Jack and the band

I babysit Jack on Wednesdays so his mother can go to her Pilates.  He turned two recently and it’s as if he knows it’s time to turn terrible.

A negativity has installed itself in his vocabulary.  He says “No” to all offers of food or entertainment.  He doesn’t always mean it and often returns to get what he has just spurned on principle – apple, blueberries (his favourite), a walk.  Only a couple of weeks ago he used to say ”OK’  in a nice little voice and flow with the tide of what was going on.  Now it’s “No” or even more cuttingly “No thank you.”  His parents have taught him manners.

I suppose it’s power.  Saying no changes things.  It blocks the flow of another’s intentions so they have to go round about “Apple?” “No” “Grapes?” “No” “Nice meat?” “No”

Like minions we scurry around his iron will.  But he looks sad in his potentate role, “No” does not seem to be as much fun as “Yes.”

And our walk this Wednesday was a torment to both of us.  “No” got translated into turning around, going the wrong way, flopping in a dead heap when pressured to conform to my wishes.    He cried and let his shoulders go limp so there was no leverage for me to hoik him up.  His face was clouded in moodiness.

All our precious little intimacies now seem to have been cast aside. “Kiss?” “No”

“Cuddle?” No.”

The high five that all babies seem to be taught to do these days has turned to a nasty thwack and has had to be stopped.

He has got so strong and at sixty eight I am not quite  as strong as I was.  Tucking the flailing child under my arm strains every sinew.  I can still talk the talk but it won’t be long before I’ll be unable to walk the walk and implement my threats.  He’s just getting too big.

I put at least some of it down to play school which he has begun attending  twice a week.  It’s supposed to help him develop his social skills as well as give his mum time to do her own stuff.  Only this week I bought a little scooter for Jack, hoping to delight and intrigue him and who knows, keep him on track on our walks.  Fat chance!

“MY scooter.  MINE!” he crowed like something out of Lord of the Rings.  He hangs on to the thing as though hordes of barbarians are eyeing it instead of one bemused grandmother.

Not so long ago he was such a gentle soul.  We couldn’t find his dummy one nap time and he said, to my amazement, as we climbed our steep wooden stairs hand in hand

“Dummy all gone.  Never mind. Not your fault.”

Of course he was parroting  his gentle mother, but ah, how nice.  My grandson is going to be a saint perhaps, I muse.

Not so now.  Beelzebub could not shoot more sulphurous looks than Jack when crossed.  There’s a sideways angle of his head, which adds scorn to the mixture of rage and outrage.  It cows me a bit.

Sometimes he just seems angry and even “No” is not enough.  He needs violence.  Two weeks ago we’d had a pretty turbulent morning’s shopping in the Broadway Centre.  A fight over getting into the supermarket trolley and another one about getting out.  A horrible moment when he’d managed to move the pushchair with his feet whilst still strapped in. I'd been concentrating on typing in my pin number. I needed a coffee and he was not, for once, oppositional about warm milk with a straw and a biscuit.  We stood in the queue and something prompted him to smack the woman in front of us – not hard but assertively.

“That’s naughty” she said, reasonably enough.

“It certainly is” I said and  marched him off from the queue. 

I felt as ashamed as if I’d smacked the woman myself, and Jack was by then being very querulous about his milk and biscuit. I knew what he meant because I’d wanted my coffee too.  We left the shopping centre and I whacked the traffic light button and swore inwardly at the little red man.  Why were the lights always so loaded against pedestrians?  We got across and into Victoria Park –with me intending to bee-line it home to disciplinary time out in the cot for Jack at the very least.

Something was happening in the park though.  The old gardener’s lodge was being reopened as a café.  There were lots of people.

“No way” I thought as I dismissed the lingering idea of an apparently free coffee.  “Not with this little limb of Satan”

But suddenly from across the park came a wonderful noise and we saw that a strange band was advancing over the grass towards us.  It was making a wild sound only held together by a tenuous  thread of rhythm.  Squawks from a trombone, the cry of a trumpet and an ancient curly instrument with a man actually inside it - all  of them accompanied by the whomp whomp whomp of a drum.  The little band, all dressed any old how, just ambled by and, as it did so, the trumpet pointed and tooted at Jack. The cheek and the lawlessness of it took even his naughty breath away. He laughed and so did I.  We followed for a bit, rivetted by the crazy aloofness of the band people thumping, straying and converging again as they made their random way around the park.

We left eventually and once home I popped Jack in his high chair and we played the blueberry game.  Three eggcups and a blueberry under only one.  It has evolved because from babyhood he had eaten his blueberries disturbingly fast, like a chicken pecking seed. 

He had his nap after that and I finally did get my coffee and mused on the morning - Jack’s meaningless badness and my fury and how it had been dissolved in an instant by the band.    I realized perhaps for the first time in my life what music was for.  It was for us.  It offered  solace,  healing and our own silly anarchic feelings all rolled into one lovely racket and  it banished moodiness and dark feelings..

 I went to wash the coffee cup and consider the night’s dinner and thought perhaps Jack and I might make it through to three after all.