Somewhere about 25 minutes into “It’s A Wonderful Life” Clara turned to me and politely asked, “When are the boy’s parents going to leave him home alone?”
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
I drew in a breath and she turned with a wink,
“Your new sweater is here, and I hope you like pink!”
Then she dashed up the chimney, with an echoing cheer,
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good year!”
There is a magical age somewhere between the stages of infant and toddler where a child’s brain is wonderfully pliable. Their mind has found ways to control the basic motor functions of the arms, legs, and mouth, but it lacks the complexity to know when and how to control these functions properly. This means they are quite vulnerable to hackers which can easily bypass the unit’s command systems and override the controls without triggering any security mechanisms or having to explain their way around toddler firewalls. The hackers can simply log into the main interface and issue commands directly. It’s really quite simple. I have created the following “How To…” guide for any amateur parents out there that might want to dabble with me in the ancient art of baby hacking.
There are, of course, many ways to break into such an unsecure brain network. But the easiest way I have found after three children is as follows: Lift the child off the ground so their appendages are dangling loosely at their sides. This eliminates any “noise” associated with tactile interaction which may interfere with your commands. Once the child stops kicking its legs, place your mouth tight up against their ear and very quietly say the child’s name. The unit’s name is sort of like a password for accessing their inner mind. The child should go into command prompt mode when it hears it name. You will know you are in the correct mode when the child’s eyes go out of focus and their mouth slackens. There may even be drooling. If you encounter drool it means you have been granted full admin privileges over all critical system.
When you are sure the unit is receiving data through the correct port you may then input your desired command. Make sure you choose something simple. Remember, you are hacking into a device that is less sophisticated than a TI calculator. Your options are limited. My preferred command is a noise. I choose “Bababababa…”. Whisper this softly into their ear at distant, almost inaudible, volume. I like to trail off at the end, just for effect.
At this point patience is very important. Your child has less than 128kb of RAM, and its operating system is busy running tons of bloatware that came preinstalled. So, it could take up to a minute for the desired command to fully process. But what you should find is that the next control command that the brain sends to the child’s body will match that of your secret input. Their lips will begin to move as they continue to stare into the distance and they will softly repeat, “Bababababa…”.
Success! Feel free to swing them in circles and blow a few raspberries on their belly to clear their memory core before attempting to do it again.
If you mess up and input too much data you run the risk of overloading the child’s processor and locking them up completely. If this happens, don’t panic, just set the child down, wait for them to cool off and then pick them up and try again in a few minutes. It is nearly impossible to damage the unit using this method of remote access, but you as a user may be harmed if the child’s fingernails have not been trimmed recently.
I have had success hacking into my son Gideon’s brain for the past few months. Unfortunately, although it has been worth it, the effort has backfired in my case. My boy now crawls frantically through the house yelling for me by name. “Baba!” he screams on his way down the stairs to greet me when I get home from work. “Baba!” he yells when he sees me from across the room, struggling to get down from his mother’s arms. I pick him up in public and he happily pats me on the face and then looks around the room and introduces me to his friends, “Baba.”
“No.” I tell him firmly. “I was joking about Baba. My name is Daddy.” He watches me with his mouth wide open in a smile. “Call me D-AAA-DDY.”
He watches my mouth, grinning at the sound of my voice, and says, “Bababababa…”
*Sigh* Perhaps this is what I deserve.
The young detective strode confidently into the hallway holding a small notepad and a mechanical pencil. She saw me sitting on the floor where I had recently finished adjusting her sister’s pants. Wrestling with the little girl had worn me out to the point that I had yet to find the strength to stand up again.
“Ah. Hello Sir!” the new arrival said as she bent over me. “Do you have a mystery you would like me to solve?”
I leaned my head back against the wall and glanced around with my eyes while she tapped on her tablet with her pencil.
“Okay, Clara.” I said finally deciding to play along. “Yes. I would like to know about this wadded up ball of packaging tape that is sitting on the floor of my bedroom hallway.”
She knelt down and examined the ball of tape and made a humming sound. “This is a mystery.” she agreed.
And then she set to work. “Okay. We need to answer the questions of Who, What, When, Where and Why.” She said this to herself as she rolled the roll upside down and began peeling it apart.
I watched her intently as she recreated the possible scenarios in her mind. She slowly traced a line across the floor with her eyes, walked into the adjacent nursery and turned on the lights. She looked around the room and made a small note on her pad of paper.
“I think it came off of this box over her.” She announced to me, crossing the room. “Whoever did it probably peeled the tape off of this, because the paper on the tape is the same color.” She walked a circle around the box. “Mom got this box yesterday, so they must have done it last night before you got home from work.” She made another note.
