I read at Temple. I changed my mind last minute. Had planned to read the harder to take section about Mahddy being failure to thrive. This seemed to work. The chapter starts with an excerpt from a written interview Tahija agreed to do while I was working on the book.
The only problem I had was I didn’t want them held all day because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if they were too spoiled. Kathryn felt that they should be held more but if she sat and held them all day she would need a maid to cook and clean and she would need a nanny to watch the baby for herself to get washed. It was three of them not one which is totally different you can’t even compare the two situations. I think we had a difference of opinion.
--Tahija Ellison, from the interview
Chapter 18
I overheard two crossing guards at a corner talking. They were neighborhood women, forty-something, dressed in uniform blue, patent-leather billed caps. They were talking about a woman who was pushing a baby stroller across the street.
“That baby’s too young to be outdoors,” said one crossing guard, an African American woman.
“No, he’s not,” said the other crossing guard, an Italian-American woman.
“Sure he is.”
"But he’s six months old, if he’s a day.”
“That’s right,” said the other, “too young to be out in this pneumonia weather.”
They were not arguing, merely stating what each took to be commonly accepted facts.
It’s healthy for babies to get out into the fresh air, the colder the better, toughens them up. It’s unhealthy for babies to be out in the air, especially cold air.
Put that baby down, you’ll spoil him! You can’t hold a baby too much!
Don’t you cut your eyes at me. Look at me when I’m talking to you.
You don’t have to call me “miss,” just call me by my name. Child, did I hear you call that lady by her name? Didn’t I teach you better?
Child-rearing “facts” and philosophies vary greatly by culture and class. I knew that, in my head; now my heart was about to find it out.
By mid-summer Damear and Lamarr were crawling quite a lot, and fast — up on their toes, Lamarr preferring reverse. Mahad would get in position and watch them, rocking, revving the engine. I felt they needed to crawl and explore their world, and that that world needed to become gradually larger. Pots and pans from the kitchen cabinets, books from the bookshelf, Mommy’s stuffed animals (Tweetie Bird presided over a whole menagerie now), phones, the interesting space beneath Kaki’s desk, and every little thing that was too big to fit into a mouth — all these should be their domain, I felt . . . the whole (baby-proofed) house, with a good stretch every day in the park, also their domain, as was the whole natural world, the sky especially, the wind and the sun. I wanted them to know how rich they were.
There were cultural differences here, to be sure. But Tahija and I were by temperament on opposite ends of the range of those differences: me way down at one end with Meet Every Need; she at the other end of They don’t have needs I don’t say they have.
She said spoil as if it were a disease, and me a carrier.
I learned that not everyone considered spoiling as awful as did Tahija. I learned this from our neighbor Miss Tina. Miss Tina worked days and watched her granddaughter Kayla evenings. Sometimes she sat on her stoop with the four-year-old in her lap, and I’d sit on mine (usually babyless). One day I asked her if she wasn’t worried about, you know, spoiling the girl.
Miss Tina laughed and rocked backward, hands in the air. “Oh I spoil her something terrible, I admit it, I’m to blame.”
A woman after my own heart. I laughed with her, relieved. But grandmothers have rights caregivers don’t, and how did the girl’s mother feel? Was she just putting up with the spoiling until she could get her own place and move out? Was Tahija?
Tahija paced the length of the livingroom reading from the book in her hands. After a convention-defying daredevil dive, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had just woken up to find himself in an academy for spiritually minded gulls.
“Is he dead or what?” Tahija asked.
“Keep reading,” Kaki said. She sat cross-legged on the chair, happy, with the autumn chill, to be back in her flannel shirts. She was also very happy to have us together in the livingroom reading. In her world it’s what families did, and what she wanted more than anything, I think, was to be part of a family. She would have liked Lamarr to be sitting there with us, as when we watched movies together, but lately he’d been needed to watch his nieces while his sister worked.
