Spain Dad, a baby blog

Alleke screams now. It all began over a piece of birthday cake. I got the last one, topped with vanilla ice cream, and sat down on the couch to eat it when Alleke noticed me take my first bite. Immediately she was at my side, standing on her tippy toes, and peering into my dish.

I was hesitant to share. I’ll admit it. I mean it was my birthday cake, and I was the one who had slaved away for an entire morning to make it, and well, this was the last piece.

I took another bite, expecting Alleke to do what she always does, which is to cock her head like a puppy, smile big for the camera, and ask politely, “Ice keem, peas?” Instead, she clinched her fists, pressed her eyes shut, and screamed.

A scream is so much more than noise. It’s unfiltered emotion. It’s like taking off the muffler or popping the hood and listening to the engine roaring inside of us. For a brief moment, it tells us what’s going on inside someone, and almost always, we’re startled by what we hear.

Alleke wanted ice cream, but instead of asking, this time she screamed because something had changed about her. The untamed creature inside of her called her will, which was not bound by reason or virtue, had finally been freed from its cage. It was a wild beast, roaming around inside of her, howling at the moon.

At bedtime I asked Alleke if I could brush her teeth, and she screamed in my face. I told her the sooner we brushed her teeth, the sooner she could have her blankie and read books, but I guess it was too important to her to sit there at the edge of her changing table holding her toothbrush and shrieking. So, I left her there. I came back a couple times to check on her, and she was still exercising her lungs. Eventually I lied and told her I was going to bed. I said “Night night,” turned off the lights, and left her in the dark.

“Daddy?” I heard her ask quietly.

Sometimes I find it so difficult not to get mad at Alleke when she screams. I end up yelling at her for yelling at me. It’s like trying to make peace in the Middle East with big guns. I’m such an emotional person, she gets me going immediately. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like when she’s a teenager. We won’t need words, only fog horns.

I can’t help feeling like we’re starting over again as parents. Up until now we’ve relied on Alleke to tell us what she needed. We trusted that when she cried, she needed something. When she said she was hungry, she was hungry. When she looked tired, it was time for her nap. We took our cues from her. But that’s not working anymore because of this wild beast that’s loose inside her. Now Alleke not only needs things, she wants things too. She relies less on her instinct, and more on her will, and she’s actually making decisions for herself. Some of her decisions are terrible, and April and I need to help her learn how to make good decisions for herself.

Alleke’s metamorphosis caught me so off guard I actually dug through some boxes under our bed until I found my old Developmental Psychology textbook from college. I found this interesting part in the book about Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Basically, this guy says life can be boiled down to a series of eight challenges or crises. At each stage of life, there’s a specific challenge we need to overcome. For a newborn, the challenge is trusting her parents, and by extension, the world around her. She wants to know if her needs will be met and if her parents care for her. Erikson calls this challenge Trust vs. Mistrust.

In the second challenge, which is where I think Alleke’s at right now, a toddler realizes for the first time that she’s an individual, and she can make decisions for herself. This challenge is called Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt. By exercising her will in all kinds of different situations, she learns that she can make good decisions with positive outcomes and bad decisions that carry consequences. She can do some things for herself, and for the rest she can rely on others like Mom and Dad to help her.

I looked up from the book. Adolescence starts earlier than I thought. For a brief moment, I imagined an independent Alleke backpacking through the jungles of Peru with dread locks and an eyebrow piercing.

The point was Alleke wasn’t acting up, she was acting her age. She was supposed to start screaming now in the same way puppies are supposed to pee all over the floor—until you train them. Alleke needed to be trained too, and well, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in my thinking.

For now, the only thing I was certain about was Alleke wasn’t getting any of my birthday cake.