Beak and claw

A couple of weeks ago my wife took the kids to the library and the little guy went all-in on nonfiction books about animals: one was all about piranhas, one was about the feeding habits of various animals (including the octopus and the sperm whale), and one was yet another Big Book of Why (with chapters broken out by biome, including “The Ocean”). So my son has been doing quite the impression of a budding marine biologist, regaling anyone who will listen with factoids about the coloration of different piranha species and how polar bears are able to sneak up on seals and whatnot, and when he’s not holding forth directly for the edification of the rest of the family, he’s drawing pictures of giant squids or crawling on his belly across the hardwood floors pretending to be a swimming shark or something like that. It hasn’t quite reached the point of exhausting our energy or patience yet, probably in large part due to my complete understanding of getting obsessed with an area of interest.

A funny side effect of his ever-expanding intellectual curiosity, though, is the little guy’s attempt to navigate the tricky terrain between fact and fantasy. He is exposed to plenty of both, of course, and always had been, and it’s bound to raise some confusion. He knows that sometimes books are about things that are make-believe, and sometimes they are about things that are real. There is a character on Mickey’s Club House who is a giant, but that’s only pretend. On the other hand, giant squids actually exist. The distinction seems arbitrary at best! (And, honestly, given the choice between a larger-than-normal person who lives in the clouds, and an equally enormous creature with no bones, crazy-long tentacles, massive eyes and a sharp beak who lives at the bottom of the ocean, which one would you believe in?)

And then, on the other hand, there’s the fact that you can’t really survey zoology without getting into the food chain and the circle of life. And the little guy is just starting to make the connection between one living thing eating another in the wild (as the octopus preys upon the crab) and us eating meat in our home. He’s asked us if the chicken we serve for dinner used to be alive on a farm somewhere. And we told him it certainly was, and it didn’t seem to traumatize him too much; I think he identifies more with the carnivorous predators already (for a variety of reasons).

His sister identifies with them, as well, as it turns out. She’s well into the animal noises phase of her speech acquisition, and she has all the basic ones (woof, meow, moo, baa, neigh, quack, oink) down pretty well. Maybe this goes without saying, but I’m not referring to actually pronouncing an onomatopoeic word spelled, e.g., q-u-a-c-k, but to faithfully mimicking the sounds, and her throaty glottal pig-snort is especially impressive. But the most adorable animal noise in her repertoire, if I do say so myself, is her wolf howl. (We have a lot of picture books with wolves in them for some reason.) And much of the adorability is simply the great gusto with which she delivers it. Point to a picture of a cow or a dog and she will make the right noise willingly enough, but try to get her to do it over and over again and she quickly loses interest. On the other hand, point to a wolf and she will throw her head back and ululate like the moon is crazy high and bright, and she’ll keep at it for a good long while (especially if anyone joins in with her, which is pretty much impossible to resist).

It’s so very tempting to read into all of the above and imagine it to be highly illuminating. My son is the intellectual one, my daughter is the emotional one; my son can only play at being an animal if he’s portraying traits with accuracy; my daughter likes to howl for the sheer joy of it; &c. It’s tempting because it creates the illusion that parenting them can be relatively easy, as long as I remember which box each of them is in and what rules go with which box. “You I will raise like so, while you I will raise like thus and such.” But it’s all bogus. For one thing, any major differences between the two of them are vastly more likely to be due to their respective developmental stages than deeply ingrained personality traits. But more importantly, even if I were reading them right and the little guy tends more towards technical precision and the little girl tends more toward wild abandon, they’d still be more similar than different, and the little guy would still have emotional moments and the little girl would still have cerebral moments and expecting otherwise would just be unforgivable all around.

It’s yet another reason why I’m looking forward to having another child. I imagine I’ll be less likely to fall into the trap of seeing the kids in binary terms when there’s three of them.