Hobson's Choice
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Bad Mooons on Mars
Living with a small child means learning the mechanics and intimacies of moods, especially bad moods. You have to sit there and endure hour after hour of bad mood with your child until someone comes to give you a break (and I speak as a parent of someone with a remarkably sunny disposition). You watch waves of happiness, fury, sadness, joy break across the basic bad mood of, say, a toothache as the hours pass. You watch exactly what a bad mood looks like as you work to relieve it.
We aren't observers of mood minutiae with anyone else. After six years of observing Chris's moods, I know them well, perhaps even better than Eleanor's. But I don't know the minute by minute byplay. With a spouse, we tell them to go away and pout when they're in a bad mood (or on one memorable occasion in our home to go to the basement and smash surplus coffee tables). Griefs, we sit with our husbands and wives; illnesses, we bring them milk of magnesia and heating pads (or whatever). But we are not trapped in a room, watching the development and dispersal of general crankiness.
And strangely, this hyper-observation is one of the gifts of having a child.
7:41 p.m. - 2004-04-12
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