To many she meets, Katy’s behavior seems strange – almost scary. I have to admit, it seems scary to me. In an instant she can leap from playing contentedly to screaming furiously because she has to go from the house to the car or because she has one doll flipped the opposite way from all the others in the box. When I say screaming, I don’t mean whining or yelling or pouting; I don’t mean expressing displeasure or stomping feet; I mean full-out, hand-in-a-blender screaming. Recently, though, it’s occurred to me that the screaming happens only because her wonderful words have outpaced her ideas and that perhaps she comes by the traits causing the screaming more honestly than I would care to admit.
Last night was date night for Bethany and me. Guess how we used our time. Nope, guess again. Nope. We went to the library. Why? Because when we were rich with no kids we used to drop $300-$400 a month at Borders, and now that we’re poor, the library is the methadone that helps us through our bookstore jones. I bring this up only because I found myself in the parenting section looking for something to help explain Katy’s behavior. What I found was a book called Temperament Tools by Helen Neville and Diane Clark Johnson. I tend to be skeptical of parenting books, and I have to admit that the multicultural cartoons and bubble letters on the cover combined with the Comic Sans font and narrative style of the chapters made the needle on my Bullshit-O-Meter take several convincing ticks toward the redline. Then I read this: "Katy can't make fast changes. Many of us live in a 4-wheel drive vehicle that can go anywhere. Katy lives in a train on a track - she has to build a new track before she can go somewhere different."
The chapter on the intense and slow-to-adapt child didn’t use Katy’s name – it used the name Tiganda Tiger (yes, seriously) - but I find that the train metaphor describes my daughter perfectly. She’s got the power of the Wabash Cannonball running at full speed, but she also has its inertia, its fixed course, and, of course, her train wrecks are spectacular. But then, so are mine.
Not to blow my own whistle, but I consider myself a guy with some inertia. I’m focused and intense about my job, my home life, my projects, and my hobbies. I often, unfairly, ask that other people be the same way. When we move, I don’t let anyone rest until the place looks like we live there. No boxes anywhere but the basement after the first 48 hours. On curriculum writing days I work on miserable tasks without a break until they’re done or I am told to go home. If there’s not any reconciliation to an argument I follow Bethany around the house - even when she’s trying to get away from me – until we have some closure. Once I get on a topic, I attack it pretty ferociously to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Case in point: while I am working on this essay, there’s a toy playing a mechanical kids’ song over and over. I don’t notice it at all. Bethany has to ask me to turn it off.
Like Katy, I have to change my mental picture of what is going to happen before I can be comfortable with its happening. Recently, the school district I work for changed my assignment to a new high school. This idea is hard for me to get used to because I have to picture myself walking down those halls instead of the ones I work in now. I have to be able to picture what my room will look like, how I will get to work, and who my neighbors will be. This is not to say that I’m a planner; I make conscious efforts not to plan. I reject to-do lists, calendars, and journals. Often, my spontaneous lessons are much better than the ones that have been planned for weeks. So I’m not a planner, but I need to know what to expect from my daily routine, and so does my daughter.
I don’t think we’re similar because she is learning her behaviors from me; you don’t learn this kind of crazy. I think it’s genetic. She is like me because she has to be, because I’m her father and along with my enjoying my gifts, she carries my burdens. This part of Katy’s personality is sometimes difficult to understand or even frustrating, I have to remind myself that this is the way life is, and I would rather see myself in her than not.
