Shopping with Eliot

Our son Eliot was born with speech and motor delays, and some unnerving impulsive behaviors. For instance, when he was five he screeched in the grocery store. One Friday afternoon, the day before Blue’s birthday, Carly was invited to a friend’s house. Perfect, I thought, Eliot and I will walk to the store to buy food for the birthday dinner, then we’ll come home and make a cake. I envisioned an idyllic afternoon with my son.

As soon as we left the house he mutinied, playing the game where he refused to walk, one most children play for a year or two but which Eliot had been playing for four years. A block into it, he was pulling and yanking on my hand, remarkably like the dog on its leash, whom I’d had the brilliant idea to bring along with us. I had tried before letting go of Eliot’s hand and walking on alone, but he just stood still. I could not leave my son standing alone on the sidewalk.

When my children were little they taught me that if I clung too tightly to my agenda when they had their own goals we ended up in a headlock. This is a lesson I learned not once but time and again. So I resorted to pulling Eliot along by the collar down the main artery through town where on any given day two or three different people I know might drive by. Rift of imaginative ideas for dealing with my son, I decided not to look at the windshields of the passing cars, thus remaining blissfully ignorant of which friend or aquaintance might be witnessing our less than ideal family scene.

When we reached our neighborhood natural food store, I tied our dog Shoe to the post outside and told Eliot to get himself one of the miniature carts designed for happy shopping children. At this point, family bliss was restored as Eliot followed me up and down the aisles, depositing in his cart the items we needed for dinner. When we got to the checkout counter, I saw a woman buying dog biscuits and thought, “What a great idea, I’ll get one for Shoe.” I told Eliot to pick out a nice bone- shaped biscuit, which we paid for with our groceries and took outside.

“Is that your dog?” a man on the sidewalk said, “People have been feeding him,” and I realized with horror that the dog biscuits the woman had bought had been for Shoe. He chomped on the one biscuit I had bought him that would accompany the handful of large ones that had just landed in his stomach courtesy of a stranger. Maybe she had seen me dragging my son down the street and had taken pity, imagining if that was how I treated my son how did I treat my dog?

Shoe, Eliot, and I were halfway down the block when the woman came flying out of the grocery store waving a package of turkey from the deli counter. “Does your dog want this turkey?” she called out.

I accepted the turkey (I’m not sure why -- I think I was in shock) but said, “People have been feeding my dog.”

“That would be me,” she said, motioning proudly to herself.

I resolved when I got home to affix a small sign to his collar that said, “I know I’m cute, but please don’t feed me.”

When we were in the grocery store I had bought raisins, Eliot’s favorite treat, in order to lure him home in a more humane manner. But as we walked away from the turkey incident, Shoe (no doubt seeking relief from the huge treat he had enjoyed) took a dump. I picked it up with the plastic bag I always carried for such purposes. I was now carrying the bag of raisins in one hand and a bag of poo in the other. After depositing the one bag in the garbage, I was not about to reach into the bag of raisins and feed my son with my bare hands. Without the raisins he mutineed, and we proceeded back down the street, with me once again dragging him by the collar.

I tried to avoid going to the grocery store with my children, but sometimes it was unavoidable. When Eliot was in preschool he went through a phase of screaming indoors because he knew he wasn’t supposed to. Nothing we told him, even “Quiet voice indoors,” made any difference. Once he started screeching in Safeway just as I unloaded my groceries onto the belt. I ignored him (which sometimes worked) and wrote my check as fast as I could. The merciful checker, bless her, called for a bagger, saying, “I am sure this woman would love to get out of the store as quickly as possible.”

Five minutes later as we were loading our groceries into the trailer on the back of my bike, an older woman came up to me. She had gone out of her way to end up at the bike racks and she said, “I just want to let you know that I think you could have handled differently your son’s screaming in the grocery store.”

Not wanting to use my son’s disability as an excuse --since we did teach him that screaming in stores was not okay-- I looked her in the eye and said, “How dare you tell me how to handle my child.”

Looking right back at me, she was rude enough to continue, “It was disturbing to those of us in the store.”

“And you think it wasn’t disturbing to me?” I asked.

