isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Dear Adam,

Well, this has been a Malkovich of a month. Even as it gets more and more exciting all the time to watch you change and grow and learn, some aspects of your emerging character are more charming than others, and this month has been a showcase of your more tetchy qualities. There have been weeks when we have to strain our memories to recall a day which we can call truly happy, where ‘happy’ equals less than 90% of your waking life was spent whining, whinging, moaning,weeping, crying, howling, screaming, shrieking^[1]. We are reminded^[2] of the days when you were just a tiny little life with no understanding of how the universe worked, or how sleep was supposed to come to you. But you’re so much smarter now and we expect more from you, more tolerance of life which is admittedly not perfect and not always entirely tolerable. We worry that you’re learning that extended, if not continual, noisy expressions of dissatisfaction are the default mode. We worry, in fact, that you may be a bit mental.

Sometimes. Then there are other times when we get over ourselves and remember that this isn’t supposed to be easy. We are forced more and more into a variety of parental roles we’re not all that happy about: policy wonk, enforcer, warden. I do not relish throwing you into the cooler with no baseball mitt. And of course there are times^[3] when you are so funny and fun to be around they all but obscure the eternal hissy fits and incessant whining, the heel-drumming and flamenco-like stomping rages, the hurling of self to sidewalk, store floor, the arched of spine of resistance. Such are your days. In keeping with my deep and long-term association with denial, I’d rather write about the obscuring bits, even though they are increasingly the mortar rather than the bricks.

Hearing you mimic with near-perfection is something I wasn’t quite prepared for. When you emit a sound that is distantly recognizable as ‘juice’, for example it’s pleasing, but your sudden love affair with a thoroughly fluent ‘no no NO, no no, no, no’ shows us what you are going to sound like when you really begin to speak. And also what your linguistic environment must sound like, you poor kid. Your language progress is a topic I mention every single month, I know, and I realize that it was exactly one year ago today^[4] that I began to really anticipate your learning to speak. A bit prematurely, it seems. Yes, you are a bit ahead of where you were a year ago, but the advance still seems disproportionately small. Each month we think that you are on the verge of meeting some critical mass, that a major breakthrough is just days away, and each month we see you approximate a handful of new sounds (engine names are beginning to trickle in now, James, Percy, and Thomas leading the pack), but the quantum language leap we keep waiting for is still out there.

We like the morning you. Being able to get yourself out of bed is a great development in the direction of abiding maturity. That you still take yourself out to the living room long before any of Your Shows come on is beside the point, and occasionally we can cajole you into coming into the parental bed for a little extra snuggle before the morning routine kicks in. That routine consists of you stomping about the front room all squinty-eyed and making little dictatorial demands for yogurt and Teletubbies in your combination of Shoshone sign-language and squawks. You insist on dragging your posse around with you, which can lead to logistical problems given the limitations of your little arms. I like that you are almost always up and about well before I depart for work these days.

This morning was fairly typical: you screamed at 03.30, were comforted by your mother as your father slept blissfully, ignorantly on; got up at 05.30 and sat fruitlessly in front of the TV with Percy, James, your piciu cup, and Straszny Lew until your mother came to fetch you and drag you into the parental bed; yowled and cursed for ten minutes, after which you dropped into cherubic, docile sleep for over an hour. With a snort, then, at 6.40, you awoke with a big smile on your freshly-shaven head (we’ve got you looking like Sluggo these days) and started a jolly game of belt-sander, wherein you try to rub our skin off with a rolling motion, much as a crocodile is said to drown their prey. Only with laughing. Like I said, a normal morning.

You invent these games for yourself, both in the house and out. Above, we can see your obsession with kanalizacija and the placement of leaves, stones, and (if unsupervised) cigarette butts into the vent holes of manhole covers. You would happily stay out all night long playing this game, and you make your displeasure known over a wide radius when play is interrupted because the post office is closing in six hours. It can take a long time to walk anywhere with you anymore. You’re hard to steer.

You have also taken to parental copying more and more. My favorite mimicking that you do is your morning mirroring of my evening ritual: the crushing of the beer can before inserting it into the usually-quite-full rubbish bin under the sink. Your morning version of it involves taking the tiny frail plastic bottle that your liquid yogurt comes in and crushing it manfully in your tiny fist, and then plunging it into the rubbish. Sometimes you even say wubbitch as you do so. Here you are fighting the flies your mother so abhors after seeing your father use the fly-swatter:

Yet another new game is the THROWING STUFF GAME. Please stop it. Just stop. I SAID STOP IT! Okay, that’s it. To the cooler.