A couple weeks ago when we were walking home from dinner at my parents’ house, Donald and Charlotte and I saw a skunk. We gave it a wide berth and continued on our way, but something about our near encounter of the stinky kind left an impression on Charlotte.
THIS!, she shouts, pointing to the drainage pipe we saw the skunk run into, A SKUNK LIVES IN THIS! IN THIS PIPE! And then she tells me the story about the night we saw a skunk. Except that in two-year-old-glish, “we saw a skunk and gave it a wide berth” translates to a full fifteen minutes of narration.
Fifteen minutes is, for the record, a very long time to pretend to be wildly interested in the neighbor’s drainage pipe and a skunk story I’ve already heard three times this morning.
Over the past few days, however, her interest in this one dinky little skunk took a turn for the curious. A couple mornings ago when we were eating breakfast, Charlotte just looked up at me with eyes as big as saucers.
MOMMA!, she cried. Yes, baby? MOMMA! SQUIRRELS EAT NUTS! Yes they do, baby. AND, AND THE PRAYING MANTIS EATS BUGS! YEAH, LIKE CRICKETS! Yes they do. AND, AND CHICKENS EAT WORMS! Yes they do. AND, AND GOATS EAT AFUFFA (alfalfa)! AND, AND CATS EAT GOPHERS! Why, yes they do, darling.
MOMMA! WHAT DO SKUNKS EAT?
Hmmm. I made an educated guess (plants, small rodents, and “we’ll look it up when you’re finished eating”) and then she started rattling off her skunk-and-drainage-pipe diatribe and I just sat there thinking HMMM.
I know that it’s just a small question – what do skunks eat? – but it made me realize that over the course of the next twenty or thirty years she is going to ask me thousands of questions that I simply will not know the answer to. In time, she will ask me questions that there are no answers to at all.
Ahhhh, the picture of innocence.
It was one of those moments where I suddenly felt just a little bit daunted by parenthood. I am ready for Charlotte to ask me about sex (just be safe about it, please) or about religion (whatever you want, kiddo, as long as you don’t try to convert your father or he’ll disown you) (kidding) or about death (it happens, so don’t bother worrying about it) or about environmental changes (so there’s this thing called carbon…). Even if I don’t get the answer right the first time, I know exactly how Donald and I will approach most of the so-called hard topics.
But how am I going to explain human trafficking to her? Or the great lengths to which some have gone to keep homosexual marriage illegal?
How am I going to explain rape?
And how am I going to explain war?
How am I going to explain the car accident that stole the child of one of her favorite people in the whole world? And how am I going to explain the cancer that stole the father of one of her pint-sized buddies?
How am I ever going to find the right words when that inevitable day comes when someone breaks my daughter’s heart? Her precious, beautiful, compassionate heart.
I wonder how many days I have until these questions start turning up. In the meantime, I took Charlotte to the library and we learned everything we could about what skunks eat. Because at least that’s an answer I can find.
Answer: EVERYTHING. Grass, rodents, birds, eggs, lizards, insects, frogs, plants, birds, everything. Skunks are totally nature’s garbage disposal.
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Filed as Poop Sarah Parenthood Motherhood Parenting choices Toilet training
Shortly after Donald and I moved in together, we adopted future coyote bait a kitten and bought a digital camera.
At the risk of completely destroying every last shred of respect you might have had for me, Sebastian’s kitten-hood was actually just about as well-documented as Charlotte’s infancy. Seriously. I was THAT person. All that was missing was a glamour portrait with his fur braided in pigtails.
Anyway, we had gift cards to burn so we bought the best point-and-shoot model the shop had on display. It was a tiny grey Canon. We both thought it was pretty damned hot.
Unrelated, but I think it’s cool that she can swing by herself. Ish. Sort of. With alot of supervision and help.
