Don't Put the Baby in the Toy Box

The baby was a whole fortnight overdue.  It was decided that an induction was necessary and so Miles and Rachel dropped two year old Jack off at his grandparents the night before Rachel was due to go into the Royal Prince Alfred and get on with it.

Dorry thought Jack was surprisingly amenable to being dropped off.  He had never stayed the night before.  Maybe he too was finding all the waiting a bit much.  Certainly for the rest of the family it was  trying.  Impossible to plan anything, endless well wishers asking if anything had happened yet.  “I know I should be grateful that people care.” Said Rachel.

Up until this point Jack had answered all questions about the pregnancy in the family with a firm “Not yet”.

“So you’ll have a baby brother soon.”

“Yes, but not yet”

And last Wednesday when Dorry had taken him to Bondi Junction shopping centre he had lodged himself in his stroller and refused to walk or run or do any of his usual things.  Even the pleasure of standing independently on the escalator did not tempt him out.  He preferred to sail down in situ like a sad monarch.

But the night before the birth he’d perked up.  Maybe the educational picture books had done the trick because he was happy.  He breastfed his Dolly and patted his Wood Hen.

“What will you do when the baby cries?” anyone could ask and he would perform on cue,

“I’ll say there, there. It’s all right” and he made little patting movements.  He seemed to have moved from ominous ambivalence to cloying sweetness at the idea of having a little brother in no time at all.

One of the issues relating to the birth of the new baby was that Dorry was wanted at the birth.  She’s been there last time.  This time, however, it meant leaving Jack in the hands of his loving but gruff grandfather who didn’t believe in delicate ways of handling the terrible twos time.  He preferred battles of will to the more pussyfooting strategies of distraction and bribery. Despite this Jack loved his grandfather.  Nevertheless Dorry and his parents quailed a little at the thought of a prolonged stretch of babysitting by Graham.

Perhaps that was why Dorry was called to the hospital quite late.  The baby was already flailing his way out of the womb when she got there. One arm and the head were emerging amidst a cacophony of midwifely encouragement and maternal grunts.  It was a much easier birth than Jack’s had been.  The baby was quite big with long legs still a bit bandy from being squashed inside.

 “Would you like to see the placenta?”  the midwife asked afterwards and it seemed polite to say yes, and there it was, a fine thing in its way, thought Dorry. 

For some reason she could not understand, watching a birth filled Dorry with a strange sadness.  It had been like this with Jack.  Perhaps it was just that the mysterious incoming baby had a flavour of the other world which for the most part she took no heed of, not being religious.  The door that had opened to let the baby in and then closed behind him would open and close for her and every other being under the sun.  For a moment it all seemed so futile.

 Dorry held the little thing for a bit before leaving, promising to bring Jack in when the parents had had a bit of a rest.

Graham and Jack seemed on blessedly good terms when Dorry got home, though when she asked of it had all been OK, Graham answered “More or less” and looked very tired.  However all three of them were excited at going back to the hospital.  Dorry ran ahead to make sure the baby was in its cot and not its mother’s arms when Jacob went in, as this had been advised by her midwife sister in England.

Jacob wasn’t at all interested in his mother though.  He went straight over to the cot and looked in, transfixed.  Cooing voices encouraged him to be pleased with his brother.  His father picked up the baby, now named Evan.

“Better than a kitten” Dorry proffered helpfully.

Jack looked at the baby thoughtfully and then asked his father,

“Do you know him?”

To Dorry it seemed a weird but very good question.

The first time Jack and Evan came to their grandparents’ house after the birth was a bit of an emergency.  Rachel had needed to be taken to Casualty with a minor infection and Miles had catapulted in with both children, the precious baby now being handed around like a bag of sugar.

“Take him while I get the car stuff”  Miles was frantic to get back to the hospital and see what was happening with Rachel.  Jack was however in total command of the situation.  He went half way up the stairs, looked over the banisters and fixed his dark gaze on his grandmother who was cradling the baby with awe and delight, all her melancholy now dispersed.

“Don’t” he said “put the special baby in the toy box”

He went on haranguing her about baby care but she hardly heard him.  The little gargoyle face with its twisting grimaces, the legs now covered for some reason in flaking skin, had got her under its spell.

In the days that followed Dorry watched Jack walk taller, with longer strides.  The attitude he assumed to little Evan was  for the most part lofty and indifferent but Dorry knew she only had put on a  wicked grin and slowly raise the wooden lid of the toybox and Jack would scramble into defensive mode,

“No, no Grandma, don’t.  Don’t put him in the toy box!”

