Genre

Friday, February 19, 2010

Reminiscence: The Children 1

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1

With A----- pregnant for the first time, naturally we began to think about children’s names. We agreed on several points:

• our children’s names would reflect our families’ Irish and English heritage

• we would always call them by their real names and not with well-intentioned but generic names (like Sugar, Dear, Cutie, Sweetie)

and their names would not be easy to make into nicknames (like Robert, William, Elizabeth, Katherine).

Several years later, the second child - son W----- - was not feeling well. I was trying to comfort him while heating something up in the kitchen. I picked him up and held him, hugged him. He was a toddler, so after a few minutes he began to feel heavy. I put him on the kitchen counter, still holding him tightly.

After a minute, I looked him lovingly in the eye. “You’ll feel better soon,
W-----,” I said.

He suddenly threw up, right in my face.

I did not hit him. I tried my best to not even flinch, but to continue looking at him lovingly. I asked sweetly, “Feel a little better now, honey?”

In his most innocent, piteous little voice, he said, “I don’t like to be called ‘Honey.’”

2

While W----- was still an infant, he slept in a crib in his own room, next to ours. Our daughter L------ - who was 20 months older - had her room a few steps away down the hall. We had worked hard to make her feel good about a new baby’s arrival, and she did.

Every morning, for instance, when she would first wake up (and often before her parents were stirring), L------ would go into W-----’s room and climb up into his crib to murmur quietly to him in a few minutes they had to themselves.

One morning, when A----- went in, she found L----- clambering back down from the crib; she had a pained look on her face. Before A----- could even ask her the trouble, she said: “I don’t like that poop in my smell.”

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