One Flew Over the Baby’s Crib

     I’m not sure if the phenomenon I've been exposed to is unique to my daughter or if the majority of parents with toddlers witness similar episodes, but I believe with near certainty that my daughter either suffers from a severe, yet undiscovered form of disassociative identity disorder, or she has had some sort of symbiotic alien attach to her brain which makes her act as though her mind is fractured into different people whose thoughts and feelings violently contradict one another’s, and whoever is in there must battle each other, out loud, for every single decision that needs to be made, regardless of how menial it may be.

     Maybe it’s because I’m still not completely healed from my pneumonia and I've not yet quite  regained the constitution required to adequately manage life with a high energy toddler, but I have noticed a drastic increase in what I can only really define as moments of apparent insanity. Every day decisions, such as “What would you like for dinner?” are turning into one sided shouting matches that leave me absolutely befuddled and slightly fearful for my safety. As I was driving my daughter home from pre-school recently, I posed the question of what should be for dinner and it was initially met with a pensive silence. My thought was (as I, who is a dad without, as my wife puts it, “the intuition of knowing when to not speak”) to offer suggestions of what COULD be had for dinner. “Mac-n-cheese?”

 “NO!”

“ Fish fingers?”

 “NOOO!”

“Pasta and meatballs?”

 “NAAAOOOOOOOOOOO!” Ok, I thought, I’ll just leave it for now. Then I heard a tiny voice mutter from the backseat of the car, “I want mac-n-cheese.” Brilliant. Problem solved. 

 “OK, I’ll make some mac-n-cheese for you as soon as we..”

“NNNNAAAAAAOOOOOOOO!!!!! NO MAC-N-CHEESE!! NOO! NOOOO!!” Screams and tears and shouting erupted from the backseat as if the tiny two year old strapped in the car seat who had experienced a brief moment of lucidity was now being beaten aback and silenced by whichever mind invading alien was trying to make its presence known, along with the fact that it had an unnatural hatred for macaroni and cheese. The screaming and apparent internal conflict continued for the remaining ten minutes of the drive, during which time I cranked up the volume to the radio and belted out a rather embarrassing version of “Smoke on the Water” (which was apparently being played in honor of the fires currently raging northeast of L.A.) while keeping an eye on my daughter in the rear view mirror to make sure her face didn't transform into some otherworldly visage or she didn't start tearing a rift in the space-time continuum. If anything of the sort had started to happen, I’m pretty sure I would have bailed out of the car while still at speed, knowing she probably would have used her extraterrestrial powers to fly the car back to her home planet.

     The internal crisis she had been suffering apparently came to a quick and decisive end because as we walked inside our home and made our way to the living room, she said rather affirmatively, “I want man-n-cheese.” I said nothing at all as I turned on Netflix and started whatever random, nonsensical children’s show was queued, hoping to keep her distracted just long enough for me to slink into the kitchen and microwave the container of macaroni I had previously made.

     Things such as this are occurring with much more frequency than they had previously, but this type of outburst is not the only thing that has me concerned. My daughter can be laughing and having a wonderful time and suddenly, without warning or apparent reason will burst into a fit of screaming and flailing, as if someone has just destroyed her most prized possession. Or, she can be playing and acting somewhat relaxed (which for her, is still, in my experience, at an energy level about ten times higher than normal children) and then will suddenly and without provocation explode in a fury of activity. I liken it to a power station that has generated way too much electricity, so before it disintegrates in a giant ball of lightning, it must funnel that excess energy somewhere. This means for a little while, the lamps in the local town burn a bit brighter, the clocks run faster and the glow on the television screen just won’t go away. In my daughter’s case, it means she begins to shake violently whilst yelling, “I’M FREAKING OUT, DADDY!”  Then she’ll begin to run in tiny circles that get  larger in diameter and exponentially faster with each consecutive lap until Newton’s first law of motion takes effect and she smacks into either a wall or a piece of furniture, thus ending her centripetal acceleration and beginning screams of shock and surprise. Normally, this is enough to reset her system, as it were, and return her to semi-normal state of toddlerdom.

     I've recently been wondering how people would react if I were to have outbursts of insanity akin to my daughter’s. I can see myself at work as my compatriots decide where we will venture for lunch and one would ask, “How about sushi?” and my response would be, “NAAOOOO! NO SUSHI! NO!” as I start flailing my arms and running in circles in my office as I cry. I’m pretty sure, though, that actions of that sort would land me in a dingy hospital, lying in a bed and freshly lobotomized where another, rather large patient would take pity on me and smother me with a pillow to put me out of my misery. He would then promptly throw a huge bathroom sink through the window to make his escape. I don’t think I’ll go that route. I’ll continue to play the part of the responsible father and let my daughter be the two year old. If she’s still acting like that in fifteen years, though, we might have a problem.       