Developing empathy and other things

Jack’s playschool is very conscientious and sends home reports on his progress from time to time.  The last one wrote that he had exceptional language skills but something they called empathy needed development.  I was alarmed by this bit of information.  Jack had bitten his mother in the swimming pool last time we went and even though he had kissed it better on command I could see he wasn’t really sincere about the kiss.  His baby brother is due any day now and it seems to me imperative that this empathy development gets underway. 

When we set out  for the shopping mall last Wednesday I tucked Woodhen and a rag doll (Dolly) in beside Jack in the pushchair.

“Dolly’s got a tummyache” I say, “You’ve got to look after her.”

He didn’t stay in the pushchair long but hopped out and ran down the road saying “Emergency” and cuddling each traffic sign he passed like a ittle pole dancer.  I understood though.  He was being a fireman from Fireman Sam the television program.  Sometimes he called me Sam in the playground and he has adopted an endearing thumbs up sign he’d got from the program too.  As I walked and he ran it looked like being a gentle morning of play and good humour.

Toilet training has been hastily added to Jack’s developmental regime on account of his younger brother’s imminent arrival.

“Do you want to do a pee?”  I say pee and his mother says wee.  I wonder if it matters and which is best.

“No” he says anyway.

We got to the shopping mall and I let Jack stand on the escalator instead of sitting in the stroller as usual.  It seemed timely.  There’d be another baby in the stroller soon and he’d have to do it then.  It was a bit scary as we both rose rigid to the top.

“Jump, jump” I said as the stroller went sideways and Woodhen and Dolly fell out.

“Poor Woodhen. Poor Dolly” I said, but Jack was already on his way to the next escalator

We did our stuff and he was remarkably well behaved in the bank.  We went up and down several escalators and Jack soon adopted an air of casual nonchalance as he stood holding the rubber rail until it was time to step off.

“No more escalators’  I said “What about some warm milk with a straw.”

“OK” he agreed.

‘Do you want to do a pee?” I remembered to ask

“No” he said in a clipped tone.

We got to the café and I asked if he wanted to sit on the vinyl bench or have a high chair.  He opted for the bench.  I got his milk and also a little chocolate motorbike in silver paper.

“Because you’re being so grown up” I said

I suppose Jack’s focus was on airily living up to his new adult like role and not on the milk because he dropped it almost straight away.

I said “Oh shit” and went and got a handful of paper napkins but a tall stranger emerged from the milling public.

“Move to another table” he said .

For a moment I was alarmed.  What was this?  Then he pulled out a phone and I realized he was an undercover security person.  He sorted everything out and even organized another milk with a straw.  Jack said thank you to the mop up man when I prompted him to so and we got up to go.

“Do you want to pee ?”

“No

“Well I do.”  So we went to the very new toilets which open when you press a button.  Jack pressed and I provided a nice example of going to the toilet.

“Do you want to pee too?”  

Jack was, however, unmoved.

 “No” he said and shot ahead of me as I manoevred the stroller out of the Ladies.  He spotted a button on the wall that opened the Disabled toilet and pressed it. He went in and pressed it again and it locked with a clack.

“Oh bloody hell” I thought.  The door was opaque glass and there were Jack’s hands whacking away at it as he howled. theatrically .  I was just wondering how to get hold of one of those undercover security people when Jack pressed the button again and let him out before sliding closed.  He was all for repeating the adventure but I’d had enough.  I wrangled him into the pushchair on top of Dolly and Woodhen.  He pulled Dolly out  from under by the arm which ripped and slid out of the sleeve of her jacket.  “Psychopath” I thought meanly but I said “Poor Dolly” and stuffed the arm back up the sleeve.  Jack didn’t seem bothered and I thought perhaps his mother and I needed to talk about this.

We stopped at the rather good Victoria Park playground on the way home and Jack launched himself at the big rope dome.  He awed me by his capacity to climb.  “When did this happen?” I thought.  He used to be so cautious.  Higher and higher he went.  There was a Chinese family in the playground as well.  Their boys were older and climbing too, but without Jack’s reckless passion.

He was far above me when the beat of water on the rubberized ground made me look up.  A small waterfall was tumbling from Jack’s shorts.  He watched it with fascination, frozen on his rope.  “Bugger” I thought,   The older boys politely averted their gaze.

