Good girl, Daddy

Sleep is at a premium in any family house. From birth onwards, parents know well the hot, grainy, sore eyes that feel like they’ve had microwaved sand poured into them, the bone-deep ache that drags you into fits and fights and lack of creativity, the lethargy that dogs your days and saps the colour from your interactions.

There are kids that sleep, and kids that don’t. Just as Bill Gates is reputed to need only a robotic three hours sleep in order to be a supergenius, there are children that refuse to succumb to elephant tranquiliser.

As Doodaddy says over at his blog, if you do one thing right, teach your child how to sleep.

At the moment, ex-hammock (there should be a new periodisation: WH With Hammock, and PH Post Hammock), Tiggy’s set up is this:

• Portable CD player with the soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil show Allegria on sotto voce
• Succession of different blankets
• Succession of different softies
• Gentle hand motion from male parent on mattress near her
• Flips from stomach to back accompanied by the declaration ‘other side, other side’

It’s particularly hard on Patrice, who’s still breastfeeding, because Tiggy still asks to ‘bop’ (her word for breastfeeding) during the night. Patrice has probably averaged 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night for the last two years, which ranks her in the top echelon of amazing human beings as far as I am concerned, and cracks the World Health Organisation’s recommendation for duration of breastfeeding…

Raising a toddler’s an exercise in letting go. Perhaps raising children fullstop is an exercise in letting go (just that when you’re older, you have to finally release that self-indulgent idea that you’ve always cherished that your children are your ticket to immortality by being EXACTLY LIKE YOU BUT BETTER).

(If you love them) you let go of your attachment to what they look like, what you look like, what your house looks like, and what your car looks like. You learn to live with rocks in your doona, fried noodles in the carseat, and tomato sauce on your jeans (plus something else that’s brown and could be alive).

This morning, Tiggy and I fought over clothes again, and I had to do some more letting go. She’s big on the language of transactions and aleatory will, and she’s big on the idiom of feelings.

‘Well, Darling, you have to wear something. It’s cold outside and Daddy doesn’t want you to be uncomfortable.’

‘What you choose? What clothes you choose?’

‘Let me give you a choice. You can wear [holds up one outfit, fetching cargo pants and orange T] this, or [holds up other fetching outfit, composed of cargo pants and rainbow T] this. Which would you like?’

‘Which you like?’

‘I know which one I like. Which one would you like to wear?’

‘Oooo! Pony’s in the washing!’

‘You’re changing the subject, sweetpea. We have to put some clothes on.’

‘Noooo! [throwing herself face first into an unfolded but clean towel] I’m a little bit upset. I can’t wear any clothes.’

Eventually, growing a little tired of the deft non-sequiturs designed to throw me off my train of thought, and the neatly-timed clambering over the washing basket and box of books in the spare room, I resolved to grab her. It’s like holding smoke, wrestling a python and playing with a live fire-hose all at the same time. I tried to slip one foot — just one — into the leg of her cargo pants, but to no avail.

We collapsed, me exasperated, and she with big fat tears brimming from each sad-looking eye.

‘Would you like to wear a dress?’

‘Yes! A ballet dress!’

Ballet is a selling point to Antigone. I reckon that if I started calling much-loathed lasagne ‘Ballet Food of Champions’ then it would be woofed before you could get her a glass of watery apple juice. There’s a whole line of related ideas. Ballet bath, ballet car, ballet washing…

So we settled on red and white striped leggings and (contra the season) a short-sleeved red and white stripy dress, with red and white shoes. Luckily it was a relatively balmy, and even though she had bare arms, I made sure there was a singlet on underneath.

We were so happy that we’d reached a concordance that we belted out ‘Where is Thumbkin?’ together with more gusto than an entire Aussie pub the hour before closing.

So, provisionally, here is a list of things that are mega-irritating to Antigone, 734 days into her eventful life:

• sleeves rolled up
• sleeves rolled down
• jackets
• coats
• tops
• denim
• denim
• denim

Once we’d dressed, we locked and loaded the nappy bag (vegemite sandwiches, carrot sticks, kerclack, kaching), prepped the balance bike, and drove on down to Steamroller Park — the coolest park this side of Disneyland — with its old repainted steamroller and Valhalla-grade play equipment (that’s a funny thought: imagine Vikings in a playground).

