Children are lunatics.
I say this after spending much of the summer with my grandkids, whom I adore. The oldest of the four is about to turn 7; the youngest is almost 2.
Two things strike me about this crew. One is that they’re brilliant. I don’t say this in a prideful way. They’re not brilliant because they’re related to me (half of them, being step grandchildren, share no more of my DNA than a stranger would). They’re brilliant because they’re human beings and we humans have amazing brains (not that we use them much).
If we think of brains as file cabinets, mine is full to bursting. I can recite a typical Yankees’ batting order from 1963, name all my elementary school teachers and sing along with “People Are Strange” (The Doors, 1967). I can usually find what I’m looking for amid all that clutter, but it may take a while.
As for adding new items, I’m convinced I’d be speaking fluent Ukrainian by now if I could delete the files I no longer need (not the Yankees’ batting order, though – there’s joy in recalling Mickey Mantle’s supporting cast).
Contrast my mental morass with the uncluttered file drawers of these 1-, 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds. Better be careful about what you say around them because they hear and remember everything. Their vocabularies are exploding. They make up games, songs and languages on the spot. It’s exciting to be around.
It’s also exhausting, both for the grownups in their orbit and for the little darlings themselves. And when they start to tire or haven’t gotten enough sleep, or are hungry, look out. At such moments, their self-control — not their strong suit even when their fuel tanks are full — evaporates, and they become raging maniacs.
As a parent or caregiver, you get used to the suddenness and violence of these outbursts. As an easterner who only sees his West Coast grandchildren a couple of times per year, I find their tantrums startling, awe-inspiring and a little frightening, like thunderclaps that shake the whole house.
One way to think about the lunacy of children is to imagine grownups behaving the way they do. Imagine picking up a tape measure, pulling the tape out a little ways, then pressing the button that makes the tape snap back into its housing.
Now imagine another grownup seeing you engaged in this mildly satisfying activity and deciding that he needs to do it too, right this second. So he grabs for it.
Suddenly, this object which you hadn’t been interested in five minutes ago and would have lost interest in five minutes from now, becomes your most prized possession. So you defend it, perhaps violently. At this point, both of you are yelling at a decibel-level that is unsafe for human hearing.
Imagine that your idea of fun at mealtime is not to eat what’s on your plate and engage in scintillating conversation but to smush your food into your hair and use your utensils as xylophone mallets.
Imagine thinking there is nothing funnier in the world than a story about someone peeing, pooping or puking. (OK, maybe they’re right about bathroom humor.)
Imagine crying inconsolably when you go out for ice cream and find the ice cream place is closed.
Imagine throwing a complete fit because you don’t want to get dressed/ get undressed/ brush teeth/ comb hair/ clip fingernails/ put on sunscreen/ get in the car/ get out of the car.
Imagine declaring this to be the worst day of your life when you’re asked to do any of these things.
All this have I witnessed during my time on the West Coast. I get it. It’s tough being a little kid. You’ve had enough experiences to know from one minute to the next what you would like to do (eat a sweet) and what you would not like to do (put on your shoes). But much of the time you don’t get to decide, though I notice that these days, parental demands take the form of polite requests, as in, could you stop strangling your baby sister, please?
Coincident with your frustration at your lack of power is a dawning awareness of the one power you do have: the power to make your parents as miserable as you are by biting, kicking, shrieking, knocking over drinks and doing the exact thing they have asked you, repeatedly, not to do.
I used to say of my own children, it’s a good thing they’re cute — pause — otherwise, we would kill them. Unkilled, kids eventually become reasonable, or as reasonable as the rest of us.
But when that happens, you miss how funny they were, how cuddly they were, how imaginative they were, how sweet the sound of their laughter.
Which is why it’s grand to be a grandparent.