“Come down Jack.  You’re all wet.  We’d better go home”  But it seemed he couldn’t move now.  He was stuck.  I considered asking one of the other boys to get him down but I decided it wasn’t fair when he was so wet, and so with great difficulty I grumbled my way up to him.  He was wide eyed and he clung to me like a limpet as I got him down the rope rungs.  Even though he was wet the hug was nice.  Not the hug of a psychopath for sure.

We skulked home both wet and smelly and when Rachel came back I told her about our different troubles.  I was just going to get on to the subject of empathy development and what we should do about it when Jack fixed her with his big hazel gaze and began one of his incomprehensible narratives. Form seems to precede content when children are learning to tell a story and they quickly become very boring because you can only understand the odd word here and there and there is never an end in sight.

“OK Jack” I said “That’s enough.  I want to talk to mummy about poor Dolly’s arm”   hoping  perhaps for a moment of remorse.

But Jack had triumphantly reached his climax.

“You see Grandma rescued me!”

There was a complicated moment of pride – for Jack’s brilliant flash of coherence,  for his gratitude and of course for my own heroic capability as Grandma fireman Sam.

Rachel and I never did get round to talking about empathy training and maybe its just as well.  Some things happen in their own time.  Meanwhile I get out a needle and strong twine and begin to sew on Dolly’s arm.

Jack and me and the playground

-->

 A decade or two ago I used to use my little fold up aluminium scooter a lot to whip around the inner city.  I relished the intimacy with the pavement, the different textures of the ground under me and the need to concentrate in case a big gap had me off and sprawling.  I loved the glides down slopes and the grace of sticking my leg out at the back like a ballerina as I flew along leaving  all the pedestrians behind.  It was so useful too. If I got more shopping than the handlebars could manage, I could fold it up, sling it on my back and hop on a bus with my bags.

I stopped using my scooter, not because I didn’t love it,  but because I found I needed a huge amount of good will and good temper to put up with the comments of truck drivers and others as they passed me.

“Good onya grandma” (and I wasn’t one then) “Gotta licence for that thing?” and so on.

  It puzzles me that people in their fifties, and indeed much older, can ride bicycles with quiet aplomb and yet if any one of them  gets on a scooter he or she immediately becomes a clown.  I now think it was weak willed of me to opt for dignity over the joy of my scooter and in fact have learnt better.

A while ago I bought Jack a little scooter from K Mart, however to begin with, it was not a huge success.  He gloated over it for a bit but lost interest when he couldn’t get it rolling along properly.

 Last Wednesday I decided to explore a new park with Jack. It was not very far away.  It had a fine slide and a little yellow loud hailer at toddler height.  Jack would like yelling through that, I thought.  The walk to the   park was along a main road and the thought of having to chase after a runaway Jack gave me pause.  Then I remembered seeing my old scooter in the attic.  With that I could catch him no matter how fast he ran, I thought a little maliciously. 

When Jack saw me with my scooter of course he wanted to take his too and I saw his point and agreed.  “Our horses,” I said  “Yours is Blackie and mine in Silver” and I gave a neigh for authenticity.  We set off for the park leading our mounts and attempting the odd awkward scoot. It was a bit uphill and Jack hadn’t got the hang of it.  Looking at him reminded me of the one and only time I had  ever been on skis – so boring when they didn’t move and so terrifying when they did.

One way and another we got to the playground – very inner city with a community garden alongside of it where corn waved and lush silver beet glistened.  Good on the Abercrombie Street people I thought .

The playground itself, though, was a puzzle.  There were a few desultory nods to early childhood – a sort of hen on a spring and the yellow loud hailer toy – but the central feature, the tall silver slippery dip was only accessible by what looked like army training equipment.  There were complicated rope loops and prickly chains, tenuous footholds and rungs far apart.  Jack and I contemplated all of this and I heaved him on to the lowest rung but he could get no higher and I couldn’t even get up that far.  At school I had always hung like a useless fruit on the end of the ropes in the gym, and things have certainly not improved since then.  I wondered who used this odd slide.  Those of an age and strength to tackle the assault course that led up to it would surely despise the childish passivity of sailing down to the ground on the silver chute.