Tahija read on. Jonathan, it turned out, had gone from rebel to sage. He taught gulls to fly like they’d never flown before. He taught them that flying was less about height and speed than faith and fearlessness.
Upstairs, Damear started crying. He’d been weaned for some time, but still seemed not quite to have given up. Tahija stopped her pacing at the foot of the stairs.
“Da-mear!”
Louder crying.
“Maybe he needs something,” Kaki suggested.
“I fed them, changed them. What’s he got to be all falling out about? He’s playing me.” She read on over his crying then finally marched up the stairs, coming down a moment later with Damear wrapped and quiet in a blanket.
“See?” she said. “Soon as I picked him up, he stopped crying. Means he’s spoiled. He didn’t need a thing, not one thing.”
“Maybe he needed to be held,” I suggested, “and now that he has it — “
“He stopped crying,” Kaki finished.
Tahija got comfortable in the rocker. His eyes reflecting the lamplight, Damear gazed out at us from the billows of his mother’s t-shirt, not the least interested in Kaki or me.
“Got her all to yourself now, don’t ya?” I said. He smiled, the tears of a moment before still wet on his cheeks.
“Spoiled rot-ten,” Tahija said gently. Finding her page, she went on reading and read straight through to the end of the book, stopping only to threaten to write the author and complain about a plot turn that simply made no sense.
Fighting sleep as long as he could, Damear listened to her voice as if to the music of the spheres.
Big Lamarr taught me something about spoiling. He and I had little Lamarr and Damear in for their check-up, the first that Tahija had let them go to without her. We were sitting in the waiting room practicing the waiting yoga, when time for the 2:00 bottle came around. Tahija had packed bottles in the diaper bag. Big Lamarr removed one and held it where little Lamarr, in my lap, could see it. Damear was asleep in his lap.
Little Lamarr began to whine and reach for the bottle.
“That won’t work,” Lamarr said to him. “So you might as well stop.”
Uh-oh, I thought, here comes major crying and everyone looking at us. But we didn’t have crying. Little Lamarr just sat very straight in my lap concentrating on the bottle as big Lamarr read a car magazine.
“Saturn’s getting to be a good buy,” he said.
“Yeah?” I was concentrating on the bottle too.
“Engine’s made by Toyota.”
“I didn’t know that.”
I thought it extraordinary. Babies in my family would have been screaming bloody murder by then. But little Lamarr just sat looking at the bottle, glancing from time to time at his dad’s face. When he started to let out a little whine Lamarr said “Ah-ah-ah,” and he stopped.
The spoiled baby in me was scream-thinking, “Oh give it to him for God’s sake!”
In a few minutes, he did. Little Lamarr accepted the bottle, examined it, then leaned back against me with a sigh and drank.
“See?” said dad. “Waiting works, crying doesn’t.”
One night Mahddy wakes with a nightmare. Damear wakes too and stands up in his crib, watching as both parents calm and comfort Mahddy.
“Usually Mear would cry,” Tahija said, telling me about it the next morning.
“Being spoiled,” I said. I was at the sink doing dishes, Tahija leaning chin in her hands on the countertop.
“Right. He’d cry, or start that laughing like he does, you know. Trying to play you, get you to pick him up. But last night he just stands there in the crib, and stares.”
“He knows Mahd needs you more.”
“Yeah. Mahd wouldn’t stop screaming, not until I held him against my heart — right here.”
She showed me, though I knew where her heart was. Hadn’t I seen it enlarging daily?
“And Lamarr’s going to say he’s spoilt,” she continued. “But that’s not spoilt.”
“No. You comforted him.”
“He needed it,” she said.
“And when he got it — ”
“He stopped crying.”
How lovely the mixing bowl in my hands seemed then as I went around it with a sponge. Lamarr and Tahija’s ways, my ways, methods passed to us along questionable routes, through landscapes twisted by hardship and oppression, were mixing in this house, in talks in the kitchen, under the backyard clothesline, in the nursery. We were changing each other, and it was good.
