Capitulate Now: Issue 27
Counterfactual
One night, Ryan changes Gordon's diaper and sets him down on the floor. As soon as his feet touch the rug he starts coughing, a cough that is first a regular, gravelly, loose cough and then suddenly an uncanny high animal bark. We (Ryan and I) eye one another. It is 7:00, the lead up to bedtime for both kids, but as Gordon stumbles toward the hallway in his pjs, screaming like a circus seal, I can feel the two of us silently let go of the expectation that he will be asleep anytime soon.
An hour or so later I carry Gordon out to the front porch. This particular tactic -- taking a croupy child outside, to let the cool night air work some mysterious cleansing magic on their airway -- has been buried in my brain, acorn-like, for literal years now, and it is a small thrill to finally dig it up and make use of it. He's drowsy when I first settle into a chair with him on my lap, but the neighborhood feral cat can be seen poking around across the street, and this perks him up. "Cat," he mumbles, pointing a finger. "Ova dere. Black cat ova dere. Where cat go." Then, more stimulation: A police helicopter arrives overhead and begins making wide arcs over our neighborhood, its searchlight blazing over the trees and houses. I make a mental note to check NextDoor later to find out what or who they're looking for, but I never will get around to it. We sit there under the cloudy, dark skies, murmuring to each other about the cat, and the helicopter. He's in a rare state of consciousness, alert but physically inert, his body draped heavy across my lap, his cheek (still plump and babyish, truly we are living on borrowed time) resting against my collarbone.
I wake up the next morning when Gordon crashes into my side of the bed. I had been sleeping on my side at the edge of the mattress, so when I open my eyes his face is in comic, eerie proximity to mine. Eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose, warm breath not my own on my mouth. "HI MARHM" he says, waving a banana. I look at the clock -- past seven! I have been gifted an extra 30 minutes of sleep by my partner, who walks into the room and says: "Bad news. Gordon is saying 'helicopter.'"
(For months he'd been calling them 'helop,' and we had all incorporated it into the family vocabulary, e.g. Look, Gordon, there's a helop; Mom, Gordon won't share the helop with me)
I look back at Gordon, his mouth overflowing with banana. "Is this true?" I ask. "Helicopter?" He smiles the smile of a true and thorough stinker and says all four syllables of the word.
With Gus, developments like this -- sudden advancements, linguistic or otherwise, that seem to rocket them out of babyhood and yourself toward your cold, lonely grave -- felt tragic, unfair. They should feel even worse with Gordon, the Probably Last Baby (???), but instead, I close my eyes for a second and perform a long, mental shrug. Farewell, helop, I think, shutting that particular door behind me. My eyes still closed, I ask Gordon for a bite of his banana. "No," he says, loud and clear, then bark-coughs in my face.
So: No daycare. I check my work calendar but there is not actually a question about who will stay home with Gordon today -- Ryan has just started a new job and has already "worked" from home one day in the last week to tag-team with me on sick child care, and I'm the one with the work-from-home gig with basically no supervision who sometimes finds herself in a crunch or on a deadline but who is certainly not in that position today. Really the only question is whether I will commit to half-assedly monitoring my email all day, or whether I'll use a day of PTO so I can just watch TV at naptime, unperturbed.
The other question is how I feel about:
finding myself, once again, to be the default parent for things like this;
how our division of labor on this front is a gender wars op-ed sprung to life;
how it's assumed I will be the one to stay home with the kids unless I have a meeting that I "can't miss;"
how "can't miss" is subjective and while I am willing to "miss" things in part because I choose to define them as "missable" and I do believe that all white collar workers with some job security, men especially, could stand to claw back some of our collective humanity from the workplace and start defining more calls and meetings and deadlines as "missable," it is also an undeniable, objective reality that Ryan has more to accomplish during the workday than I do;
how I would never in one million years trade this job for another one just to have the opportunity to say, in this situation, that I can't stay home with Gordon today either because I have a really busy day.
As I think about what Gordon and I will do -- I'll use PTO, I'll email my boss, I'll set up auto replies, it's a beautiful fall Friday in DC and Gordon isn't so sick that we can't go to the coffee shop and the playground and honestly this won't impact my projects right now, I'll get through my to do list on Monday just fine -- I decide that the answer to these questions, for today at least, is: Could be worse.
Later that day, as I'm pushing the stroller up a hill, another buried acorn sprouts forth and I remember reading somewhere (A peer reviewed scholarly article in grad school? A stray BabyCenter comment?) that travel, or otherwise novel experiences, are thought to produce developmental leaps in children, and this makes me wonder -- were those fifteen strange, unprecedented minutes on the porch long after bedtime, watching the police search our neighborhood from the air, responsible for prodding Gordon's brain into noticing the difference between "helop" and "helicopter?"
Then I spend a few more minutes sweating in the autumn sunshine, Gordon dozing as I roll him toward the fast casual sandwich chain I have decided we deserve to have lunch at, trying to remember if the Noticing Hypothesis was something that only applied to second language acquisition or if it was a first language acquisition thing, too, then trying to remember if I was made to learn about this theory because it was old and still in use or because it was old and discredited, then I just think about the mundane wildness of it, the idea that people learning a language truly are not ready to notice certain mistakes until, mysteriously, they are, and I wonder how many times my Mongolian coworkers must have gently repeated my words back at me but in the correct order and using the correct case and pronunciation, and how many of these times I must have nodded and said "za," unaware that they had just used a gentle error correction technique that I myself had used on my own students and that I had discussed the efficacy of in my graduate seminars, and finally, I wondered about this abandoned career of mine, which I barely allowed to totter up on its wet legs before cutting it down, because I thought I could see all of the professional possibilities within the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages universe and the one outcome most likely for me -- finding myself adjuncting at community colleges as an ESL instructor, hustling between my TOEFL prep class at one campus to my Pre-Academic Writing class at another, being paid so little and working outside of class so much as to be effectively earning $2 an hour, being eaten alive by resentment and trying not to lose my cool at the classrooms full of bored Saudi kids but also kissing enough ass so that I could maybe, someday, be made a program administrator and be severely underpaid and overworked from behind a single desk at least, from 9 to 5 every day -- seemed like something I, personally, should avoid, sunk costs be damned, and I was right, it's likely that I have never been more right about anything in my life, and I wonder whether either of my kids will ever have a desire to enter a field like teaching or nursing or social work, and if so whether I will keep my mouth shut or whether I will warn them to be shrewd about it, because this country believes anyone in the business of helping people deserves to have their quality of life destroyed.
I also wonder if I would trade those moments on the porch for one more day of helop.