Anyhow it was very frustrating for Jack and me.  We didn’t want to leave the playground without going on the slippery dip.  It was part of any playground visit.  Jack solved the problem in the end by trying to climb the chute itself.  He couldn’t do it because the sole of his sandals were leather and slipped.  I began to help and found my rubber soles clung nicely to the steel surface which was fairly tacky from lack of use.  Jack struggled to pull himself up with his arms as I shoved him from the back “Urgh, urgh, urgh” he grunted like a little grown up.  I didn’t grunt.  I sooled him on.

“Come on Jack.  We can do it.  We can climb Everest.  Nearly there.”

 I pushed his back and he heaved and my sandals blessedly stuck to the slide.  “If they don’t” I grimly thought “It’s one of those modern rubber surfaces underneath and we’ll probably survive a fall.”

But we got to the top and both of us were relieved and joyous.  The struggle made it seem all the higher.  The little cars on Abercrombie Street seemed far away and the branches of the gum trees  were  intimate and welcoming to us high people.

We availed ourselves of the slide down but it was a bit of an anticlimax with us stop starting all the way.  But Jack wanted to climb again and again and I wasn’t opposed to doing it.  I liked being the strong one and having him need my strength (and the traction of my sandal soles).

The sliding down improved with our repeated polishing and by about the fourth circuit my sandals wouldn’t stick any more so we had to give it away.

We were mellow on the way home and the lay of the land was in our favour with most of it being downhill.  Jack did his first tentative glide.  I showed off.  “Whee” I said and stuck my leg out like in the old days and then Jacob poked his out too.  I thought with great delight “He wants to be like me!”

Something nice had happened to us that morning.  Instead of beating me down with his terrible two power trips Jack had, yes, actually looked up to me and respected my expertise.

Was it only that I’d been appreciated that made me feel happy?  I don’t think so.  There was a relaxed collusion between Jack and me .  Both of us, at present, belong to the periphery of society.  He’s too young to be in the hurley burley of the mainstream world and I have opted for the freedom of retiring from it.  Nobody else has the time to play like we do and it’s a bond.

I’m going to go back to my scooter.  It’s  more than ten years since I gave up the pleasure of scootering and now I’m not wasting any more of my time.  I don’t think I mind about truck drivers any more.  I might call out when they jeer at me

“What’s your problem?  Get over it why don’t you. ”  It’s more or less what Jack would do.

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.

The death of the cat

I’d been away from Australia for three months – much of it in England where my 96 year old mother lives in a care home now.  When I came back Jack was predictably quite changed, taller, more dexterous, more dark and complicated.  Both his mother and I were a bit afraid he’d reject me after such a long time away.  I think he’d been primed to be nice on our first encounter when I got back but  he was cross with me after the initial pleasantries.   “Go way” he said.

Coming home after such a long trip is difficult at the best of times.  The house was dank and gritty with dust and  the garden deep in leaves and the plants either dead or rampaging. The lush passion fruit vine was now just basketwork on the wall.  They don’t live long anyway I’m told.

 But the worst thing I had to deal with was Fergus the cat who had been boarding for some of my time away at a place she’d always thrived in before.  She’d   come back to us plump and purring.  Not this time.  She was skeletal and her eyes were wild.  We took her to the vet and he suggested we send her to a more comfortable place, as he put it.

“You mean a dead place?” I said.

“Well some people see it another way”

I had a  grotesque vision of cats with wings and it was absurd.  Anyway  it seemed all wrong to kill her without her consent.  Nevertheless I grew to dread getting up in the morning to be met with her huge eyes and diminished frame and clear up the night’s mess.

Jack saw her once when she was so sick and stroked her head with a gentleness he would  have been incapable of three months before, and this time she didn’t run away.  “She wants milk” he said with accusation in his voice, “She wants more food”

We anguished for about a fortnight and fed her delicacies which she just  picked at. She grew weaker. She started licking ash from the fireplace.  Every morning I hoped to find her dead, and not by my murderous hand, But  in the end I gave in.  A friend said euthanasia was the last gift you could give a really sick pet.

Graham and I took her in together.  Her little leg was shaved and we stroked her as she was injected with the poison.  It was a bit like an addict getting a hit.  She looked relieved, relaxed for the first time since she’d come home.  But it felt like a terrible thing all the same.  We took her body home in a pillowcase and buried her and cried, both of us.

It began to be OK after a few days.  I reconsidered my position on euthanasia and started to think it would be the way I would like to go if I were as sick as Fergus had been.  A hit of bliss and the vet checking my heart until it stopped.  A pillowcase burial organized by loving mourners.  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a crime, what we had done.

