Oliver has started talking quite a bit this summer.
As a parent, this is something you eagerly wait for. You read board books and sing folksongs and talk to him in the car about the birds you see out the window. Then that magical day comes when the ga-ga’s become, “No, I’m not,” or “Let go me!” or “Un-thank you” or a quite clamorous “No! Baby do that.”
Those long-awaited words have revealed a lot of defiance and indignance. Apparently, my diaper-clad child has inferred these last two years that he’s the king-of-this-castle, and now that I think about it, he may not be wrong. We actually have been tirelessly accommodating his every need since the OB-GYN told us we could no longer hide in our postpartum room at the hospital.
Perhaps, like childbirth, I forgot since Beckett’s toddler years how two-year-olds behave. Perhaps, like childbirth, I forgot about how they manage to go limp and gain forty pounds on the floor of Walgreens when you don’t give them the candy they asked for. Perhaps, like childbirth, I forgot about how they crumble the Kashi breakfast bar onto the floor because it no longer meets their expectations of three-minutes-ago.
The other reality is that we just have a kid that’s figuring out how to be heard. That changes things a little.
The other night while we were reading Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems I was struck by the first line: “Not so long ago, before she could even speak words, Trixie went on an errand with her daddy…” We are told the story of how Trixie loses her stuffed animal, Knuffle Bunny, on their errand to the laundromat. Her babble makes it so hard to share her needs with her dad that she resigns to tears and tantrums. They frantically retrace their steps. Upon finding Knuffle, Trixie bellows, “Knuffle Bunny!” which happen to be the first words she ever speaks.
I don’t have the solution for Oliver’s phase of toddlerhood. But, I do know that finding your voice is hard at any stage in life. We don’t always have the tools to say what we need to say. More likely, we don’t know how to say it effectively. All I do know is that we can carry patience and love for one another, and some compassion for those still figuring it out.
#knufflebunny
