wee ones

I have moments, usually in the early morning, when I am possessed with a timid glee. Often, right after waking, my hand will casually brush against my belly; flat on my back in bed, a rock-hard lump readily jumps up to greet my unsuspecting fingers, giving me a thrill. As soon as I stand up, it vanishes into the soft abyss of the typical belly of a gourmand, but the mild, pleasant shock remains.

Uncaring as to whether I adopted or personally grew one, I've wanted (desperately) to have a child all of my life, but have had a rather rough go making this dream a reality. Until my first doctor's appointment at 10 weeks, I could not (and would not) wrap my mind around what was happening. Since then, despite two ultrasounds and an ever-so-slowly expanding mid-line, the experience has been punctuated with moments of disbelief.

But when these cyclones of tentative excitement and supernatural levels of curiosity possess me, any nagging fear is swallowed whole. Usually, the bitter scenarios my dark mind likes to throw out are replaced by very simple memories that make my heart swell (and almost burst): rubbing sunscreen on fat little arms before going out into the hot sun, blowing bubbles into music-filled air with tiny tots dancing all around my feet, gently stroking a small back as a child drifts off into midday dream land.

Having worked with little children for most of my adult life, I've familiarized myself with a wide-range of personalities and have been granted a rather intimate view into exactly where nature and nurture begin and end. Spoiler: nature is responsible for an awful lot. My own child is a mystery to me; all that my influence (and my much-more-grounded love's) will do, ideally, is give them a sense of calm, security, confidence, and curiosity. What they end up curious about and how they express themselves in their (much-hoped-for) self-awareness and strength is totally their thing. One could shudder with equal amounts of dread and excitement - but of course, in the reality of this moment, the dread is pretty much absent. I'm a bit prone to self-sabotage (a major influence of "The Twelfth House"), but I don't think I could pour my energy into deliberately creating new life unless I believed (with those rose colored glasses), that they were going to be among the most incredible people I've ever known.

On the youth front, there's some stiff competition. With nothing to really go on in imagining my future charge, I spend lazy moments musing over some of my favorite freshly-incarnated souls. Though countless wee ones have found their way into my heart, and there are many (such as "the healer," "the rock star," "the magical fairy" and "the genius" to name a few) that I wonder about almost daily, mostly I think about members of my very favorite class, a group of wobblers-cum-toddlers at a large but lovely center in Portland, Oregon:

AR - This little girl was a true artist, a somewhat neurotic Libra after my own heart. Before she was two years old, she would hold her face within a hair's width of her pen (or crayon) and painstakingly produce perfect spirals on the class posters - beautiful, colorful works reminiscent of fireworks that the other children would scribble on and splatter with paint like Jackson Pollock. AR would personally give these joint-projects a distinctly psychedelic touch with her spirals. She possessed an intensity that was beyond her free and relaxed parents - she suffered chronic constipation as a natural result of demanding perfection in all things she did, and often collapsed in fits if she failed to live up to her own expectations. For her, I felt a mixture of pity and admiration.

AV - One of a small handful of "linguistic geniuses" I've been blessed with knowing, a Capricorn as most of them have been (for reasons open to speculation). She was deliberate and centered and, like other such prodigies, hardly like a child at all. At only a year and half, one could carry on conversations with her. A favorite memory of AV begins with the indiscretion of us teachers complaining at work about how we never got raises. AV mistook the word for "raisins." We tried to explain the difference, but it just compounded the situation; she began to demand raisins with an out-of-character confusion and ever-increasing volume until, quite suddenly, the school cook appeared at the door with a bowl full of them. "I heard someone wanted raisins?" A more heartbreaking memory involves her chastising me for having abandoned her upon my return from a two-month trip to Peru.

E - This little boy is one reason I am excited to be, at the very least, expecting a Leo. He was the most well-controlled "wild child" I've ever known - perfectly capable of following instructions, yet giving way to nothing short of acrobatics as soon as he was given the opportunity. Literally. Before turning two, he learned quite by accident that he could stand on his hands, and even do flips. It was a bizarre practice to behold. I imagined that he'd been a circus ringleader in a previous life; if he had understood that concept I'm sure he would have been flattered. Like any Leo, he performed with gusto. Never one for crying (unless he had, say, bit clean through his tongue - the stitches from which he was quite proud of), I was disturbed one day to hear him whimpering behind me. Turning around, I found that he was inches from the mirror, enthusiastically exploring his "sad face" - when he noticed I'd caught him in the act, he became vividly embarrassed. He was enamored of a smaller girl in the class, GA, and at random times throughout the day would shout her name and run to embrace her. She hated that, and feared him.

J - A quiet and reserved Virgo with potential magical powers. he was intensely observant and reflective; one time shortly after turning two, I watched him as he stood apart from the group, toy guitar in hand, attempting to get the precise beat of the song that was playing with the tapping of his foot - and succeeding perfectly. He had a sweet demeanor and an attachment to one of his teachers that was much more mature than any I'd witnessed before. At my first job with toddlers (in the Middle East), I myself had become the favorite of one little girl, and she nearly had a nervous breakdown when I returned to Oregon. In the absence of his favorite care-provider, J would simply become a little sullen, but ultimately possessed an intuitive understanding of relationships and the ways of the world. Potty training him was a bit of a challenge, however, as his desire to succeed at the task left him ashamed were he to accidentally poo in his diaper; his efforts to hide his mistakes herein were sometimes quite messy, which only magnified his humiliation.

O - Sharing J's exact birthday, O was also an introspective, quietly sensitive little boy; with wide blue eyes and a penchant for making bizarre statements, sometimes giving the impression that he found the world around him hallucinogenic. I remember, while the rest of the class huddled in a protected corner waiting for their parents to come take them home early, O standing in awe at the room's wall of windows, his face squeezed into the narrow crack in the glass door, watching a swirling, errily warm spring windstorm descend upon the neighborhood, threatening and foreboding. I stood with hi cause that's totally my style too. How can you not be enchanted by wild weather? Above all others, O served as a great example of infamous child mimicry - I could only assume that someone in his personal life was an avid sports fan (or something along those lines), for at the end of each sing-along, when the other children would clap and cheer, O would often throw up his hands and exclaim, with pure innocence, "Ooooh SHIT! Yeah!"

I wish that I had kept records at all of the places I've worked of the amazing, intriguing, hilarious and awe-inspiring things I've heard kids say. I work with kids right now, some right around this age, but they do not speak like others I've known. I can't help but suspect it's a matter of childcare philosophy, that this is one area where nurture trumps nature, at least briefly. Even a child like E, who I wouldn't describe as a "linguistic genius," far surpasses most kids I've worked with in non-RIE centers. He would awake from his nap talking to himself, describing the fish in the tank above where he slept in as much detail as he could, usually a little too loud. I'm vaguely ashamed of feeling disappointed in little ones that cannot express themselves in our too-linear, often-inadequate world of words, but I miss the window to their world that comes from precocious mastery of that skill. The things that very, very young children say, when they can, are sometimes mind-boggling in what they reveal about infant consciousness.

Even while not working at a RIE center, the RIE philosophy has been so embedded into my mind that I apply it regardless. I cannot help but have the possibly unfair, probably unrealistic wish that this method IS what is responsible for the wildly disproportionate number of highly articulate children I've known in centers that follow it, and that my own child will be a little AV, or at least E, capable of filling my mind with their own fantasies before they even qualify for toddler-hood. I count Magda Gerber as one of the people who've inspired me the most - be it via brainwashing or not. Hard to tell some times.

http://www.rie.org/