Attention Seeking

A few months shy of three, Eliot can slip open the sliding door onto the deck, scoot a stool to any forbidden corner of the house, unlatch the porch lock, turn on the bathroom faucet, and open car doors. He knows how to manipulate keys, zippers, snaps, lids, and most so-called child-proof locks. He can't, of course, maintain any kind of awareness of his immediate environment. If the dog didn't woof a warning bark, he wouldn't even know when his own daddy had walked through the door.

If you are put in charge of Eliot, you learn pretty fast not to let your attention wane. If you have enough time to finish that article in Time magazine, Eliot's had enough time to slither into the back room and start scooping cat litter into the laundry basket.

I do not finish thoughts. Instead, I set a single, manageable task for the day and complete it in a staccato series of steps. This morning's plan to strip and re-make the guest bed required several breaks in order to repair a train track, free the dog's tail from Eliot's death grip, put on cowboy boots, take off cowboy boots, fill the bubble dispenser, clean up spilled bubble stuff, kiss an owie, and cuddle on the couch.

It should come as no surprise that I do not negotiate when it comes to exercise and the afternoon siesta. Walks and naps together form a brief but critical respite from my state of constant alert. Huffing the jog stroller along the state forest trail in the cool morning, I let my vision blur out and my attention wander. Eliot asks me an endless stream of questions, some of which I answer, many of which I ignore. I figure if a gentle observation of the green canopy and scuttling wildlife is good for my spirit, it is probably good for his. Usually, Eliot quiets down after a few minutes and relaxes into the bumping rhythm of the ride. As do I.

About two weeks back, as I tooled back along one trail in the general direction of our house, I heard Eliot say something. I half mm-hmmed in response, but his tone grew a little more urgent. I bent down, and I noticed him pointing back along the trail. "That way, mommy," he said. I glanced back, my knee-jerk dismissal of his latest caprice already on my lips. Then I noticed. In my zoned-out reverie, I had ambled right on past the fork in the trail leading us back home. I stopped. In this sun-dappled, leaf-carpeted, twisting tangle of tree trunks and ferns, Eliot had discerned the subtle change in the trail when I had not. Somehow, he could see the way the path opened up in two directions, one of which stretched forward up the mountain, the other, bending past three large rocks and leading on to our house. He was paying attention. Even when I was not.

Since that day, I have begun to notice Eliot's capacity for attending to the tasks of our shared days. When we go out in the yard to play, he often asks, "Can we put on gloves and go in the garden?" Without my prompting, he will move to fill his watering can then sprinkle water over our delphinium and lilies. He checks the peas to see how they are growing.

On a day when I said we needed to run some errands, he asked, "Can we go do the recycling?" He knows the painted box by our front door needs to be emptied eventually. He delights in feeding cans and bottles into the machine at the supermarket, retrieving our ticket and exchanging it for some small item from the store shelves. Another afternoon, when casting about for activities to fill a gray stretch of inside time, he said, "Let's do some baking!" It was a great idea, and I probably would not have thought of it. Then he reminded me we needed to don aprons before we could get started.

This morning, I brought the sheets up from the dryer and dumped them out on the couch so Eliot could bury his face in them. He calls the laundry "warm and toasty," as in, "Can we go downstairs to get the warm and toasty?" I left him there to roll around in the warm and toasty while I went in to finish the dishes. When I came back, I found Eliot happily playing with his trains on the floor. The now-cooled laundry was stuffed neatly back in the basket on the couch, waiting for me.

As any parent will tell you, these moments of toddler attention are rare and fleeting. They are also impossible to anticipate, which makes their occasional appearance such a pleasure. Each unexpected flash of politeness or thoroughness give me a glimpse of Eliot as a responsible person. A person with a repetoire of skills to build and choices to make outside of the reach of my care. Someone able to look up himself before crossing the street, able to engage in small kindnesses without prompting. Able to pick up where I leave off, so that I can finish that magazine article. Or that conversation with my husband. Or that single, rambling thought all my own, its route a hidden path onto which I can veer unseen and lose myself completely.

The Great Potty War

Don't go head-to-head with a toddler. This is advice I frequently fail to remember. Like yesterday, when I spent the afternooon engaged in a protracted, ultimately unsuccessful campaign to convince Eliot to pee.

For an insentient organ, a two-year-old's bladder has a remarkable facility for demoralizing a grown woman. The child even slept for two hours in the midst of battle, woke dry, and managed to continue to hold back long into the evening. I called upon every weapon in my arsenal. Cookies, temporary tattoos, verses of "Darling Clementine" repeated ad nauseum, organic lollipops, juice/water cocktails, stickers, threats, a promise of a mall excursion to procure big-boy underpants. Even pulling up a stool alongside the potty so my son could nurse failed to elicit even one squirt of urine. This kid's determination rivals that of Tibetan hunger strikers and Earth Firsters u-locked to giant redwoods. How does he manage to keep in all of his day's accumulated beverages for ELEVEN HOURS?

