Add that it's raining steadily, so that not even I would encourage Eva to go out (I believe getting wet and dirty on a regular basis are indispensable to childhood).
But Eva's trapped inside with her mother and me, no YMCA day care for an hour (when I say "We're going to the YMCA," she answers, "See-ay,") to distract her. She's doing the early toddler version of going stir-crazy, digging through the recycling bin (her auxiliary toy chest), scrabbling for items off her mother's and my bureaus (Kate's watch is a frequent theft), scattering her possessions in every room and verbally announcing her discontentment the whole while.
She's driving Kate and me a little bit nuts (to say nothing of an increasingly harried and persecuted cat).
Everyone's heard the old saw, "Ain't mama happy, ain't nobody happy." And in any family that's certainly true. It really describes the centrality of the mother to the homestead, because the woman has traditionally been the person most consistently taking care of it and the other family members. So the mother's state of mind has a larger effect on everyone else than any other family member's would. That's much less true now with the fragmentation of the American home, due to two working parents and many other causes. But even so, to a large extent the old saying is still very true, and to paraphrase my favorite B-poet Robert Service, ain't mama happy, she makes it spread misere.
But really, if anyone's unhappy, the rest feel it. There's no doubt that I've dragged Kate's state of mind farther down this winter by being the scowling lump of doldrum that I've been, looking unsuccessfully for work and despairing over bringing in any money at all. And my lack of gitup'n'go rubs off on Eva, whom I've often left to her own whining devices while I just funk out in front of the TV or reading more bad news from Daily Kos.
So, in every family unit, everybody affects everybody. It's a smaller version of the earth, really, or the universe. And it's obviously much more visible on such a small scale, but it's none the less true.
So the "ain't mama..." thing is cute, and funny, but less than the whole story.
Which brings us to the baby.
When this trundling little tyke with the 10-second attention span and an increasingly long arm's reach gets bored and ornery, things happen around the house, and generally not to the good. My first memory is of nearly electrocuting myself by sticking a key in a socket at 14 months. Eva loves to play with keys, so that's another thing to make sure are never within her reach. Without policing her every motion it's impossible to keep her out of the proximity of electrical outlets, so of course our main task is to make nothing available she might be able to stick in one. And so on down the line--child-proofing a dwelling is an entirely different level of safety from baby-proofing. As Kate and I are learning.
But for right now, we might as well rewrite the old saw: "Ain't baby happy, ain't nobody happy."
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