I may have forgotten how painful it is to be five years old, to have growing bones, limbs and joints stretching, skin elasticizing. I may have forgotten but my five year old has spent the day reminding me.
It started with her limping from her bedroom down the hall complaining she had kicked the bottom of her bed. Ouch. A quick hug sent her for her first morning visit to the bathroom where she was miraculously able to switch limping feet. I suspect the poor delusional patient suffered such a painful stubbing that in her absolute delirium she couldn’t distinguish right from left and the pain was so intense there was really no way to isolate which foot hurt most because clearly, it was all consuming.
She called me, well, more like a pathetic, moaning whimper to demand I come and pull the toilet paper from the roll and hand it to her because if she leaned in the opposite direction with every fibre of her being, she was almost just far enough to fool me into thinking she couldn’t reach the roll. I mean really, who would have mounted the roll a train ride away from the toilet in the first place? Did the carpenter know this kid had already kicked a bed this morning?
“Wipe.”
And wipe I did. I mean, how could I expect her now dislocated arm, a result of a courageous surge toward the toilet paper roll to function at any level of normalcy?
“Can I have a drink?”
“Of course you can.” (Sweet darling, she’s dehydrated, I can hear it in her squeaky voice)
Still hobbling, she hadn’t quite mastered the limping technique so the poor thing appeared to be shifting her weight back and forth like a “sucker!” kind of dance. Only a mother knows it was really a desperate cry for help.
We tried playing a little tennis on the driveway. I think you can guess how this one worked out. She insisted I serve to her right side but shame on me for not getting that ball right on her imaginary mark the first time. No wonder she threw the racquet in the air and collapsed in a heap on the pavement, hitting her knee and writhing in pain. I’m just lucky she didn’t boomerang it at my head. What in God’s name was I thinking missing her by two inches? She must have thought I was aiming at that sore foot of hers. How could she properly retaliate with that pesky toilet paper arm still spasming?
Next it was a Wheat Thins cracker break. The baby handed her big sister a couple of crackers. Who wouldn’t fly off the handle if one of the corners had been broken off? When you think ‘cracker’ you think of a woven square in its entirety. Not some mangled impersonation of a Wheat Thin. Off with their heads!
We played roof ball with the tennis ball. I should have been counter-intuitive with that ball knowing exactly how many bounces it would take before slowing down to a reasonable pace in order to be caught. If I yelled, “two” and it took three, the bugged out eyes of a frustrated five year old lasered that ball like a magnifying glass on an ant until it began to smoulder.
“Can we play a card game I made up?” Prone, lying in a pool of her own Wheat Thin crumb coughs, she can barely lift her head to yell at me for not accurately predicting the next rule of her made up game.
What is wrong with me? I’m her mother, I should be able to anticipate her next move, her ever-changing, always evolving approach to gamesmanship and I should predict and counter each move with the correct Go-Fish-War-Cinderella response like a worthy opponent.
Taking a sip of water, a dribble rolled down her chin and I think the woe-is-me face actually sprouted before the drop landed on her lap.
Looking forward to the teen years.