She didn’t dissolve, as I hoped she would, but she did walk away, leaving me to wonder what possesses people to walk up to strangers and give them advice on child rearing, or to seize their dogs and feed them massive quantities of food. Parents struggle every day in the raising and loving of their children, and, in the process, they need unsolicited advice about as much as a carful of dog biscuits.

Our Stuffed Companions

Our childhood attachment to stuffed companions isn’t wholly rational when you consider how odd many of them are. Maybe at a very young age we are able to recognize in our companions a unique trait we possess ourselves. Eliot’s stuffed penguin is a perfect example. Anyone who has seen March of the Penguins knows that these creatures have an inordinate amount of patience. They can stand on the outside of a mass of penguins for long periods of time being assaulted by ice and wind, knowing that eventually they will shuffle to the inside of the circle while the warmed penguins take their shift on the outside. And being equitable, one mate takes a very long turn covering the egg while the other embarks on the journey for food, then, like the huddlers, they switch.

When Eliot was two, our friend Susan gave him a foot high penguin for Christmas, and Eliot spent all his time locked in a bear hug with Penguin. Penguin got a thousand kisses a day. Eliot dragged him around the house by the wing. At night he slept with an arm thrown around Penguin. Several nights in a row I found the two of them asleep in exactly the same position. Once it was Eliot and Penguin facing the same way, Penguin spooning up against him. Once it was Eliot asleep on his side with an arm thrown over his face, Penguin behind him also on his side, a wing thrown over his head.

There was a synchronicity to Eliot and Penguin. Eliot rarely got frustrated with his own shortcomings, and instead, artfully avoided difficult tasks. With a lot of coaxing from us, he took on these tasks when he was ready. Like the penguin, his progress was slow, steady, and amazing.

Around the time Eliot started talking, his grandmother Sushi gave him a stuffed Curious George, and Penguin had to make room for George. George had his own voice, a deeper, hollower version of Eliot’s. He sounded a lot like Mister Bill from old Saturday Night Live episodes. In fact his life was a lot like Mr. Bill’s. George “fell” in the fishpond and he fell in the toilet. George landed on the burner (turned off) and he landed in the pancake griddle. You knew when you heard George’s panicked call for help that he had been pitched into a dangerous spot.

Carly’s stuffed companion was a doll Blue and I bought in Oaxaca before she was born. He was “Man” to us, but when Carly adopted him he became Little Man. Little Man has red cloth skin and a black yarn mohawk. He represents the part of Carly that thinks outside the box.

I recently sewed Little Man’s head back on for the second time. It was late at night and I was sewing in bed, so when I finished I slipped him onto the pillow facing Carly’s sleeping head. Being twelve made her no less elated when she woke in the middle of the night to the outline of his mohawk in the dark.

Little Man has been through many transformations. First he lost his clothes and was naked Little Man. Then his arm fell off and I sewed it back on. Then his head fell off (the first time) and our friend Dr. Weber, a neurologist, sewed it back on. Then his arm fell off again, and since Carly’s aunt Shelley was born with one hand, we decided Little Man didn’t need his other arm either.

Our stuffed creatures provide comfort and security in a sometimes frightening world, all the more so in adolescence. We are very young when we first notice that the world around us is constantly changing. I was pregnant with Eliot when I moved Carly out of the crib and into her own room. In the newfound freedom of her room, she played until she fell asleep. Once I found her conked out on her back, spread eagle in a pair of cowboy boots. But one night she climbed into the crib, bereft as it was of blankets or animals or even a mattress cover. She wrapped herself in her blanket, rolled like a taco over the bars, and thumped down onto the bare mattress.

I had always wanted to crawl into the crib with her but had wondered if it would hold my weight. Now, nine months pregnant, I didn’t hesitate. I climbed in, and it held. I put my arms around her and cried. I thought about how she was giving up her place of safety. It seemed she would rather have that place in its cold plastic nakedness than not at all.

A few days later when it had quieted down in her room at nap time, I went to check on her and found her in the crib, cheek plastered to the cold coverless mattress. She had brought her books with her, and Little Man. While she slept, Little Man sat propped up against the crib bars, guarding the shrine of books.

I never found her in the crib again. What I found a few nights later was Carly asleep in her bed and her Lego people in the crib, face down side by side. As if only now that she had made her pilgrimages to the crib, was she able to make room for the little person she had been told would emerge from her mother’s belly.