Eliza is Making Her Way, I’m the One Stumbling

By Jennifer Savage, 11-15-07

Last week I took Eliza to our local library for story time. When we arrived I was surprised to see at least 40 other children younger than three years, their parents in tow, settling in for songs and stories – which is to say they were ricocheting off each other like pin balls.  As soon as we stepped into the large, carpeted room, Eliza was trying to twist free of my grasp. There were, after all, children to meet, adults to smile at. Before I knew it she was lost in a sea of little people checking things out.

Eliza, I’m learning, is not shy. In this, Seth says, she is like her mother. Truth be told, I am not very shy. I completely annoy Seth in restaurants because I stare – stare and eavesdrop. I tell him it’s not my fault the woman at the next table chose such a public place to talk about her divorce or that the people across the room, clearly on a first date, are so nervous they are giggling awkwardly and drawing attention to themselves. Every time we go out to eat, I start off minding my own business, I tell him. I can’t help it that these compelling stories are placed in my path. He usually tells me I’m full of it and when we leave I give him the run down of everyone within earshot of our table.

What can I say? People fascinate me.

And it looks as though they fascinate my daughter as well. She’s the kid in the restaurant nearly turned all the way around in her highchair so she can make eyes at the next table. She’s the kid in the grocery store waving over my shoulder at the woman behind us in the checkout line.

So on this day at story time she was no different, walking up to perfect strangers clapping, and smiling when they responded. As she worked the room, I think she totally forgot I was there. So I sat with a friend musing about attachment parenting and joking that maybe it actually works given that my child seemed independent and strong all the way across the room banging on the steps with a group of children she’d never laid eyes on until a few minutes prior.

Then it happened. Some little boy that I would later learn was named after a particularly brutal empire and who obviously didn’t finish his morning nap, pushed my sweet baby girl to the ground. She looked up at him as if to say, “What’s your problem?” and I ran across the room to get her. The little boy’s father met me there and told him in no uncertain terms that pushing was not okay. Yeah, I thought, and especially pushing my kid. I wanted to jerk that little two year old up by the fuzz of his head but walked Eliza back to the center of the room to hear the story instead.

It’s not particularly nice to go around harboring bad thoughts about other people’s children but that day in the library I couldn’t help myself. Then I realized I was being ridiculous. He was, after all, two and had plenty of pushing and hitting to go around that day.

Last weekend a girlfriend was talking about her three month old having rolled off the couch. It happens. We’ve all turned around to get a diaper or answer the phone and the baby that has yet to roll over ends up on her head on the floor. It happens, but when it happens to you it feels like the end of the world.

“What am I going to do the first time she breaks a bone or when some little girl talks smack to her elementary school?”

That’s exactly how I felt that day in the library. What will I do if some little boy kicks her on the playground or some teenage girl doesn’t invite her to the slumber party?

My brother is 13 years younger than me and I can remember when he was about six my stepmother banished the neighbor kid from coming to play because she said he wasn’t nice to Matthew. I remember rolling my eyes. I was about 19 and thought I knew everything.

“They’re just kids,” I told her. “They’ll work it out.”

“I already worked it out,” she said. “He’s not coming back over.”

Last week as I sat in the library, singing “Itsy, Bitsy, Spider,” I finally understood.

I also understood why when my French teacher in high school moved me to a lonesome seat by the door, next to a girl she probably thought I’d never befriend, my stepmother went to the school to have a little talk with Mme Gainey.

I’m not sure what I initially did to irritate Mme Gainey, a skinny woman with permed bangs who spoke a bastardized version of French with a Southern accent, but she loathed me. I talked too much, she said, but I suspected there was something more. I did talk in her class, probably too much, but the class was full of my friends and it was, by the way, conversational French.

By the second semester I was in her class she had moved me to a desk by the door and next to a girl named Rhonda. Rhonda and I were unlikely friends. We were from different friend groups, different sides of the tracks and I was three years older than she. In my seat by the door, no one sat in front of me, to my right or behind me. Only Rhonda sat to my left. It was Mme Gainey’s way to getting me to talk less by giving me no one to talk to.

But as it turns out that was the year Rhonda got pregnant. She needed someone to talk to. I was the perfect person. We were not friends, I wouldn’t tell anyone and I was happy to lend an ear. Should she keep the baby? What would her dad do when he found out? We had serious things to discuss and we did it quietly enough that Mme Gainey left us alone. 

Usually.

Then Mme Gainey said I was causing Rhonda not to be able to do her work and one day pulled my desk out into the hallway and made me sit there for class. Then she wouldn’t allow me to go on a field trip to teach French songs to our local elementary kids because she said she “couldn’t trust me.”

I was an honor roll student with a 3.5 GPA. I was one of two girls picked by the faculty to represent our school at a prestigious state conference that same year, I was on the track team, the volleyball team, I was a cheerleader, I was secretary of the student body and Mme Gainey put me in the hall and couldn’t trust me.

When my stepmother heard about the hall situation she hit the roof and made an appointment to talk to my French teacher. I’ve always wondered what she said to her. I used to fanaticize that the gave her the verbal tongue lashing she deserved, made her shake in her Bobbie socks because I know my stepmother is capable of both of these things, but what is probably closer to the truth is that she politely and pointedly told her that no one was going to treat her kid poorly, that there would be no more hallway time for me and I would need a seat in the class not on the periphery of it.

The next week, I got a seat on the third row and Rhonda got an abortion. My stepmother, with whom I had had an on again off again speaking relationship that year, got check plus in my book.

That day in the library Eliza picked herself up and moved on. She steered clear of the little boy that pushed her but that push didn’t stop her from circling the room again after the librarian read the story. She’s curious, interested and some little grumpy fuzzy-headed kid can’t change that.

I suppose as parents we learn along the way when to uninvite the neighbor kid, when to go have a talk with the teacher and when to take our kid by the hand and walk her back across the meeting room at the library. Slowly, we are sending our children out into the world and we want more than anything for their falls to be padded. But what if they’re not?

As the mother of a toddler, I’m holding my breath and just beginning to learn these lessons.