When You Were Eight/When You Were Four
[Previously: when you were seven, with links to when you were six, four, two and one]
When you were almost eight and when you were four, one month into quarantine, we were walking around our block together. It was April. Not one, but two neighbors shouted from across the street something to the effect of “you’ll look back on this so fondly! All this time together!” They had no idea how long this would last, and neither did (do) we. Their children were grown and gone, and I can’t imagine how that feels right now, so I understand the impulse. But I remember thinking that it was not all this time together that was hard, it was all this time together with nobody, and nothing, else. But still, if I asked you this question, you would say that things are great. You who are eight love not having school (or parents who are good at enforcing structure at home), and you who are four love being in a tiny group of preschoolers who chat with their masked teacher and wash their hands for 20 seconds while singing happy birthday, for as long as that lasts.
You who are four pack your suitcase to visit your grandparents across the country. I say that may be more than a year away, but you still tend to your luggage daily because you don’t know what a year is (does anyone, now?). You who are eight rename yourself unrepeatable things on Zoom meetings, pester us to play tag for an hour and hate that we’re always telling you to read a book or “just sit and imagine.” I agree this is obnoxious of us. You both scream “LOOK OUT, NO MASK!” when someone passes us without a face covering. You both ask questions about the virus, and we tell you half-truths about children not having to worry as much and how our home is safe, yes even after we bring in a cardboard crate of dog food shipped from somewhere in the Big, Germy, Scary World and serve it up to Sadie at room temp.
When I was four, when I was eight, when I was everything younger than 37, I remember hearing emergency broadcast alerts and wondering when there would be a real emergency. Eventually, after the mystery and thrill wore off, it was a sign to turn the dial, because god could any noise be that annoying. I remember one recent evening in May when I was sitting on the porch, and you both were inside, and all of a sudden my phone started trilling with a new alert noise I’d never heard before. If you listened closely, you could hear all the other phones on the block beeping and screaming, and when I looked at the screen there was a message about a citywide curfew. The civil rights protests would go on for about a week, and one day the sirens and helicopters were so loud that they drowned out the sounds of you playing and arguing in the yard (your combined decibel levels are impressive; this is something).
Unlike talking about the virus, discussions around these things -- even though you are only eight and four -- are hopeful, if awkward. Addenda was added to many of your older books, like George and Martha (typical 80′s stuff) and Encyclopedia Brown (his dad is a cop!), plus we had to explain the military trucks half a mile from our house. Much like using the phrase “circling back to this” in a professional email, we started bookmarking pages with our fingers and saying “let’s pause here for a second” as if we had suddenly decided to speak a foreign language (in this case, adult) to you. I don’t know how much you listen, and I don’t know how good of a job I’m doing explaining how badly our country has fucked up civil rights, but I know we do it almost every night and we’re trying so hard to nail it. The good thing is I believe a lot of people are doing this, probably better than we are.
I remembered trying to describe to you (8) the Armenian genocide when a parade went by our house, and how you were basically a toddler, and I had to say “a genocide is when a large number of people are murdered.” And you were kind of fiddling with your plate of beans and fruit, and I was thinking, maybe this is premature. But now it isn’t. Because you hear the sirens and know what the sirens mean, and now that the inside of our house is our entire world, we may as well tell you the truth about what’s outside of it.
When you were four and had packed your suitcase, you chose to include a neck pillow, headphones, two stuffed animals and a radio-like contraption that reads you short audiobooks. You said you could wait as long as you had to, but that when you got to your grandparents’ house in the country you would hold a baby lamb and bake a cake. When you were eight, you had trouble sleeping -- either it came easily but you woke up at 1 AM, or you couldn’t fall asleep in the first place because your mind was so starving for stimulation from a place that was not-our-house. You might also be anxious, because you’ve always picked up on that from us.
You two fought bitterly, clawing and poking and screaming at each other, and then -- two seconds later -- you begged to sleep in each other’s rooms in sleeping bags so that you’d be able to talk until 10 PM. You made each other little zones on the floors of your rooms, behind chairs and in corners, with toys you thought your sibling would like and pillows and blankets. Sometimes we skipped lunch and ate crackers with butter and little nuggets of granola on the porch. Sometimes I woke up in a foul mood and snapped at you as you ate your breakfast. We put time generous limits on television and video games, the kind of limits that would have never been acceptable in the before times, so many hours that they seemed infinite -- and still there was so much time left in the day. We let you watch funny Vines with horrible language. I marched into the main bedroom every week and closed the door to work, listening the whole time in case either of you cried for mama. If and when you did, I trained myself to ignore you because you were being attended to, safe, but every time I lost my train of thought and wished I could be in a different building with different walls, far from you. Your voices derail me in a biological way. It is the same for your dad. I wear headphones but I can still hear you. I think I could hear you from two blocks away, or maybe even two miles.
When you were eight you saw your friends on a screen. They sent you messages and pictures and videos, or maybe we Zoomed, and you kind of froze up and didn’t want to engage. We didn’t know how much to push. What is a face on a screen? Meaningless until junior high, at which point it’s dangerous if you’re anything like I was. You had grown two inches in a year and picked up on division in a minute, even with my horrible explanation. Can children grow in quarantine? Not just height and weight and facts, but can they grow up? I don’t know.
When you were four I sent you off to preschool in a mask when it reopened, and we got tested at Dodger Stadium. I wasn’t sure what the magnitude of the risk I was taking was in sending you back to school. I took it because you were four and because I talked to the teachers and knew that they felt it was right. I couldn’t take the same risk with your brother, of course. 600 kids in an indoor campus. I’m not sure when, if ever, that will be safe.
When you turned eight we threw you a birthday party in our backyard, just us. You and your sister took turns hitting a Nintendo switch-themed piñata, and we gave you breakfast in bed and a candle-lit Oreo for your birthday wish (you are not a cake fan). You said it was the best birthday ever. I asked, really? And you replied, really. I swabbed both of your mouths with q-tips and put them in a sealed bag at the place where we used to watch baseball games and fourth of July fireworks. You waved to me from the car while I waited in line at the grocery store, all boarded up, people shuffling nervously in masks, and then I’d hand you treats every time I got back in the car to thank you for being patient for your poor dad who had been waiting in the driver’s seat. We moved things around in your rooms so they’d look different, we planted trees so the outdoors would seem like another place. We cooked new recipes. We lost our tempers, made up, did it again. Every time we told you the truth, we added a tiny white lie to make it less awful. And after you went to bed, I drank wine and read the news and wrote things like this, or just scrolled endlessly and despaired until I fell asleep.
Our neighbors play music every weekend and last night it was “All Things Must Pass.” Being a parent has never (I don’t know! But maybe?) been a more acute situation and feeling. Being a child, even more so. Last year we were at Legoland, packed into a shallow pool with two dozen other families, eating at the buffet. Now I trace your faces with my finger before I say goodnight and wonder at how your profiles still change despite being stuck inside, how your cheekbones and noses shift, and you look bigger every morning because you are. You still outgrow your clothes and you still forget to put your socks in the hamper. Sometimes when you yell and tantrum I have to remind myself that I would have exploded as a child. I would have screamed until my lungs hurt. You two show remarkable restraint.
This is how it was when you were eight and four.