We were avoided by a pair of alternatingly distant and micromanaging mums (and a dad whose interaction with his daughter was grunting from afar through grim puffs on a cigarette):

‘So anyway, Sue said that she’s not available this weekend - yes, I am watching darling - but I don’t know if I really want her there anyway, and Andrew’s being so difficult… [marches over] Put that down. Get off that. No, not that way. No, you can’t get up there. That’s yucky. That’s not for you. Come over here. Put that down. Come back. Anyway, as I was saying…’

After which we collected the balance bike and rode down to the ‘castle’ (a sandstone structure that’s crenellated to resemble battlements and is often used as the location for wedding parties) at the bottom of the hill — my castle, according to Tiggy.

‘Shall we drive up the castle’s ramp?’

‘Daddy’s castle, daddy’s castle! Daddy lives here!’

And we saw the coolest bug ever, kind of like a boiled lolly that someone had sucked for a while then dropped in cotton wool.

So it pays to let go sometimes — especially about clothes — even if it’s only so you get to see bugs that look like a hairy Fisherman’s Friend.

On our way to visit our good friends K and Miss P last week for a catchup, Tiggy and I stopped at the Bankstown Aviation Museum. As you do. I hadn’t even known that the museum was there until K and her partner moved out this way and we started travelling past it.

It’s a small parcel of land on the fringes of Bankstown airport, with several sheds and buildings clustering together. Outside, it’s a bit JG Ballard, with a ghostly fleet of decrepit and skeletal aircraft in various states of repair — a few DC3s, a MiG-15 two-seater trainer, and an English Electric Canberra drooping on its suspension, among others. Tail sections are damaged, oil streaks engine nacelles, and engines themselves are absent, leaving tangles of raw cables to swing in the wind. In a hangar are some better kept aircraft, including a Dassault Mirage.

While I definitely had a fascination for this odd place, I thought that Tiggy would enjoy it as well, and she did, running up to the sides of the fuselages as wind whistled through small gaps in flaps and communications wires, knocking on the sheet metal and saying ‘No one in this one!’ or ‘Fix this one with a SCREW!’. And there was something quite extraordinary about watching this tiny girl cavort beside the grass-hemmed, rusting bodies.

So we decide to go outside, Tiggy and I. Afternoon hours have backed up inside us both, and we need time breathing air that’s not house air. I tug on my trainers, and Tiggy wrestles on her favourite polka dot gumboots.

‘Come on, door! Open!’

Tiggy woops as the door swings and crabwalks her way down the stairs on our landing. Outside, Sydney’s turned slightly chill, and there’s a sharp breeze blowing across the construction site opposite our block.

‘It’s a cold day. It’s winter time!’

‘It sure is, sweetpea.

We make our way up the street. The excavator in the construction site is resting its prehistoric bucket, curled up in a dinosaur sleep.

‘The exkapator’s not working!’

‘No, it’s having a rest. The men who were using it today have gone home. Hey, Tiggy, where shall we go?’

‘To the Gamesmen, and see Link?’

Since Tiggy was a floppy-armed, beanied baby who used to accompany me around the streets of Mortdale in our Ergo sling, we’ve been in to visit the Gamesmen to buy anime and games. They’re a local video games place, part of a run of stores just up on the main road that led me to think, upon moving to the area, that at least we had the essentials covered: there’s a liquor store, a Domino’s pizza joint, and the Gamesmen. Hey, I was much younger then, and beer, pizza and Killzone was much more of a holy trifecta than it is now.

Inside the Gamesmen is a lifesize statue of the Nintendo character, Link. He’s got manga-boy blond bangs, a blue earring, is holding aloft a powerful-looking fantasy sword with a blue hilt, and bears up a shield as if to ward off a blow. He’s the proud centrepiece of the store, the heart of shelf upon shelf of cardboard and plastic game boxes, posters of Mario and tough-looking commandoes with automatic weapons.

If it were possible to speak of Tiggy having a crush, Link would be it.