A Plague O’ My House

     I like to think that I have a pretty resilient immune system. I haven’t really been “sick” in a very long time, other than allergies and the like…at least that was the case before I had a daughter. My daughter attends pre-school now, and I have found that pre-school is merely a facade for what is really a system of clandestine laboratories that specialize in producing biological warfare agents.

     It all started innocently enough one morning when getting my daughter ready for school. She had a minor cough (which for her, was as far as it would progress) that really didn't seem like any cause for alarm. That is, until I picked up her, her lunch box, my backpack, her backpack, her milk cup and her bag of pre-school, nap time linens to carry everything (in the world, apparently) to the car so we could load up and make our way to school and work. About the time I was able to hoist myself back into an upright position after being laden like some pack animal, is when she coughed directly into my face from point blank range. I felt the microscopic droplets of poison being ejected from my daughter’s mouth splatter against my eyeballs and into my open mouth. I shook my head in disgust and disbelief and reminded her that we must always cover our mouths when we cough, and she obliged by burying her mouth into the crook of her elbow and uttering a fake cough. “SEE, I DID IT!” Yes, indeed she had.  Oblivious to the fate that loomed before me, we went about our day.

     A chain reaction of biological catastrophes were set in motion that morning which just a few days later would have me laid up with pneumonia. No doubt, this entire scenario was brought to fruition by the cesspool of filth and disease known as pre-school. And, I have my suspicions, that this disease factory is probably propagated either by some covert government agency whose sole purpose is to use children as disease carrying weapons against the adult population in order to make us more susceptible to a hostile alien takeover , or by some unfortunate, third world asylum seeker who sneaked (walked in broad daylight) across the border into my country and who hails from a place where an immunization consists of drinking some bubbling concoction that has been brewed in a rusty cauldron over an open fire next to a pen of goats and chickens, and any disease one might already have is treated by dipping a handful of reeds and straw into a bowl of potion that was stomped into liquid form by some witch doctor’s stinky feet, and then using that handful of now dripping reeds and straw to thwack the afflicted about the face, chest and back until they are adequately covered with enough of the brew to cure their illness and keep everyone they know at least fifteen feet away until the accompanying funk subsides. Regardless of its origin, I had grown rather ill.

     Two year old children do not understand the meaning of “daddy is sick” and life doesn’t pause even when pneumonia is involved. What does happen when pneumonia is involved, though, is that the slightest physical exertion would send me into a fevered fit of coughing and gasping for breath, because every breath feels like you’re inhaling Jello and the desire to not drown makes your body instinctively try to retch it out. Seeing me in such a state of disarray meant nothing but fun for my daughter, who whenever I would collapse onto the couch in a coughing attack(which happened about every three minutes), would climb up onto my lap, get in my face and scream, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING DADDY? COVER YOU MOUTH! WHAT’S THAT? I WANNA WATCH STRAWBERRY CUPCAKE! GET UP! I NEED SOME WATER!” My inability to breathe combined with Doc Holiday style coughing and a two year old screaming in my face was more than enough to render me absolutely useless. My condition deteriorated to the point where I was delirious with fever and lack of oxygen. I watched in a half conscious daze as my two year old transformed into a teenager and asked me for the car keys so she could go to work. I sat for hours and watched the same nonsensical episodes of Strawberry Shortcake (whom my daughter calls Strawberry Cupcake) over and over until I thought I was living in Berry Bitty City and my name was Rhubarb Ross. I’m pretty sure at one point when I was nothing but a heap of semi-coherent wreckage, lying limply on the couch and drooling all over myself, my daughter was bashing me in the head with one of her plastic frying pans and laughing hysterically.

     After two weeks of feeling and acting like a one hundred year old man who had smoked for seventy-five of those years and then was forced to chase a toddler through the house every day, I began to heal. The myriad of antibiotics, inhalers, decongestants and codeine laced cough syrup had finally begun to work its Western Medicine magic and I could feel the strength returning to my worn out body a little each day. My daughter still doesn't grasp the concept that I've been ill and that it’s hard for me to pick her up and walk up and down the stairs as she screams in my face, but I muster the strength and do it anyway. Sure, I have to stop at either end of the stairs and lean against the wall to catch my breath, but it doesn't faze her.   

     I could faintly see, over the horizon of my days to come, a hint of fully recovered health returning to me. Then as I picked my daughter up this morning to give her a hug, she coughed in my face again. I figure that I’ll be nothing but a shriveled corpse by early February.