A youngish couple pushed a stroller through the grass, gazing this way and that as they slowly moved along. A glance into the seat in front of them revealed to me a little girl, probably just shy of her first birthday. She thoroughly ignored the pandemonium of the county fair around her.
Instead, she focused her attention on the world inside her stroller. Her curly brown hair bobbled over her forehead as she sucked fiercely on a straw, taking in gulp after gulp of dark liquid. Her tan little legs were wrapped around the tall, 44-ounce clear plastic cup from which she drank. Her hands, so tiny with their minuscule fingernails, were dwarfed by the sheer size of the cup they attempted to hold.
Her brow furrowed as the liquid stopped flowing. She removed her lips from the straw and replaced them with her fingers. Her hand rose and fell, poking the ice. I marveled at her skill, knowing that if my own 15 month old daughter faced the same obstacle, poking ice with a straw would not be her first course of action.
The stroller came to a stop next to my 4 year old daughter and I as we waited, ever so patiently, for our turn on the merry-go-round. The little girl’s face lifted in acknowledgment of the stroller’s pause, and our eyes met. A smile revealed four little teeth.
She shifted the cup in her lap and returned to her task. At last, the straw reached through the ice to the bottom. The little girl happily sucked brown, bubbly liquid into her mouth once again.
As the stroller began to move, I spied the label on the side of the cup. It read: PEPSI.
Category: Kids
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Confessions
Let’s talk a little bit about guilt. I don’t mean the O.J. Simpson kind of guilt, but the kind you carry around with you. Self-imposed guilt, let’s call it.
I’ve got a bit of it knocking around. Occasionally it will rear its ugly head, and I’ll have to do something to rectify the guilt so as to loosen the knot in the pit of my belly. Guilt can be an ugly, ugly thing if it’s left to its own devices.
Take, for example, this ugliness:
I never talked much about how “the trip” came about, because I didn’t want my 4 year old to ever get the impression that it was somehow her fault. That her getting out of bed repeatedly, and me having to go in there and take away her books, and thus walk around her room in the dark, was the cause of my fall. And subsequently, the cause of the blood all over her floor, followed by her daddy cussing in front of her for the first time and her Mommy being rushed to the emergency room.
Are you following?
Yesterday, she walked up to me and said, “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry I pushed the ball at you when I was mad, and I’m sorry you fell.”
How heavy was the weight that came off of her tiny shoulders when she confessed?
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And then she got married and had kids
My little girl is now a Preschool Graduate. I don’t know when it happened, all this growing up and getting smarter stuff. One day she was toddling around in diapers. The next, she was wearing a cap and gown.
One moment, she was telling me I was her best friend, next to Ma’Maw. Now, she has “real” best friends. Just yesterday, she was taking her first steps across the living room, not walking over to accept her diploma.
And also, when did she start smiling with her mouth closed? She has a beautiful, dazzling smile. 
But lately, she won’t show it when she knows a camera is on her. She says it’s because of her “missing tooth”, which is actually a space caused by an aberrant frenum. It never used to bother her. These days, though, I get irritated when adults, who should really know better than to think a child would have a tooth right in the middle, ask me what happened to her tooth right in front of her. It’s made her self conscious. Soon enough, though, she’ll start losing those baby teeth and it will be time to clip that frenum. It will probably be tomorrow.
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Go ahead. Try it.
My mom, while she is reserved and quiet most of the time, is an incredible practical joker. It’s her brand of humor, and she is a master.
When we were kids, we’d be tricked into trying foul things like baking cocoa and pure vanilla extract. Although, I admit, she usually told us we wouldn’t like it, but how could we know when she was joking or telling the truth? Because occasionally, when she told us we wouldn’t like something it was delicious. Like raw coconut and fistfuls of sugar. Which, according to her, would give us worms.
She used to hide her co-worker’s stapler and quietly snicker as she heard her look for it. One time she removed all of the pencils from someone’s drawer. Later, my mom would replace the items, but put them in a different place. Anything to beat the 9-to-5 droll, I guess.
She used to say, “Hey! You want a banana? A banana sounds good!” And whoever it was (her brother or one of us) would say, “Yes! A banana!” And then she’d laugh and say, “Ooooh, sorry. We don’t have any.”
YES, it used to irritate the crap out of me. But this morning? I finally GOT IT.
I was dipping my tea bag into my mug of hot water at the breakfast table, and Blythe got it in her head that she just had to have the tea bag.
“No,” I told her, “It’s not good. You won’t like it.”
Her reply? “Me. Me.” she said, as she did the sign for “gimme that”.
Then a smile crept over my face. And I let her have the tea bag. I was seriously looking forward to seeing her reaction when she sucked some of that pure, bitter tea into her mouth. Unfortunately for me, she didn’t like the texture and threw it on the floor before it ever reached her lips.
My mind went straight to the baking cocoa in the cabinet and I thought, “I wonder if I could get Alison to try that?”
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THAT kid. You know the one.
You remember the kid in elementary school, the one nobody wanted to be friends with? Maybe it was booger eating, possibly a malodorous waft in his or her general vicinity. If you don’t remember THAT kid, maybe it was you.
The kid I remember was named Jacob. Thinking back, there wasn’t a whole lot wrong with him. Mainly it was the booger eating, but also the way his clothes were always too small, so that his belly hung out, and that he wore thick glasses with the sports band around his head to hold them on. As a Mom, I can now completely understand , but as a 5th grader? Not so much. He wasn’t really teased, but nobody wanted to be his friend. The poor little fella.
So when I look at my beautiful, smart, funny, polite, non-nose-picking daughter, who is getting ready to start Kindergarten, I get this tight feeling in my stomach every time she makes a weird face. Because, people? She is making them more and more often, without even realizing it. She scrunches up her nose, furrows her brow, rolls her eyes. We’ve started pointing it out to her whenever she does it, just in a light, nonchalant way. Like, “Hey, do you need a tissue? Looks like your nose itches.”
But what the hell do I do? She’s shy to begin with, and now I’m worried that with all those crazy facial expressions she’s going to be laughed at. Just last night, on our way to Vacation Bible School (her BFF at preschool invited her, and she jumped at the chance to go) she said, “But what if the other kids laugh at me ’cause I’m new?” Kids can be so cruel, and I’m not going to be around to smack the backs of their heads.
And also, do you think the parents of THAT KID realize it?