Jack came over about a week later and we made jam tarts and I was   in his good books again.  Our rituals were back on track, the cuckoo clock, the battery powered dog that warbles “singing in the rain” – and then he said,

“Where’s the cat?”

I’d been expecting this sooner or later and told him that she’d got very sick and died.

“She’s sick.  She needs milk.  She needs food”  There was pain in his voice now.  I again said she’d died.  “She ran away”  he suggested.  I couldn’t let that go, especially in the light of having just run away for three months myself.  “No she didn’t run away.  She loved us”  I said.  “She was just very old and she died.”

On and off, all day, he interrogated me about the matter.   We have an attic which has got a bit sinister the way attics get to be as the detritis of decades gets piled into them.  Fergus loved this attic.  It was her bolt hole when Jack was after her or she knew we wanted to chuck her out.

After his bath Jack pointed up the attic stairs with a smile and said with a note of conviction

“The cat’s up there”

“No Jack, there’s no more cat”

“She’s run away”

“No she got ill and died”  

I was weary with Jack and my sorrow and guilt and then I remembered a lesson my mother taught me when I was In England with her this last time.  She has short term memory loss now. She can discuss poetry and feminism but anything new doesn’t stick.   In the early days of my stay this was hugely taxing.  I used to pick her up every day and take her to the cottage where I was staying and she’d quite reasonably ask where she was-

“Could you tell me – where exactly am I?”

“We’re in the cottage I’ve rented for my stay with you”

“Ah”

Then five minutes later

“Where exactly am I?”

In the beginning I would try to vary my answers because it seemed more respectful, more like normal conversation.  So my answer would be perhaps

“”Not far from where you live.  It’s called Cradley”

And then not long after she’d ask again

“Where am I?”

“In a holiday cottage in Worcestershire”

After a while though, I learnt to see the questions another way. The problem of where she was could not be resolved for Mum , but asking was as necessary as breathing.  To stop asking would be a sort of giving up, giving in.   And so her questions became like a sort of birdsong to me.  I stopped trying to vary my answers and just gave back my own simple response to her call.  It began to be part of  our way of getting on.  Nothing to do with information exchange – just reassurance and affection.

I realized Jack’s questions had no answers that he could process either.  Where indeed was the cat?  But he needed to go on asking just the same.  He had to confirm her going and his staying.  He’d loved her after all.  And so I began to answer not with my mind but like a grandmother bird with the same soothing song.

 I should have left it at that but I’m afraid I didn’t.  I suppose I was tired and it was the end of the day.  I half remembered the vet and his attempt to reconcile us to the cat’s death.   I am not a believer in the afterlife but Jack’s parents are.  So what the hell, I thought.   When Jack asked again “Where’s the cat?” I answered “She’s gone to heaven” and immediately wished I hadn’t.  It seemed another sort of lie.  Jack liked that answer though and savoured the word “heaven”

Rachel and Miles were rightly a bit shocked at me  making free with their belief system when it was convenient  and I was ashamed.  But I am left with a lot of confusion in my heart and my head.  Why are answers to questions so problematic? Why don’t they work? Which is the higher duty – to tell the truth as one knows it or to provide comfort and closure of a sort even if it requires  a compromise with sincerity?  What are questions for anyway?  After all some are downright rubbish like “How are you?”  Or is that really so?  Is it another instance of human chirruping – question and answer just to be nice?

 At this moment I wish that somewhere there could be some nice mother bird to take me under her wing  and sooth my soul with a few answers.  I don’t think I would really care if they were true or not just as long as they were there..  And I could ask again and again.

Jack and Barbara

On the days I look after my two year old grandson Jack, we sometimes cross the road to visit my friend and neighbour Barbara.  She’s the senior resident of the street. She’s lived here for over sixty  of her eighty four years and can tell anyone around what went on in their house before they got into it.  She can tell you about sousing a brawler with the contents of a chamber pot and boiling up lead to make sinkers for Chas, her husband’s fishing rod.  They raced pigeons from the back yard then.  It all sounds much more interesting than today.  Now Chas has died and Barbara still misses him a lot.

I started taking Jacob over when he was a tiny baby.  I was rather in awe of him and I think Barbara was too.  He had black eyes and a furious cry.  There was nothing pleading or pathetic about it.  Whilst I did all I could to identify the cause of his rage and calm him, Barbara had a different approach.

