Making discoveries and rediscoveries all over again
orty-five minutes into the English
Department subcommittee meeting
on drafting a grading rubric for the
English 101 final essay assignment, I folded
up my notebook and made an
announcement to my colleagues: “I’m sorry,
but I have to go paint a ceramic owl.”
My colleagues on this committee are all
non-breeders; most are younger than me
and have great shoes,
hip eyewear and are
lovely people. They
were accepting, if
disappointed in my
bailing early. I
shrugged and said
simply, “I chose to
reproduce.”
I actually try not to
be the person who
Melissa Favara makes non-kid-havers
look at endless
pictures of my six-year
Melissa Favara
old daughter on my
teaches English in
cell phone, and I
Vancouver and lives
seldom rave publicly
and writes in North
Portland, where she
about Ramona’s most
Parents Ramona, age
recent observations.
6, hosts a bi-monthly
(“Mommy, isn’t it kind
reading series, and
of funny that it’s
counts her husband
called a chili pepper?
and her city as the
Get it? Get it?”).
two great loves o f her
I remember having
life.
great shoes, hip
eyewear and all the
time in the world to
invent interesting and funny handouts on
avoiding sentence fragments o r re fle c t
deeply on a foreign-language movie. I
remeber the act of tolerating breeders,
assuming that I found their children
interesting. I think, too, of my favorite
quote from the TV show “Boardwalk
Empire,” when gangster Arnold Rothstein
is asked whether he has children, and he
replies, “No, but I’m told that they often
say unexpected and amusing things.” This
is true, but the inflection on Rothstein’s
words implies the added clause, “but
please don’t bore me with what your kid
said, did, made in preschool art class,
vomited, excreted, etc.” I don’t want to be
that parent.
If I were, however, to soliloquize about
the joys of parenting to my cheerfully
childless colleagues, now that I am, six
years in and kind of getting the hafig of it,
I’d start with the thing I least expected and
find most interesting about parenting. The
opportunity to do kid stuff with a kid who
was once a baby, but is now hitting
developmental milestones to beat the band,
on her way to becoming a person.
Author Tom Robbins once wrote, “It is
never too late to have a happy childhood.”
The chance to be kid-like is among the many
gifts that Ramona forces upon me.
For instance, painting ceramic owls. No
joke. When I was a child, I remember my
mother dropping me off at the odd little
cobwebby ceramics shop in my
neighborhood, putting on one of my dad’s
flannel shirts backwards for a smock, and
slathering paint onto a clay pumpkin or owl
or Santa or Easter egg, depending on the
season. When we got our Chinook Book this
year via a school fundraiser, Ro immediately
(she can now read) located the coupon for
Pottery Fun and insisted we go th a t v ery
Friday— th e day of th e w eek when we
typically have an adventure.
Ro doesn’t have aftercare, and I pick her
up at 3 o’clock. I decamped my committee
meeting, grabbed the girl and drove her
instead to Mimosa Studios, the paint-you-
own pottery shop close to home on Alberta.
Childhood revisited, I thought! Artsy
bonding!
The thought lasted until we crossed the
threshold of the studio and Ro realized that
she would only be painting pottery, not
making pottery. “But the coupon said
pottery fun, mommy! It’s fun to make
pottery! It’s not fun to paint pottery!” she
shouted through indignant tears. At the
artfully arranged tables clustered with
pigments and brushes, the docile children
and their mothers, adding embellishments
to their coffee mugs and piggy banks, raised
their eyes to my little banshee screaming in
the doorway.
Childhood, like adulthood, kind of sucks
sometimes.
Ro was upset because she read the
language literally—and I was reminded of
what a difficult process it was learning all
the nuances of the English language and all
of the hidden meanings everywhere. As in
when Ro’s dad was explaining why he didn’t
push a yellow light on the way home from
school recently by saying, “The last thing I
want to do is hurt someone,” to which she
replied, “Do you mean that’s the last thing
you want to do today?” Childhood is full of
little misunderstandings that can produce
frustration, shame and more frustration.
But it’s also a pretty flexible place to be,
and a tremendous point of discovery. I knelt
to hug Ro in the ceramics shop and pointed
to the wall of animals and dishes and asked
if she m ig h t like to a t le a s t look at what
th e r e was to paint before we left. Heaving
one of those choking-back-tears-shivery
sighs, she pulled herself together and
indeed, located an inquisitive-looking little
owl that caught her fancy. We pulled up
chairs to a table that had room next to a
nice mom speaking French-accented English
to her daughter, who was painting a Snow
White, and started choosing colors.
Our conversation ran to how excited Ro
was to bring AJ, the class pet (a bearded
dragon fond of crickets and lettuce) home
next weekend for our first try as the
Weekend Custodial Class Pet Family. I made
no secret of the fact that I am jazzed to host
AJ, who sort of clings to your shirt when you
hold him and makes a kind of solemn, world-
weary, lizardy eye contact. I never had a
lizard growing up, but now I get to do that
with my kid, whose color scheme for the
owl she finished in good time and great
cheer (blue head, yellow chest, orange tail)
was eccentric, but charming. “Mommy, can
we come back next week and paint a dog?”
On the drive home, I remembered the
time when I could barely imagine having a
child. I remembered the little nickering
feeling a decade ago, at 28, when I arrived
as emergency babysitting backup for a
friend’s 4-year-old to find the child naked
and covered with orange circles done in
marker. “What are you doing?” I had asked.
“Obviously, I’m drawing circles on myself.
Do you need glasses?” the kid who was not
my kid replied.
I was hooked by children saying
unexpected and amusing things. What would
it be like to corral one of those creatures
from the cradle on? To be there for the kid
as they make the discoveries, to rediscover,
to learn how to see from that perspective
and respond and help? I had said to that kid,
“No, I don’t. Do you want to draw some
circles on me, too?”
My colleagues were kind as I left my
meeting, and one, a young novelist going
places, said, “I want to go paint an owl right
now! I think I’ve gone right past the baby
urge and into kid envy.”
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