Teachable moments and potty mouths

Graham gets extremely irritable during my showers. They last eight to twelve minutes, eight if Graham gets irritable immediately and twelve if he spends the first few minutes contentedly playing with his toys. If the latter is the case I make a gamble that I invariably lose:  while Graham bangs blocks or chews the wings of an owl, I spend a few shower minutes dreaming, usually that I'm in a shower in a hotel room just yards from the ocean or a forest. The longer I let my dreaming go on—tying hiking shoes, snapping Graham into a Snuggly, putting a sunhat on his head, stepping into the ocean—the likelier it gets that Graham will become undone by the cranks before I am done with my shower. Nothing serious is ever the matter with him. As soon as I emerge from behind the shower curtain and look down at him in his pack n' play, he laughs and smiles. Eight minutes is the longest he ever goes without being touched or looked at. That may amount to a mistake, but I'm not here to judge myself. Graham is simply a whiny little cricket when I'm in the shower. I use whiny reluctantly, because the characterization seems to suggest that I think there's something manipulative about his disposition. I don't think that. Mimi, my dad's mom, claims that the first thing a child learns is how to control his caretakers. I think babies have needs, physical and emotional. Babies are needy—not in a bad way. My baby is whiny when I'm in the shower—not in a bad way. But while I'm showering I can't attend to his needs or soothe his crankiness. Sometimes a mother must rinse herself off.

The fact that Graham can't remain calm for eight minutes while I'm in the shower may make you think that if I were to take a bath and shave my legs and then shower, a routine lasting at least twenty minutes, he'd be absolutely hysterical by the end of it, but that's surprisingly not the case. While I shave my legs in the bathtub Graham and I sit on the same level, only a few feet apart, and we can see each other. We talk. I also talk to him while I'm in the shower, but the running water muffles my voice, and the only time my songs don't soothe him is when they're sung from the shower. ("Your baby:  the only creature in existence who is consoled by your awkward songs.")

I rarely lecture Graham:  we're usually engaged in activities whose content I'm not responsible for, like reading from story books, or chewing on them, although he does also often chew on my chin, not that I'm responsible for my having a chin. I read him poetry when he feels like listening, but never, as I hope you already know, my own. On the 30^th of each month I tell him about the day he was born:  nothing gory or overly complainy—just things like, "It was 12:17am," and "You weighed seven pounds and eleven ounces." I think I’ve also mentioned that the quiche the hospital delivered the next morning was zucchini and disgusting, and I always tell him who came to visit him in his first days.

I try to limit my talking-at Graham to once a month, because I'm sure nothing I have to say interests him that much. When I read him poetry I really have to get into it—accents, gesticulations, wild pitch variation—to keep his interest. Otherwise he prefers funny faces and to play with his toys together. But when I'm in the bath and he's in the pack n' play, talking-at Graham is really the only thing to do. I try to make bath time educational. Today in the tub I examined my armpit and said, "I hope the hair there is long enough to shave. Sometimes if the hair is too short it's harder to shave, and if it's too long that of course is a problem too. This is a lesson you may want to remember for your face later in life." Each time Graham sees me shave my legs I fear that I am indoctrinating him to expect women to have smooth, hairless legs, so I am careful to explain during every shaving that women who choose not to shave their legs are not weird or repulsive. "They probably, in fact, do much more interesting and important things with their time than I do while I'm sitting in water with a razor blade, and they also avoid exposing their skin to potentially harmful ingredients found in shaving cream," I tell him, and then I attempt to pronounce some ingredients on my shaving cream bottle. 

"Graham, when people say that 'everything happens for a reason,' I doubt them insofar as I think what they are suggesting is that everything happens for a good reason, a proposition whose truth or falsity is indeterminable. Everything happens for reasons, maybe:  because the thing before it happened and so that the next thing can happen, and then the thing after that, and then the thing after that. But today, as I wash my feet, I notice that my right foot is significantly softer than my left foot. Why? Because that's the foot I dropped a bottle of olive oil on in the grocery store parking lot yesterday. It makes me believe that everything happens for a reason, optimistic overtones and all."

Graham has learned to yell, and he yells really well. When I talk-at him, he often shrieks, and I shriek back. It feels like a conversation. We take turns. We don't interrupt each other; he waits for my shriek to end before he begins his. It's fun. So if I were to have truthfully transcribed the story of my coming to hesitantly believe that everything happens for a reason, it would've contained at least twenty shrieks.

Last Sunday I decided I should start spelling simple words for Graham—words like mama, dada, Graham, cat, dog—to help him develop a sense of spelling. I don't know if it'll work, but it seems worth attempting. I am an awful speller:  without spellcheck, all of my blog posts would be full of misspellings, and they might sneak in even with spellcheck. In the second grade spelling bee I spelled monster m-o-s-t-e-r. It wasn't a hard word. It isn't. I remember that it was last Sunday that I decided to start spelling words to Graham because it was Sunday night that Ashley and Paul invited us over for dinner (an incredibly delicious falafel meal). Over dinner we happened upon the conversation of sex reassignment surgery, and I mentioned that a clitoris can be turned into a small penis, and the question "Does the penis work?" was asked. Aron responded that often a pump is installed under the skin, and I said, "Graham, pump:  p-u-m-p." It felt like a sufficiently simple word, one that is faithful to phonetics, and it's not an inherently dirty word.

Fuck is a dirty word, but I don't know that it's any more of an inherently dirty word than pump. Maybe it just requires a mature mind to understand its meanings. I'm not planning to teach it to Graham. I'm planning, of course, to avoid using it around him, mostly because I don't want him to use it around other children whose parents are the type of sensitive assholes who would complain at me about bad language their darling picked up from my child. It would not be good for Graham to get in trouble for saying a bad word, and it'll probably be a long time before he can learn to ask teachers if they practice voodoo, which is what he would ideally do if he were reprimanded for using foul language. "Because," he'd say, "most of us don't believe that a 'bad' word makes evil manifest in the world. And so-called 'vulgarities' have a history:  you just have to go back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 to get at the linguistic heart of the 'bad word' matter." But of course Graham won't be reprimanded for using foul language because he won't learn it. Not in this house! 

Athens Mayor Nancy Denson has apparently been working with Wal-Mart contractors to get a store built downtown. (Something like that; I don't know exactly what's happening.) My neighbor, with whom I am friends with on Facebook, called Mayor Denson a "corporate whore" for her dealings with Wal-Mart, which I took some feminist offensive to. I had earlier that same week seen a documentary called Miss Representation—about the representation of women in the media—and heard dozen of male newscasters make vicious, sexist comments about women politicians. One newscaster said he'd like to wake up next to Sarah Palin, and the documentary also included a clip of Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a bimbo. Several male newscasters expressed concerns about Hilary Clinton having her period. But "corporate whore" is an evocative and cadent insult. I don't approve of it, but I like when language does things. I want Graham to respect women:  by listening to them, not judging them according to the magazine standard, and feeling their pain as his own. I also want him to be able to spell. It will please me for him to play baseball, fairly and without an ego. 

Nothing I have said here is meant to be an argument—strictly musings.