I was sitting at the living room table,
facing my two-year old son. He was in
his high-chair, with his bowl of natto (sticky, fermented soy beans) and rice
untouched in front of him. Normally my
wife helps him eat his dinner. But she
was sick and had to rest, and so the duties of taking my son to the nursery,
and bathing and feeding him fell to me.
Unfortunately, like many toddlers, he is in a rebellious phase and often
refusess to do things, or makes life difficult for his parents. I wondered if I could get him to eat his
dinner, and without making a mess.
Let’s try cheerful optimism, I
thought. “Mmmm... That looks lovely!” I said. “Natto and rice – What a lucky boy!”
He ignored me and started bashing his fork
on the table. Since I’m blind, I
couldn’t see if he was just making a noise or throwing the food around. I’d better deal with this fast, I thought.
Okay, let’s try some child psychology. “Oh, you don’t want your food then? If you don’t want it then Daddy will eat
it.” I picked up some natto and rice
from his bowl and ate it myself. “No,
no. None for you. It’s all for Daddy.”
I hoped he would cry and demand that I give
him his bowl back. Instead, he picked up
his plate of vegetables and handed it cheerfully to me. “Daddy!” he said, happy to have found a way
to get rid of his unwanted food.
Okay, I thought. Generally we try to get him to put the food
into his own mouth, but perhaps today would be a good day to be pragmatic and
compromise. “Let’s play a game! This spoon is a train. Your mouth is a tunnel. Daddy will drive the train into the
tunnel. Open wide! Chugga-chugga-chug.” I scooped up some natto and rice, felt his
mouth with my free hand, and guided the spoon into his mouth. I repeated this again and again, continuing
to make train noises. And it seemed to
be working. He opened his mouth, waited
for the “train” to arrive, and took the food into his mouth. Little by little the pile of natto and rice
in the bowl got smaller. I began to
worry that he wasn’t chewing his food properly, since he seemed to be
swallowing it very quickly. But I was
proud of my cleverness. “My wife
complains about how hard it is to get him to eat, but all you need are a few
clever tactics,” I said to myself.
Eventually we finished and I told him what
a good boy he had been. Then I reached
over to help him take off his apron. My
hand touched something sticky. Then it
touched something else sticky. Then my
hand plunged into a huge pile of stickiness.
The entire bowl of natto and rice, now also mixed with his drool, had
dropped onto his apron, the high-chair, the floor, and all over. He had been letting the food into his mouth,
and then silently spitting it out again a few seconds later. Because I couldn’t see what he was doing, I
hadn’t noticed.
I had a few days full of little incidents
and difficulties such as this with my son.
When I took him for a shower, I needed to free my hands to fetch some
soap. So I left the shower head on the
wall. I was getting annoyed by my son’s
crying until I realised that the water was running straight into his face and
he couldn’t breathe. I battled for
twenty minutes to get him to put his legs into his pyjama trouser legs, with him
crying and kicking the whole time, before I realised that I was trying to force
his legs into the sleeves of his pyjama top.
I hope that it will get easier to do these
things when my son can talk a bit more.
He will be able to tell me when I am doing something wrong. Until then I hope I don’t have too many more
experiences of being a blind single father.
It’s hard. I am happy to say that
my wife is feeling better. I can go back
to shopping for groceries, cooking dinner, and hanging up and folding away the
laundry, which are my regular household chores.
It’s chicken and rice tonight. I
don’t feel like natto.
Vocabulary:
a rebellious phase – a period when someone
often resists control or authority
to make a mess – to make things untidy or
disordered
optimism – hopefulness about the future or
the success of something
to bash something – to hit something
pragmatic – dealing with things in a
realistic and practical way, not insisting on principles or ideology
compromise – give and take; a willingness
to give things up in a negotiation
to scoop – to pick things up with a wide
object like a spoon
to chew – to use one’s teeth to break up
food into small pieces
to swallow – to let food or drink drop from
the back of one’s mouth into one’s throat
to plunge into something – to fall, jump,
move etc. deeply into something
drool – saliva dropping from one’s mouth
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