“Let it all out boy” she’d say, “Let him get it out”

I couldn’t do that of course and went on trying to sooth him.  Eventually he’d exhaust himself and go to sleep and we could both relax with our tea.

As Jack grew there were more divergences in our approaches.

“What’s he eating?”

“Just his mum”

“Well there you are,  He’s hungry.  You should give him some sugar and water in a spoon”

A shiver of horror passed through me.

“Oh no his mother wouldn’t allow that” And nor would she.  Likewise when he began to crawl and touched a plug

“You need to give him a little smack for that.”  I held my own and didn’t.

When he began to make sounds but not known words she’d interrogate him fiercely

“What do you mean?  Talk English can’t you.”  She was joking but formidable all the same. She has a shock of white hair and the deepest voice of any woman I know.

But Jack has taken her in his stride and until recently I’ve managed to resist all attempts to undermine the modern parenting style I try to copy from his own exemplary  mother and father. Healthy food, no sugar, no snacks, gentle guidance on to the safe right path.

However, when Barbara got the biscuit tin out I began to lose my grip.

“No,” I said.  “He doesn’t have biscuits

“What!”

“His mother doesn’t want him to have sweet things”

“Look at him. He’s hungry .  You’re starving him.” She’d say. “He’s got to eat.  He’s growing”

Jack was in fact fixing the tin with a beady eye.  He looked at Barbara with trust.

“It’ll spoil his lunch” I parried with an old phrase taken from my own grandmother.  But I lost.

“Only a plain one”

What?  You think I’ve got anything else.  I’m a pensioner.” She said smugly.

And after that Jack would go and stand by the biscuit tin shelf every time we visited and watch the battle commence.  When I realized  it was their  two wills against my one and I wasn’t going to win, I thought I’d try at least to minimize the damage.

“Could we call them something else Barbara,  If he starts saying the B word at home his parents are going to wonder where he learnt it.  Lets call them peacocks – and only one. ”

 Last time he’d wangled two.  I was especially anxious as now Jack would joyfully say as we crossed the road Barbara - Bikkit.  I hoped the peacock ploy would at least confuse the issue a bit.

Barbara’s house is nice for me and Jack.  It is a small terrace  with no doors so I can watch him as he ranges through the rooms, right out to the bathroom at the back where Fred, the parrokeet  lives in his cage . While  Jack  checks out Fred , Barbara and I catch up on the local goings on.  Who’s been burgled and how.  Who’s selling up.  Then he’ll come back and play happily with Barbara’s many childproof bottles of pills and supplememnts which rattle and roll pleasantly and he’ll turn on the torch which she uses to check which ones to take.

Sometimes we go out into the yard where Barbara grows some lovely orchids.  I can never get mine to flower and am always asking how she does it.

As well as Fred the parrokeet in the bathroom there are  two other birds who occupy cages in the  yard.  These parrots joined Barbara’s household decades ago  in one way or another. One of them, an ancient  corella, had been owned by a workmate of Chas  way back in the nineteen forties.  The friend was going on holiday and moaning about what to do with the bird.

“My old woman’ll take care of him for you” said Chas helpfully.  The man never came back and Barbara has the parrot still.

When you open the back door into the yard there is a clatter of wings as about a dozen pigeons take flight from around the cages where I like to think they.ve been passing the time of day with the parrots or maybe they are even descendants of the old racing pigeons.  But Barbara says it’s just the seed that brings them.

Jack was not keen on the  garden parrots.  Both are very very old.  The sulphur crested cockatoo screeches horribly as he furls and unfurls his yellow topknot.  The corella  has a decidedly weatherbeaten appearance not improved by putting his head into a rusty old tin can and banging it on the bars of his cage.  There was nothing about either likely to appeal to a small child but in the beginning I tried anyway.

“What’s that one’s name?” I asked pointing to the cockatoo.

“Charlie” said Barbara

“He’s called Charlie, Jack.  Say Hallo Charlie”

But he just looked from a safe distance and wouldn’t.

“And that one?” There was a silence and then Barbara said

“He’s Charlie too”

It was only on a later visit that I asked why both the parrots were called Charlie.  Barbara looked to see that Jacob was down in the kitchen communing with Fred and then bent towards me “His real name’s Bastardhead” she said “But I couldn’t have him hearing that.”

I was relieved that Barbara had decided to keep that dark. Not just one but two taboo B words in Jack’s rapidly increasing vocabulary would have really brought my grandmothering skills into question.