I was truly impressed so far.
Tapping the pencil against her cheek she looked from the box to the hallway several times. “And I think after peeling the tape off, the person probably used the tape to attack her sister. She probably chased her around the room over there and tried to stick the tape in her hair.” With this she looked at me down the tip of her nose and made another note on her pad with an angry flourish.
I was amazed by her deductive reasoning. “Wow, you have determined all of that just by looking at the ball of tape and looking there in the nursery?”
She walked back to the hallway and looked at the ball. “Yes.” She said absentmindedly and then made a final note in her tablet while saying, “And it’s a ball because they threw it at their sister while they ran to get their mom. This is where it landed.” She sat next to the ball and poked it with her pencil.
“Huh.” I shifted to a kneeling position next to her. “So, detective, who was this culprit, so that they can be brought to justice?”
After a moments hesitation she handed me the pad of paper. The chilling twist of fact stabbed into my spine as I read her notes. Scrawled across the page in large upper case letters was a single word: “CLARA”. The detective had not been solving the crime after all. They had been confessing to it.
“Here. Touch this.” I opened my eyes to see a set of blurry fingers thrust at my nose. I flinched into the crack in the couch where I was laying.
“Lydia! Hold on. Stop. Get your fingers out of my face please.”
There was a brief struggle. A flailing of arms in the dark. Lydia backed away, but continued.
“Touch it!” She said again. “Touch it and you will be clean all over!”
I blinked around the room. Had I fallen asleep and woken up in some kind of weird prophetic vision? Was this the throne room of God, because it really just looked like my living room.
“Touch it and be clean, Daddy!” She lunged at me again, but I held her at arms length.
“No. I’m not going to touch…” I tried to focus on the object in her fingers. A white goo coated the ends of her fingers. “…that. What is that even?”
She leaned in, rolled her eyes back to look at the ceiling and whispered towards my ear, “It’s. just. bubble gum.”
“What? No. Get that away from me and wash it off your hands.”
“But it’s magic bubble gum! Touch it and be clean all over.”
“No. Touching that will do the exact opposite of making you clean all over. Go wash it off in the bathroom and do not touch anything on the way there.”
Situations like this happen pretty much every 30 seconds in our house.
I was still a teenager when I accidentally grew a mustache. I was in my first semester of college, living in the dorms, scraping my life out of the bottom of a tin soup can. Out of pure neglect, I went a week or two without shaving and the next thing I knew I had a mustache. I surprised myself one day when I finally looked in a mirror. I had become a monster. I was a post apocalyptic scavenger of the wastes. A ragged outlaw struggling to survive.
I decided to keep it. It just made sense. At the time I was trying to hide from the world. I wanted to watch it from a safe distance like a spy sent to observe a foreign country he didn’t completely understand. I found the world confusing and frightening. And a beard and mustache seemed like an efficient way to shield myself from it. It was my newspaper with a pair of holes cut in it. The painting with the eyes that followed people while they walked down the hallway. I became invisible.
I hid like this for several years before slowly mingling with society in a more acceptable way. But the mustache never left. It had been too long. I was somehow trapped behind it like a door I had locked and the forgotten where the key was. I didn’t hate it, but 15 years later it was still a regular reminder to me of the person I used to be. A boy, hiding in a room, avoiding eye contact with the world.
I called the girls in to watch the night that I shaved it off. The three of us cringed in grotesque amazement as I slowly removed the fur of the beast and revealed the soft pink skin hiding below. I shrugged off my aged face and emerged from my cocoon a changed person, a stronger person, a more deliberate person. The kind of person that does hard things because he chooses to. A person that faces the world without fear and has no need to hide from anything. I turned and smiled at my children and they forced a pair of smiles in return.
“When is it going to be back again?” Clara asked when she felt the appropriate amount of time had passed.
“What do you mean?” I asked, rubbing my cheek and examining my chin in the mirror.
“I mean,” She said, “When are you going to be a man again?”
The room was silent for a few moments. The words bounced around inside the bathroom and were slowly eaten by the buzzing light over head.
“A man?” I knelt down in front of her. “Kid, you only just met one.”
Clara is very concerned about her dance recital on Friday evening. It is becoming a constant source of anxiety for her. The least of her concerns are the usual fears of stage fright and the inability to do the dance steps she has been practicing in class (which seem to consist mainly of stepping forward and backward on cue without looking at her teacher.)
