Today in the fast food restaurant I took Sophie off to the bathroom and thought with a sigh of how she loves to lock herself into rooms and refuse to open, just to fuck with your head. But clearly her dignity demands that I not go into the bathroom with her! I managed to extract her by knocking and whining loudly, trying to channel her older sister, "Come ON! I have to go, SO BAD!" Which was a lie just to avoid getting into the power game she loves where adults beg and threaten her to unlock the door.
As I was standing outside the door I thought of how some people I know would have been wildly uncomfortable taking a kid to the bathroom... And honestly... at first I was kind of tenative about it, i mean, other people's children, eep! Now it's no biggie.
Then I thought of a funny memory I have of being 5, on an xmas visit, and in the Smithsonian with my parents and my dad's family. We split up so that I was with my dad and all of my uncles. This was so great! No longer weighed down by what I snottily thought of as the boringness of my mom and baby sister. Why wasn't she enthusiastic? Didn't she care about Science? Why did she want to just sit down all the time and stare into space? Why was she so dumb? (Needless to say.. now I understand... and wish I could take back every snottiness of my younger self. Cripes! My poor mom had surely just endured a multi-hour car ride with a 6 month old baby and all of her annoying in-laws. Then, an enormous museum. Sheer hell.) But meanwhile I was in heaven since my uncles were playful hippies and very into messing about with the exhibits, goofing around.
Then, I had to go to the bathroom. This became a scene of 3 men and an 8 year old boy (the youngest uncle), and a midget in flared pink polyester pants standing awkwardly in front of a standard dual set of bathroom entrances. "What do we do? Do we take her in the men's room? Do we go in the women's room? Can you hold it till we get back to Mom?" ***OUTRAGE*** I'm five years old! I can go to the bathroom by myself!
I was describing to Jo in the fast food place how at that moment in 1974 I had this clarity of vision. I was struck by sudden self-awareness - I saw us all standing there in a ridiculous tableaux, even if I didn't know the word "tableaux" - that I was indeed in the eyes of the world, a tiny girl-child instead of a giant, speaking, sponge-like brain-intake system. That the men were paralyzed by many things - not knowing me well enough to know if I could wipe my own ass - afraid of some mysterious kind of unspeakable harm that might happen to me in a bathroom alone - what if she goes into the gate to women's country and doesn't come out, who do we send to get her - and whatever we do, will the women yell at us for it later as the wrong decision? And I was dumbfounded by the thought that my own dad had never thought about my going to the bathroom before, long enough to know that I had been doing so for quite some time... Them, the men who had just been talking to me about Science almost as if I had been a grownup! And that they were incompetent bewildered fools when it came to normal everyday taking-care-of-kids life! Oh, how the mighty fell from grace!
I try to keep this sort of memory to the forefront when I am around kids! Now they're old enough that I have very solid memories of being that same age.
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