It’s a Girl

In fourth grade, I was friends with a girl named Mishna Wolff. She went on to become a fashion model, stand-up comic, screenwriter, and now memoirist. Her book about growing up in Seattle centers on a loving but depressing portrait of her dad, who wasn’t exactly adept at fulfilling such basic parenting functions as making sure his kids got enough to eat.

Frankly, I don’t understand parents who are too self-involved to remember to feed their kids. Even less do I get those body-image-obsessed moms who damage their unborn children by developing pregnancy anorexia, or pregorexia. (Yes, it’s really called that.)

What I do understand, though, are the parents who unintentionally hurt their children through some combination of fatigue and frustration. This can range from the banal (thoughtless comments made in front of perspicacious toddlers) to the tragic (parents forgetting their kids in their cars). Parenting is a 24/7 job, after all, and you can’t give 100 percent all the time.

My own mom once gave me away. Not “gave me away” as in “blowing my cover.” Gave me away as in, she literally handed me off to a stranger.

She was sick with a fever and home alone trying to deal with my two-year-old self and my always-screaming baby sister. My dad was at work and couldn’t come home to help out.

So my mom, in her heat-addled brain, concocted a plan: Wait for the nice-seeming lady who always walked past the house every afternoon with her own two small kids, accost her, and beg her to take care of a two-year-old for the rest of the day.

Fortunately for my mom, this plan actually worked, and the reason I know about it (and am alive today) is because that nice lady not only took care of me but eventually became one of my mom’s best friends.

My mom sure has a way with people.

A year later, after my parents had moved to Seattle, I wandered off. By the time my parents had missed me and begun dashing up and down our neighborhood’s twisty streets, I had crossed a busy road, slashed open my hand by picking up a broken piece of glass, and gotten rescued by a family sitting on their porch who thought it odd to see a three-year-old girl trotting down the street alone.

Let’s just say that my folks are damn lucky.

Coming home from the hospital with Delphine, we were like all other new parents: totally paranoid. Were we holding her properly? Would we drop her? Let her slip in the tub?

Were we, in other words, worthy of being parents?

All the parenting books say that parents worry because their babies are so helpless. Put another way, babies are totally in their parents’ power. And that’s a terrifying responsibility.

Delphine is, as they say, an easy baby. She sleeps a lot. She’s not very fussy. She eats plenty. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get worn out by the nonstopness of being parents, or get befuddled by her behavior. (A happy baby is great, for example, until she won’t go to sleep at all and the parents are zonking out themselves.)

And when we’re wasted, the baby starts to not seem like the baby anymore. She’s no longer cute; she’s just a crying machine with no “off” button. At 10 o’clock at night, what’s truly frightening is how quickly a parent can go from feeling “OK, I can do this, we’re in this together, she’s going to calm down soon” to “Not OK, I can’t do this, what is this noisy, messy thing that’s driving me crazy?”

How long is the gap between everything going OK and everything going haywire? For my parents, it was maybe a few minutes — long enough for them to get distracted and for me to toddle out the front door. For a woman in Portland recently, it was maybe a few more minutes — long enough for her to throw her two kids off a bridge.

Will that poor woman plead the old canard of temporary insanity? Unless you’re a new mom, it’s difficult to believe in the concept of temporary insanity. But temporary insanity, or at least temporary spaciness, most certainly exists. And when it does come to pass, we all pray that it won’t last long enough for anything truly bad to happen to our children.