So we make our way slowly up the street, pausing to uproot dandelions and daisies, replacing fallen gumnuts in trees, replanting sticks in the ground so that they can grow up to be big strong trees, and being good citizens with rubbish.

When we get near the traffic lights, Tiggy throws her arms up at me.

‘I CARRY you!’

I sweep her up to her safe vantage point; my hip.

The Gamesmen’s motion-activated doors slide open, and we greet the staff. When we reach Link, Tiggy wriggles down and she runs up to touch his base.

‘Standing on a green rock! And there’s a sword. And a shield. Look!’

Part of me is a little terrified that if a Nintendo Australia rep were standing there beside us, their heart would be beating faster in excitement. Link’s in the kid’s head. But then part of me doesn’t mind, either, because it’s also innocent enough, and she could easily have been describing a dinosaur statue if one existed round the corner from us and she’d seen it multiple times since she was little.

But it’s not a dinosaur. It’s Link, and she loves him.

Antigone’s current fave toys are her wooden blocks, bought and revealed to her a year too early. But they’re making a comeback, and she’s acquiring some fantastic skills - dexterity and fine motor skills, as well as resilience and persistence. And she makes a great foundation. Which is colour-coded, I might add.

Playing with blocks is also a perfect opportunity to capture Tiggy’s ‘camera smile’. If you ask her to smile for the camera, she either pokes her tongue out or grimaces as if she were passing a monster scat.

Here’s monster scat-face while climbing down the stairs in gumboots.

My apologies, first of all, if you googled the title of this post looking for something else instead. You’ll have to look elsewhere…

What I really wanted to talk about is the whole adults demanding affection from kids thing. It often interests me how adults relate physically to children - particularly relatives, and how their perceived (pre-existing) adult relationships should be acknowledged bodily by little people (as in kids, not leprechauns).

Some people demand hugs and kisses from children, often if they haven’t seen them in a while. Which is perfectly understandable! There’s the aunt who chases her nephew down to bear hug him from behind, the uncle who makes his nephew come and shake his hand, the grandmother who insists on pressing her granddaughter into a suffocating hug irrespective of the little girl’s moue of reluctance.

The funny thing is, and despite having the best intentions (’I haven’t seen you in a while and I’m desperate to reconnect with you’) forcing children into physical affection that they don’t want to spontaneously engage in for themselves breaks down their resistance and self-will. It tells them that their opinions about their own body won’t be respected. And self-will and determination has to be an important part of recognising that your body is your own, and that you have the right to choose who touches it and how, and perhaps avoiding adults whose intentions are much less benign.

Often, when Tiggy hurts herself, my instinctive reaction is to comfort her with a soft pat on the back or stroke on her head. But sometimes when I do that, she tells me not to pat her or stroke her, and I have to respect that. Have you ever had anyone try and ask you whether you’re ok when you’ve just stubbed your bare toe on a cold winter’s morning?

Just say no, kids!

For a long time, feminist theory has talked about the presence/absence thing, and how it operates in society, or is the basis for a hierarchy of power. Y’know, a metaphysics based on having or possessing ‘it’ or not having or possessing ‘it’ (and by ‘it’, I am being coy. It’s the phallus, doncha know) . By extension, the absence/presence thang plays into all sorts of other subjects of concern to those interested in gender: history, labour, public life, literature…

Related to the absence/presence thang is the idea of the depth model of gender - that one gender has substance and the other surface - or, to put it more simply, men do things in the world; they work with stuff, build things, manipulate things, construct, devise, plan, make - and women are passive; they look good, invest a lot of time in ‘immaterial’ things, in surface and image (hence ‘Superflat’). They’re the stereotypes, at least, and the ones that feminism has been at work dismantling. But stereotypes hold a lot of sway…

I used to be fascinated in these notions, and the binary gender split and their attendant values in a superficial, theoretical way, but now I have to say that it’s taking on an immediacy that it didn’t have before, principally because I can see how it’s shaping a person. That’s Tiggy. Der.

