You have a baby, which emerges into the world as a curled-up ball with tiny fingers and toes and a mouth that sucks and a bottom that gets wet. About three months later it becomes a real baby, which to you is the most adorable being who ever lived. Surely, you think, this is a new kind of human. When he/she grows up, the world will know what perfection really is. And then 8 or 10 years go by, and you start to notice that this perfect creature has, sadly, developed some character flaws. She is sloppy. She doesn't flush the toilet. She gives you a lot of lip. She is a drama queen. What the hell happened? How did I fail? you think.
And then, if your timing is right, you manage to finish converting a whole lot of VHS tapes you've had lying around for a while into a DVD format, and you play snippets from the past back to yourself on the living room television, and you see these adorable creatures in the light of your present knowledge, and you say, Oh. Now I get it.
For quite a while now I've been fretting over Suzanne's problems with making friends, and her problems with decoding social cues and generally being super-sensitive to teasing. I thought of this as something that had somehow "happened" to her somewhere in her development, and which it was my duty to at least try to ameliorate. But the other night I was watching a recording of her when she was a year old, when Rebecca was five. "Say hello," Daddy says in the recording, and Rebecca says, "Hello, daddy," and then, as the camera tracks over to Suzanne, sitting in her high chair, Rebecca says, "She can't say hello yet. All she can say is 'mama' and 'no no no!'" And Suzanne then turns in her high chair and gives her big sister a hard stare, a look I now recognize as "You are SO mean. Why are you criticizing me?" I know this look well today; back then, I couldn't interpret it. But there it is: the hypersensitivity, the tendency to interpret a casual statement as a criticism or insult. It was all there, from the beginning.
I'd been thinking also that Rebecca's tantrums, and her tendency to focus her rage on Suzanne, was an adolescent phenomenon--but nope. There's a recording when Rebecca was six and Suzanne was two, and Rebecca is riding in a wheelbarrow, which she doesn't like and is screaming about, and after she gets down from the wheelbarrow she disappears around the corner of the house in a total meltdown rage. Suzanne looks after her, obviously concerned. "Becca?" she says, and toddles off around the corner of the house to see about her big sister, and on the recording you can hear a fierce scream: "LEAVE ME ALONE!" Again: there from the beginning--or at least there from a long time before I started to notice.
Insights like this make you think about genetics, and the powerful role it plays--not that it dooms us to a predetermined fate, but it certainly provides the raw materials fate has to work with. The wonderful stuff is still there, too: the kindness that shines in Rebecca's eyes, her bashful pride in her own accomplishments, Suzanne's open-hearted love and empathy and creativity. Parents these days often fall into the trap of thinking that every little thing they do with/to their kids in the first five or six years is of earthshaking importance--when in fact, the kids are creating the parents as much as the parents are influencing the kids. They come out of the womb as people, not parenting projects. If nothing else, having children teaches you humility--if, that is, you can avoid calling it "failure."