No, her main trepidation is in her inability to choose who she is going to point at. Apparently, there is a time in the program when the children are going to be asked to point at someone in the audience that is special to them. And the poor little girl doesn’t know if she should point at me or mom, or Lydia or Gideon. Gran or Papa? Grandma or Granddaddy? Uncle Isaac or Adam? All of these special people that are planning to come to her performance and she has to pick only one of them to be considered special to her. It is impossible.
She tried to convince me the other day that we should all sit in a long row behind each other so she can just point in a line at all of us at once. I told her that was probably not possible. So, she suggested we sit as a group and maybe she can just move her finger around in a circle and get all of us at once. “Maybe,” I told her.
Then I caught her standing downstairs last night practicing a two handed quick draw. When I asked what she was doing she explained that she was practicing in case people she cared about sit on opposite sides of the room from each other. She held still for a few seconds and then quickly drew her hands out to point to the left and right corners of the room. She smiled hesitantly and looked to me for approval. I raised an eyebrow, and motioned for her come and sit on my lap.
“I wish only one of you would come to watch. Then it would be much easier to choose.” She said finally.
I hugged her. “But that probably isn’t going to happen.” I said, “And do you know why?”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because when we are asked to point at someone that is special to us, we all want to be there so we can point at you.” I poked her in the chest and she smiled. And then I tickled her, because that is the best way I have found to clear the mind of a child.
Nothing can really prepare you for the depth and suddenness of a child’s mind. It’s like living in a dunk tank, sitting on a narrow shelf that can disappear at any moment. One second your driving circles around the Walmart parking lot waiting for your wife on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and then the next, you are an Alka-Seltzer pill bubbling at the bottom of a lukewarm glass of water. Such is the life of a father.
I thought they were all sleeping in the back seat when I rounded the corner for the fifth time in my continual circuit around the building. A crowd of shoppers crossed in front of us, coats and hats pulled tight as a gust of wind streaked across the parking lot. Our van rocked softly. An eddy of trash swirled up in the corner of an alcove and was scattered along the wall as we drove on.
“Daddy.” My daughter’s voice came from the back seat. “The way the wind is blowing that plastic bag across the parking lot reminds me of the time Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.”
My brain bagan to fizz. “What?” I asked.
“The naked people.” She responded softly.
Distracted by the thought I had to brake suddenly as another family of shoppers crossed in front of me. “Clara, I know who Adam and Eve were, but what do they have to do with a plastic bag?” I looked in the rear-view mirror, but the child had already drifted back to sleep, smuggling her secret riddles along with her. My brain bubbled itself to powder in an attempt to find some sort of connection, but my mind vanished before an answer could be found.
Clara walked up this evening while I was playing a game. She arrived right at the moment when the character in the game was having to fighting off an army of giant spiders.
“Oh, Clara, maybe you shouldn’t watch this right now. I don’t want you to get scared and have nightmares or something.” I paused the game.
“Dad,” she said. “Spiders aren’t scary. I only have nightmares when Lydia sleeps in my bed and won’t stop talking about rainbows.”
I turned the game off and turned to face the little girl. “Okay, I give up. Why would rainbows give you nightmares?”
She looked at the wall and sighed deeply. “Because rainbows reminds me of the rainbow popsicles you gave us that one time, and I didn’t like those popsicles, at all.”
I leaned in closer and held her shoulders gently. “Clara, the only reason you didn’t like the popsicles was because you were sick that day. Nothing tastes good when you are sick. And anyway, ‘Rainbows’ happens to be your little sister’s favorite color. So, you should probably get used to her talking about rainbows.”
The little girl scrunched her face into a knot and closed her eyes tightly. “Dad, can we please stop talking about Rainbows? I think I’m going to have nightmares now.”
I walked into the room to find Clara and Lydia sitting in the middle of the floor huddled around something with their backs to me. The two of them were involved in some sort of quiet disagreement. As I entered, Clara turned and said, “Oh good. Daddy, Can you eat rabbits?”
I hesitated for a moment, surprised by the question. “What do you mean?”
I mean, “Is it possible to eat a rabbit?”
I sat down in a chair across from them and leaned forward. “Oh, then yeah. You can eat rabbits.”
“I knew it!” She said triumphantly. Then she lifted a book above her head and showed me the page they were looking at. “Then why is HE-” She pointed to the picture of a kitten sitting on a stack of hay “-not eating HIM?” she pointed to a fluffy baby rabbit sitting next to him staring up at the moon. She quickly closed the cover of the book and tossed it aside.
So, nice try writer of the children’s book ‘By The Light of the Silvery Moon’. Maybe next time you should do a little bit more research.
Where Are We Here? 