The Two Child Family

Today I threw a load of laundry into the washing machine, microwaved milk for coffee, checked Facebook to see what a bunch of people all over the world are up to, emailed registration material for a workshop I'm attending next week, plugged in my cellphone to recharge, and downloaded some more tunes for my MP3 (indispensable item for running).

I remember washing clothes in a Hoover Spin-Dryer--you actually had to touch the laundry--no fun when it came to poopy diapers (a particularly memorable laundry episode involved an ill-fitting diaper pail lid and some intrepid maggots). Milk was heated in a pot on the stove--it took forever, usually boiled over and made a sticky mess. If you wanted to talk to friends far away, you needed a rich uncle to pay for long distance charges. Phones were rotary monsters that hung on walls with long cords that tangled and strangled or perched, like gigantic insects, on desktops. As for tunes, there was vinyl--you played records on a stereo that had an incredibly expensive (and fragile) thing called a stylus. Styluses and three-year-olds were a bad (and expensive) combination, as we discovered.

My granddaughter is visiting this weekend. She is still in diapers (although she's at the stage where she mews "poopoo, poopoo" to indicate the need to unload). Her diapers are paper-thin, but can hold a bucketful of material. Her stroller is an all-terrain vehicle, able to roll over boulders and large dogs with ease. It has holders and chambers for every conceivable item--all it needs is a satellite dish and we can invade some recalcitrant desert nation with it.

I remember cloth diapers--again, you had to actually handle these after they were used--rinse them off in the toilet and fling them into a malodorous (no matter how hard you scrubbed or shined) receptacle called "the diaper pail" (see second paragraph for laundry horror tale). Once they were washed and dried, you had to fold them so they were ready to use. I can still see the high towers of folded cotton, leaning precariously, on the baby's dresser. After many washings, no matter how much you bleached them, they acquired an attractive shade of pale grey. You had to keep the gigantic diaper pins sharp by sticking them into a cake of soap. For extravagant pee-ers, double-diapering was the norm. It's a wonder more kids didn't have their hip-joints permanently popped from accommodating such gigantic wads of fabric.

My granddaughter's car seat is a marvel of engineering--I doubt the Apollo astronauts were protected as well as she is in her automotive cradle. She will inhabit this car seat until high school, or thereabouts. Our kids' car seats, while much safer than the primitive device my younger brother endured (some of you may remember these--a folding canvas contraption that hooked over the front seat, positioning the kid at the perfect height for launghing through the windshield--it also had a little steering wheel so the tyke could steer while sailing through the air) were still light-years away from the high-tech cocoons of today.

You can probably guess where this is going--another of those "we never had that stuff when WE were young and look how we turned out" harangue. You're half right--we never DID have stuff like that when our kids were growing up, but boy howdy, would I have loved to have it--all of it, because it's way better stuff.

But stuff aside, we did the best with what we had. The real job was learning to have two kids instead of one. Because Segundo's arrival changed us from a single to two child family. I don't think we were quite prepared for the degree of change this entailed. It's hard to imagine what we have no experience of, so we tend to envision the same thing, only bigger and more of it. But having two kids is completely different from having one, and not just in terms of more (more laundry, more groceries, more housework, more bodily fluids to clean up, more sleep to lose, etc.). While it does entail all those mores, it's also Something Completely Different, as Cleese, Idle, Palin (Michael, NOT Sarah) and the Python gang might say.

As Segundo's personality emerged (along with his face from the fat rolls of birth--although he would hang onto those famous cheeks for years yet), we were gobsmacked by how different two kids could be. Same gene pool, same environment, but two quite distinct personalities. Segundo was serious but quirky, cracking us up with jokes and antics, furious with us for laughing at them. Primero was affectionate and easy-going--amenable to most everything. The two quickly became a unit--Segundo the Pancho to Primero's Cisco Kid.

It was during this time that "Not Me" moved into our house. Not Me became our ghostly third child. Whenever anything went missing, got broken, messed up or wrecked, it was always Not Me who was the transgressor. "Who broke the cup?" "Not Me!" "Who threw all these toys everywhere?" "Not Me!" "Who chucked the cat off the roof to see if she would land on all fours?" "Not Me!" (more about this later).

One of Not Me's more memorable deeds was uncovered by Jack when the toilet refused to flush. No amount of plunging or snaking would work. Jack, cursing and swearing, finally yanked the toilet off its wax ring and fished out a nice, round apple--intact except for one small bite--that was blocking the drain.

Two pairs of eyes stared at him from shin height. Two mouths offered up the culprit--"Not Me! Not Me!"

Not Me moved in with Segundo and stayed for years. He didn't take up much room. He was always there--no matter how many kids were over, Not Me was there as well. Angry Mom who just dodged shrapnel while weeding garden: "Who threw the aerosol can into the burning barrel?" Little Moron Club Chorus: "Not Me! Not Me! Not Me!"

