Wednesday Whatevsday

The Ways I Have Psychologically Screwed Up My Children 

Exhibit A. When my daughter was an infant, I used to count the steps in our house each time I had to carry her up and down the staircase. I have always been fine with silence, but when it was just her and I alone in the house, I felt I needed to fill the silence for her because what if she found it eerie, or grew up to think of me as dull. I was always deathly afraid of having a fatal accident on the stairs with her in my arms, and counting the steps we took made the harrowing journey to the second floor seem shorter, more quickly achievable. Ten, eleven, we're almost there - and we're still alive!

By the time she was one-and-a-half, she was already counting to seventeen because of the numerous times a day we'd go up and down the stairs. Even when she'd ascend and descend alone, she'd count. Often times it seemed she'd climb them just because she had a compulsion to count. And she'd tug at me to come back and "cown!" even if we were going up a staircase outside of our home.

When she was three, she was still counting every stair she encountered each and every time... Her cousins came to visit us that year. They were four and five at the time. When the two of them raced up the stairs ahead of her for the first time, she sat on the fourth step and bawled and screamed, "Come back! Come back! You didn't count! You didn't count!" We explained to her that not everybody does, and not everybody has to. It took her a while to accept this. Like days, not just minutes. And she had the same meltdown again and again when we started having play dates with her friends at our house, despite the fact that I'd dropped the counting routine altogether since the meltdown with her cousins.

Eventually the whole thing seemed to have just blown over, as most kid things seem to. But there have been a couple times we've gone up or down a staircase and my daughter has said something like, "Mom, we just climbed thirty-two stairs," in all seriousness, as though it was a somber, breaking news story that she didn't really want to report on, but had to. Now she's five, and just the other day, she said to me, "Mom, I'm really worried my little brothers aren't ever going to learn to count. You never, ever count the stairs for JJ, and that means you probably won't do it with Noah, either." She even asked when we moved into our apartment here in Key West, "Can we please take the stairs sometimes instead of the elevator. Imagine how high JJ will learn to count if we take the stairs instead."

At seven months pregnant, I'm never going to take four flights of stairs up or down with two kids and whatever bags we're towing. And I won't do it with two kids and a newborn, either. So my sons will be at a mathematical disadvantage in life, it seems; and my daughter will be left to forever count things alone in her mind, which somehow sounds really sad and like I've set her up for failure...

Exhibit B. Within the first few days of moving into our Key West apartment, someone's dog peed in the elevator. As we walked in, there was a huge, rancid puddle of it on the entire left side of the elevator. Being pregnant and therefore highly sensitive to smells, I involuntarily gagged, said, "Ew, gross!" like five times in a row, fanned myself dramatically to keep the fumes away, cursed the stupid ass person who let their dog do that, and yanked my kids to the right side of the car with me. My son, who was one-and-a-half, watched me the entire time like I was crazy. The next day, I couldn't determine if the elevator looked like it had been cleaned or not. It was the weekend, after all, and I could still somewhat smell the piss, but maybe it was just because of my hormones. Not taking any chances, I held my two kids on the right side of the elevator with me again. And again the next day, too.

When I felt confident that the pee had been cleaned up, I stopped ushering them in to the right. But my son hasn't stopped doing so himself. Every time we walk in, he backs himself up against the wall on the right side. If any of us venture too far to the left, he points and shouts, "Pee pee! No, don't! Pee pee!" It's been three months now and he hasn't stopped worrying about the left side of the elevator, no matter how often we say that it's now okay. There aren't many elevators in Key West. Except for one, at our family clinic. And the two times we've used it, my son gravitated towards the right, eyeing the left suspiciously.

Now I can't help but envision a lifetime of him being afraid of everything that appears to the left of him...