As for me, I kept plunging ever deeper into my well of patience and creativity. Until about 8:00pm, when I could dredge up nothing but sludge and dead crayfish. The kid kept returning to the potty -- this in itself was incredible -- and just sitting there. Dry. I have to assume the myopic attention his mommy is paying his bodily functions is too delicious to resist. I sidled up next to him on the floor, entertained him endlessly, and offered him copious amounts of sugar. Occasionally, I stared with longing out the living room windows at the spring sun, the impatiens wininking pinkly from the garden, the soft brown path into the woods undulating its call to my hiking boots. But I tore my gaze away and settled in for the long wait.

I am nothing if not an agent in my own undoing. I understand how parties to a conflict become more deeply entrenched in their positions the longer the face-off lasts, no matter how irrational and ultimately self-destructive that entrenchment. Yet there I sat, sore-assed and growling, on the hardwood floor while my son hummed and sucked juice boxes and held gleefully onto his excrement. Did I win by keeping Eliot out of the sun? Did anyone? He wet a diaper just before bed. Today, his tush is cusioned once again and we are ambulatory. I need to re-think my strategy.

So, what's the urgency here? Wouldn't it make more sense just to let this whole potty process unfold in its own time, to let Eliot have a vote in his own development? Sure, I like to believe my son will simply learn what he needs to know through osmosis. But I also know some skills require a parent's unwavering decision and consistent follow-through. Eliot would still be sleeping in our bed, biting us at his leisure, and regularly unpacking the contents of the refrigerator if we, his frazzled but ultimately better-resourced parents, had not directed a change in behavior.

Let me add that this kid is ready. He has gone in his potty enough to show us he can. He understands when he is doing it, and he can even sometimes let us know before it happens. But you know what else? I'm ready. The loosey-goosey approach to potty learning does not take into account a kid whose laundry list of food sensitivities inspires bowel movements of epic proportion and monstrous consistency. I love this child, everything from his flirty eye-cutting to his unstoppable compulsion to scale my back every time I squat down to remove a wad of lint from the rug. But I don't have to love rinsing diapers whose contents resemble a masticated carnival hot dog. With an orange julius mixed in.

Any Little Corner

Thanks to my industrious husband, we now have a fence around our yard, a sandbox in the middle of it, and a lawn cleared of last fall's leaves. Our little family has already nestled down in the comforting confines of chicken wire. We are staking out a corner of upstate springtime. In a small garden patch bordered by rocks picked from the endless underground supply, perennials chosen from the nursery shelves by Eliot pop pinks and purples into the fresh brownish-green. Along the fenceline, a few gladiola bulbs and creekbed lilies offered up by a camp neighbor promise a splash of light in summer.


After four years of living in high desert, I was a giddy about the move to a deciduous forest. I'd had it with fried sage, mullen orgies and invasive thistle. The possibility of a garden made my heart gallop. I entertained wild, slightly naughty fantasies about pole beans. Knowing we would start jumping back and forth between our New York camp and another camp in Massachusetts in 2010, I figured this summer would be my first and last chance. Oh, visions of glossy spinach unfurling from luscious brown soil. Pulling a trellis a green bean slighly furred and glistening with dew. Goosebumps.


We hauled ourselves across the country and into our new home right in the heart of winter. Snow fell in heaps. Who knew what lay beneath? We shoveled. Crossed our fingers. Chipped ice from the porch. Bit our nails. Raked snowy clods of leaves away. Then, we dug.


Sadly, the soil around our house is mostly sand. Anthills abound. A dense skeleton of rock holds up the earth here, just inches below the soft skin. Life, however, finds its way. A little grass pokes up in patches, and the hostas with their legendary local reputation begin to curl open along unexpected corners of the foundation. I dug up my little patch. Made room for flox. And who, with a toddler, a dog, a cat, a deer convention in the neighborhood, and a fleet of Tonka trucks can expect to keep lettuce safe in the backyard?


But what I had not counted on was the wall. Around the base of our house, extending back behind the foundation of the main floor, is a stone wall. It stretches fifteen feet or so below the deck as the hillside drops off into anthills and, eventually, a creekbed. Then it jogs and stretches another fifteen feet or so along the back of the house. Above this stone wall and below the deck is a huge patch of scary-looking dirt. I assumed this dirt sat atop a stone foundation of the house. But, now cleared of soggy leaves and an old canoe, I have discovered the wall is simply that: a wall. It holds up a lot of really soft, squishy, deliciously chocolatey soil. Safely separated from the rest of the yard by a stretch of chicken wire, neither dog nor toddler can reach it. And, six feet off the ground, no deer will likely try.


So, today, with my onion starts and seed packets, I scaled a stepladder and dug trenches in freshly raked soil. My garden is just a teeny stretch about ten feet long and two feet wide. And I had to balance along atop crumbling stone wall to drop my seeds in their waiting furrows. But I will gladly clamber and wobble up there with my watering can and my spade if it means the possibility of tearing lettuce fresh from the earth into a salad bowl for my family.