I wrote this piece about 14 years ago, when my daughter was about 9 when I was just starting Tai Chi. She's 23 now. Her mom and I have since divorced, but we remain friends.
DOG EATING LIZARDS
“Idiot. Stupid dog!” The words pierced the veil of my unconscious and I bolted upright in bed. My daughter, age 9, was cursing at our dog.
“What is it Claire?” my wife and I yelled running into her room, hearts pounding.
“Freckles got into the bog terrarium and got mud everywhere in my room.” Freckles cowered in the corner. “Then she attacked my lizard collection and chewed the legs of my tuatara!” “Bad dog.!” Claire shouted at her.
For those of you wondering, a tuatara is a very primitive lizard from New Zealand. It is the closest living relative to the dinosaurs. And Freckles is the dog we recently adopted from an animal rescue organization. Her wiry hair indicates part fox, part Jack Russell terrier, but her short squat legs recalls a Basset. Like all terriers, she loves to chew and for the third time in our marriage, my wife and I found ourselves child-proofing the house for small items left lying on the floor or on low tables that could easily end up in an immature digestive tract or, worse, chewed to pieces.
The night before, Claire had shown a friend her science project, a bog terrarium she’d made last year by scooping up mud and moss and ferns from a local wetland. She’d left it on the floor. Claire had also had taken out every specimen from her rubber lizard collection, which consists of 40 odd lizards ranging in size from one to 18 inches. She’d them on the floor, too.
My wife and I stared at the carnage in Claire’s room. The carpet was smudged in at least a dozen places with the bog mud. Mixed in with the mud were the roots of the ferns. Plastic and rubber lizard and amphibian parts lay strewn about amidst the mud. Here there was a tadpole tale. There, the claw of an iguana. Freckles had single-handedly (single-pawedly?) made Claire’s room look like a Louisiana bayou roadkill.
In her book, Bonnie Bergin’s Guide to Bringing Out the Best In Your Dog, the author states that human and dogs can feel happiness, sadness, anger love and joy. Where we bipeds and our canine kin diverge is our ability to think about the past and the future. It makes no sense, therefore, to call a dog over long after having done something bad and punish it. The animal will feel it’s being punished for coming (since it won’t remember the past event) and you just end up training it not to come.
Still, I think I speak for all of us when I say we all wanted to kill Freckles.
My wife offered to get a bucket and start cleaning up the mud. I decided just to run out too the local mega-hardware store and rent a carpet cleaner. When I returned an hour later, I heard a strange noise coming from Claire’s room. I listened. It was the sound of Scotch tape being pulled off a roll.
“Claire,” I asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m putting bandages on Hot Dog.”
“Who?” I asked entering her room.
“The lizard Freckles chewed. Look.”
She sat on her bed. Next to her, she had placed a green cushion from the living room sofa. On the cushion, she had spread a paper towel. Her rubber lizard lay on top of the towel. Claire had carefully shred and folded pieces of toilet paper into small pads which she taped around each of the three stubs of the missing limbs of the lizard. She had gotten some red food coloring and squeezed big drops of it onto the bandages. The effect was quite realistic and grisly, to say the least. She stroked the lizard’s head and cooed words of consolation to it.
I have wondered if her preoccupation with her lizards is completely healthy. She has given names to each lizard—names like Taco, Hot Dog, Hamburger, Cappuccino and Tiger. She’s fussed and fumed when I, finding them lying about the house, have picked one up and thrown it into her room. “Dad,” she yells. “How would you like it if someone bigger than you picked you up and threw you into your room. You could have hurt her.”
At times like that, I wonder whether a typical 9 year old should still personify inanimate objects. What would the great child experts say? Of imaginary friends, Spock says:
“...if he is spending a good part of each day telling about imaginary friends or adventures, not as a game but as if he believes in them, it raises the question whether his real life is satisfying enough...If children are living largely in the imagination and not adjusting well with other children, especially by the age of 4, a psychiatrist should be able to find out what they are lacking.” (Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 1985)
Of symbolic play, Piaget says, not limiting himself to any age range:
“It is indispensable to his affective and intellectual equilibrium therefore that he have available to him an area of activity whose motivation is not adaptation to reality but, on the contrary, assimilation of reality to the self, without coercions or sanctions. Such an area is play, which transforms reality by assimilation to the needs of the self, whereas imitation (when it constitutes and end in itself) is accommodation to external models. Intelligence constitutes an equilibration between assimilation and accommodation.” (The Psychology of the Child, 1966).
If I listen to Spock, my Claire needs counseling. If I read Piaget correctly (no easy manner as the quote above illustrates) Claire’s fantasy play helps her negotiate reality as she recreates her own that corresponds to the outside world.
What strikes me odd in Claire’s case is that long ago she decided she was a tom boy. When she did, she rejected, with extreme disdain, even contempt, all her Barbie dolls. But as this incident shows, she treats her lizards as if they are real, living, sentient beings.
My wife later told me that one time, she overheard Claire carrying on a conversation with two of her lizards. It involved some conflict the two of them were having. It was obvious that Claire was working through some conflict she was having with another child at school. My wife pointed out that often child psychologists use puppets in a similar way to get children to talk about events and feelings.
Like everything that happens to my daughters, this incident triggered intense memories. At the age of 6 or 7, I received two plastic 1950’s space men. Shortly thereafter, my best friend in first grade, Jerry Morton, moved away. His father, a Methodist minister, was transferred to another town. I was devastated by the loss and remember pretending that the silver space man was me and the green one was my friend. The green man was telling the silver that he was leaving and said goodbye. The silver man began to cry and begged him not to go.
Later, in the 7th grade, a turbulent year form me—a new school and what seemed like older, meaner teachers—I invented an invisible pet zebra, named Herman. I knew he really wasn’t there but acted as if he were. I would talk to Herman in front of other kids and try to convince them that he did exist. What I do remember is wishing I had someone real, like Herman, who I could talk to.
I feel proud that Claire already knows how to heal herself. But I also feel proud that she also is practicing caring for others. Her ideal jobs, she’s told me, sums up her wholeness and sense of balance: she wants to be a doctor, a musician, and an artist. Helping others; creating works of beauty for herself; interpreting works of beauty for others.
What more could a parent ask for?
.PS: I raised two children who were 3 years apart. Can you imagine raising Quads? Check out this family's blog: http://www.murraycrew.blogspot.com/
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