Not Me stalked us. In the car, grocery shopping, camping trips, Pizza Hut, Burger King, MacDonalds--he was always there. It was Not Me who instigated the infamous Helium Balloon caper at Pizza Hut's grand opening--it's amazing how many balloons a couple of small children can suck dry and how annoyingly loud their shriveled vocal chords can get. I believe we are banned still--"lifetime" is a term tossed after us as we exited.

Apparently Not Me had clones living with all our friends as well. I'm not really sure when Not Me left home--I do know I suffered no empty nest syndrome at his leaving. He just seemed to disappear one day. But I can pinpoint his coming--he came with Segundo.

Segundo brought other things as well. As parents, we now each had a kid to wrangle--no more superior numbers. We achieved a detente of sorts--it was short-lived, only lasting until Tercero showed up, but we did have it there for a while.

Segundo introduced Primero to the concept of sharing--toys, attention (positive AND negative), cookies, his room, bacon, etc. The shared room lasted for several years and brought with it many opportunities for learning--UN peacekeepers could learn a lot from observing shared rooms.

Along with sharing, Segundo brought "He's bugging me!" in its various guises. "He's bugging me" outlasted Not Me and was even more exasperating. It could be initiated by the most innocuous things--air: "He's sucking up all my oxygen!", a glance: "He's LOOKING at me!", area: "He's taking up my space!" It always escalated into "Am not!" "Are too!" etc. etc. or "Did not!" "Did too!" etc. etc. ad nauseam ad infinitum.

Segundo's arrival necessitated a strategy we came to call "Blanket Shit"--essentially punishment that didn't differentiate between instigator and instigatee. We discovered early on that it was far too time-consuming to wade through the rhetoric of fault-finding when sanctions needed to be applied swiftly. Blanket Shit meant that both parties suffered the same consequences, regardless of malfeasance. Of course, we didn't call it Blanket Shit in front of the kids, but between ourselves, the term stuck like, well, like you-know-what to a blanket.

As you can see, Segundo's arrival precipitated many things. In particular, it introduced us, as parents, to the concept of strategy. Because even though the number of heads might have matched (two parents--two kids), kids will always win hands-down in the cunning ingenuity department. We had to hone our wits to stay a step or two ahead. Later, as the boys grew (in age as well as number), we were happy to just keep up. Even that became more and more elusive, as the years progressed. We eventually settled for not being left TOO far behind.

Of course, Segundo also brought a sense of teamwork with him. Primero and he learned to operate as a unit, for good as well as ill. They taught each other many virtues--patience, generosity, cooperation--and in so doing, they taught us as well. For being parents of a two child family is never static--having two kids introduces (in spades, as they say) the concept of dynamics--forces and motion, forces IN motion. And the two forces most in motion are the kids.

For us, having two kids hammered home the idea that family is more than the sum of its parts. We quickly realized that the energy required to herd two small children far outweighed what we expected to expend. I'm sure there is a mathematical formula of some kind (one of those exponential ones that rapidly add up to dizzying amounts) that would explain the exact ratio of parental-energy-to-number-of-kids sort of thing). Throw in two completely different personalities to mess up the numbers, and you understand that you are dealing with a complex entity that defies neat analysis or formulas.

Having two kids introduced our children very early to the idea that the world did not revolve around each of them--a good thing in this world where we all need to learn to share. Thus our two-child family became a primal place of learning this important principle: we defer to the other out of love, not fear or threat of punishment (although the enforced "time out" can be very effective when breaking up your more boisterous disagreements).

Segundo brought all that and more when he came home with us. Of course, without Primero, he wouldn't have been able to do so. Each child plays a pivotal role, for we are all pivots and THE pivot, the centre, all at the same time. If we understand that being the pivot, the centre, is a shared phenomenon, then there is room at the centre for us all. Its economy becomes one of generosity rather than scarcity. We can all stand there, side by side. Perhaps such a centre can hold, unlike the one W.B. Yeats so famously wrote about in 1917: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." ("The Second Coming"). But then, W.B. had just witnessed the Easter Rising and the Great War's beginning. Perhaps he'd also glimpsed the rest of the twentieth century's brutal disintegrations. I prefer to think of Seamus Heaney's (another Irish poet) idea of centre from his 1974 poem "Kinship": "This centre holds / And spreads, / Sump and seedbed / A bag of waters."

The centre shifts and changes, as does the world. We are in a very different place than Yeats's 1917, or even Heaney's 1974. I like to think of Heaney's "sump and seedbed" centre seeping its way into the heart of the world, its "bag of waters" watering all those seeds into a blossoming of new sensibility.

Segundo and Primero are all grown up now, as are Tercero and Cuarto. But Segundo and Primero were the first partners in learning about "other". They set the pattern. And while that pattern looked ferocious and savage at times, beneath its hectic exterior, the basic lessons of love and fellowship were being learned.

And not just by the kids.