That camera served us well for average everyday picture-taking for years, you guys, YEARS, and then last spring it up and went missing. One day TWO WEEKS LATER my husband was walking through the garden checking out garlic plants and he looked up and was all WHAT.THE.FUCK?
Because there it was. Our tiny grey magic Canon. Hanging in a tree.
It was really A MOMENT, if you know what I mean. The camera must have been hinged together with miracles, though, because it pulled through. It sat on that tree through a week of torrential downpour followed by a week of an unseasonable heat wave and not even the battery or the memory card were damaged.
A few months after that, Charlotte banged it against a rock and knocked its faceplate off. We snapped it back, but we never found the screws so it just stayed there through some sort of tiny grey magic Canon force field. And a few months after that, Charlotte stuck her finger in the lens so that every time it turned on the camera GROANED and MOANED and WHINED and sometimes gave up altogether.
During the holidays this year, my parents gave us a new point-and-shoot camera, presumably because they overheard the old one begging us to put it out of its misery. This time we have a tiny red Canon.
I am only now beginning to play around with it, mostly because point-and-shoot camera technology seems to have come quite a long way recently and I have felt a little overwhelmed by all this sleek, shiny awesomeness. Yesterday afternoon, though, I took it with us on an early morning walk through the neighborhood and when I pulled it out, Charlotte was Very.Excited. to see this new red thing in my hands.
What is that?, she asked.
It’s a new camera so that I can take pictures for Daddy when you and I go places, I told her.
Oh, oh yes, she said. She thought for a minute and then, in all her two-year-old wisdom she announced: DO NOT LEAVE IT IN A TREE, MOMMA! OKAY? NO TREES!
Dear Charlotte,
You are two and a half years old now and as testament to the whirlwind life has become with a two and a half year old child in the house, I didn’t even notice you’d hit the big milestone until half a week later. Sorry, kiddo.
If it makes you feel better, one year I forgot your Auntie E’s birthday. We all made plans to go out to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant – and I plumb forgot. Your grandfather left me a series of a dozen voice messages where all that was recorded was mariachi music.
And you weren’t even born then. I couldn’t even say it was because I was busy stomping in rain puddles or fishing monster boogers out of a pint-sized nose or something equally riveting.
The last month with you has been, as every month with you is, excellent. You are a firecracker – always telling stories and imagining fascinating things and running around like a wild animal. You are also hugely in love with singing (you can sing about half a dozen French nursery rhymes now CUTEST THING EVER) and dancing (although strangely not keen on my dancing…) and jumping. You are silly and clever and wonderful and we love you like crazy.
There are two really big cool things that have happened this month and the first one is this: you can use the toilet by yourself. At least once a day, you announce that you need to use the bathroom and you do everything from opening the toilet lid to washing and drying your hands all by yourself – except for wiping. It’s freaking amazing. When you’re thirty, don’t be surprised if I’m STILL amazed that you can perform basic bathroom tasks without me.
The second really cool big thing is that your father and I made the decision to proceed with adoption through the domestic foster-care system. It could take a few months or it could take a few years – this largely depends on whether or not we get pregnant in the next six months – but either way you are going to have a sibling.
There are sacrifices that our family will be making to this end and one of those is that we are going to be fixing up the spare room and preparing you for the move into Your! Very! Own! Room! I would be lying if I said that we weren’t nervous about this. We are. But at the end of the day, we keep coming back to this: a sibling.
There is nothing in this world that your father and I will ever be able to give you that will matter as much to you as a sibling. You won’t always get along. Sometimes you’re going to royally fuck up (see also: that time when I forgot my sister’s birthday). But at the end of the day, a sibling is a blessing. You will always, no matter what, have each other.
In other news, you are totally weird. And cool. All at once.
And try as I might, I simply cannot think of anything more beautiful than that.
We love you more than bears love honey, (and everyone knows that’s an awful lot),
Momma and Daddy
P.S. This month you also figured out not to wake me up on Saturday mornings. THANK YOU!