Jack's Birth

When my first grandson Jack was born everybody around was full of congratulations and merriment.  I didn’t understand the sadness that sat on my heart at this amazing and wonderful time.

I had been at the birth.  Rahel had wanted me there alongside my son Miles and I was glad to go, having been through three births myself and feeling something of an authority. But I also felt tentative.  Would I be useful or intrusive?  Was it my place to be there at the coming of my grandchild or should I wait until the little thing was held out to me for inspection in the time honoured way?

I didn’t hesitate long and when Rachel and Miles went in for her to be induced I joined them at lunchtime with Lebanese takeaway and a Scrabble set.  The two of them were bored and restless and in that funny state of disbelief that things would ever come to a head.  The steps to hurry things along had been taken and we watched her, between our bits of banter,  for any little signs of change.  She returned our looks with apologetic ones.  Nothing yet.

What tedium and how undramatic and not like a novel this was.  The baby whose sex we didn’t know was still non existent and for who knew how long.  For ever?

We had our Lebanese picnic on her bed and surveyed the facilities.  Gas and air machine, swabs and wipes and medical stuff.  Solemn and serious in the face of our skittish levity.

Suddenly a little start from Rachel.  “Just indigestion I think.  It’s the Lebanese”

“Tell us about it” we hassled  “What was it like?”

We put away the plastic takeaway boxes and began to stop waiting.  We got serious.

:”I think I’m going to vocalize a bit” said Rachel, now swinging into role.

“And I’ll count” I said remembering the comfort of Graham timing the contractions at my own births.  Through each twisting pain I could hear the numbers and the higher they went the nearer the end the contraction had to be.

Rachel gasped and made a little mewing call, a cross between a dolphin and a currawong.  That seemed to suit her as Miles held her hand.  The afternoon came and went through the hospital window.  The labour progressed ponderously and Rachel sang on.

“How different it is” she said at one point “having a contraction and not having one.”  She was already becoming an authoratitive birther. 

The strain of watching Rachel’s struggle affected Miles and me in different ways.  I longed to swap with her.  Take the pain off her.  It was much harder than being at my own births.  Miles got hungry. 

“I know it seems weird but I need to eat something”  The midwife looked aghast and Rachel weakly backed him up.  “He needs to eat” she said and she seemed eased by the sight of Miles munching a rolled up flat bread from the Lebanese plastic bag.  

Soon after that the readings from the monitor showed that things were going too slowly.  The baby was stressed.  Rachel was getting tired.

“I can’t do it” 

There was despair in her voice and for the first time I thought it might all go horribly wrong.

After an interval a whole lot of people came into the room and permission was asked, rather incongruously I thought, for a medical student to stay and see his first forceps delivery.

I was appalled by the strength it took to pull at the head,  the top of which was now visible, bluish, with wet black hair. It looked dead.  I thought no human head should be squeezed in this way and if that doctor had hurt Rachel or the baby I would kill him. It was not a passing feeling but one charged up with impotent rage.  On looking back I can understand why people are chucked out of labour rooms when things go haywire. 

When the  little face came out it wasn’t a pretty sight but it was blessedly alive.  The rest of the body slithered forth and after all that, it seemed a minor point that  it was a boy.  Anything would have done. 

“He has beautiful eyes”  I said “Black and so big”

But Rachel was looking at Miles with the little thing flopped on her.

“We did it” she said.

I did then feel it was time to go.  Rachel afterwards said she was reassured by my matter of fact departure.

“You just said -well that’s that and headed off” she said “It made it all seem so normal”

Out in the hospital car park my eyes seemed far too dry.  It was all too much to live through.  I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t laugh but I knew that my world had shifted on its axis.  I had become a grandmother and it seemed that I had moved one huge stage further on the journey of my life towards where?.  I felt terribly alone and redundant after the sharing of so much pain and triumph.

It was quite a bit later that I found out  I’d been so wrong to be sad.  There were no answers from Jack to my scary questions, but there was huge solace in the little baby .  Looking into his dark eyes there seemed to be so much experience and acceptance. He couldn’t tell me but wherever he had come from but it didn’t seem to have been too bad.  I’m  now convinced  that there is  no good reason to suppose that the great hereafter is any worse than the great herebefore and it’ll all be all right when the time comes.    Meanwhile  Jack’s enraged cries for what he needs right now – a nappy or some milk, remind me that even if this vale of tears isn’t exactly a picnic for him there’s a lot I can do about it.