Walk into any discount department store: Big W, K-Mart, Target or Walmart. What does the pink toy ghetto tell our girls? Sashay down the aisles and take it all in, and really think about it: there’s a dizzying surfeit of pink, purple and silver. Everything is tagged ‘princess’, ‘fairy’ or ‘ballerina’ - and the uber-products are the ones with all three words. It’s a universe of surface, a symbolic order that is predicated on dressing up, performing, looking a certain way. And that’s the hothouse for a lifelong obsession with appearance.

I’ve been told at playgroup that dress-ups are for girls. That the blocks and lego are for boys. And Tiggy does love to dress up. But that shouldn’t be at the expense of a host of other activities.

What can be done when a whole culture functions this way? Where’s the exit? Or should I just sigh and get on with it?

For years, many parents’ answer to children’s undesirable behaviour was a smack, strike or blow with an implement. That, so the former thinking went, would teach them to associate pain with bad behaviour and give rise to a Pavlovian response to the thought of doing something ‘naughty’. Thinking of doing something bad = involuntary thought/remembered sensation of physical anguish = avoidance.

I have major problems with using physical violence to solve any problem, let alone the ‘problem’ of how to guide a child away from ‘bad’ behaviour towards ‘good’ behaviour (quite aside from the entirely subjective and context-dependent question of what is necessarily good or bad - something that can change drastically from culture to culture and historical period to historical period. With perhaps the exception of doing the nasty with goats. That’s usually a taboo wherever you go. Oh, and siblings… well, let’s just leave it there)* - although there does seem to be a case for it in very specific situations, such as those argued for under the Doctrine of Double Effect. But as far as I can see, if using violence to discipline does achieve its aims - reducing undesirable behaviour - then its corollary is also to engender a culture of violence, and establish a clear hierarchy based on who has the greatest capacity to wield force and do damage. Think of old-style private boarding schools, military academies, prisons, and other heavily hierarchised confined systems where behaviour is strictly controlled.**

And there are so many other ways to achieve the same effect (which is really compliance from your kids, if you think about it)- usually all of which involve time, patience and effort, which is hard for a lot of people. The strategies would differ depending on the age of the child - distraction with something shiny doesn’t cut it with a five-year-old (well, unless it’s electronic, made by Apple and retails at over 200 bucks), but they almost all involve empathy, reciprocity and understanding. I find that if I really want Tiggy to pay attention to me, getting down to her level - where I can look her in the eye - and dropping my voice so that she has to strain to listen to me works a treat.

I am not perfect. Sometimes I am so frustrated that I want to lash out, but that’s more to do with me than Antigone. I never have, and I hope I never will.

* And I’m not insisting on a slippery antinomian moral relativism where ‘there is no good or evil’, just trying to keep the differences of other cultures in play as I submit to the values and strictures of my own society. In other words, a moral code that’s quite solid but blurs a bit at the edges. Tricky to do, that.

** And don’t try to sell me that ’smacking aint violence’ shtick. Coz I aint buyin’. Violence has a host of meanings, all of which have to do with force and a desired effect, from destruction and damage to coercion. Consider state-sanctioned force, always employed for a certain effect, from coercion and compliance to submission.

Since I was a little boy, I have been fascinated with aircraft, mostly aircraft from WWI and WWII. When I was younger, I built nerdily-painted plastic model aircraft - P-51 Mustangs and Focke Wulf FW-190s - and read W.E. Johns’ Biggles stories, replete with stiff upper lips, engine coolant, and the satisfying comfort that natives knew their place.

Not that I’ve tried to foist it on her, but Tiggy quite likes aircraft too. And if my daughter wanted to be a pilot, astronaut or engineer, she’d have my blessing.

And there’s a long history of women in aviation, from the much-feared Nachthexen (well, among the Germans, anyway, for whom anything that menstruated and flew was self-evidently diabolical and quite probably dangerous); Russian all-female biplane bomber crew who terrorised the German army along the Eastern Front during WWII, to Amelia Earhart, the amazing navigator and long-distance flier Amy Johnson and Pauline Gower, who set up the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain during WWII.

But best of all? I recently discovered that W.E. Johns contributed as much to the damaging of young women as young men with a yearning for the skies in a series of novels for girls, featuring the dashing pluck of that irrepressible heroine, Joan ‘Worrals‘ Worralson. Now if only I can find them for Tiggy to read…