| brucekluger.com |
Reader's Digest, February 19, 2007 Chip the Monkey A dad learns a little bit about growing up—and letting go— thanks to a chance encounter with a stuffed money. By Bruce Kluger A few months ago, I was in my daughters’ room, making their beds (don’t get me started), when I ran into an old friend: Chip the Monkey. Eighteen inches tall, dressed in Army fatigues and sporting a small beret and aviator specs, Chip is the product of a Saturday afternoon trip to the Build- a-Bear store in midtown Manhattan, where my then nine-year-old daughter, Bridgette, had constructed him from hide and stuffing—as always, with her signature brand of precision and ample doses of love. The sight of Chip brought me up short. After all, he came into the world more than two years ago, and now looked somewhat out of place on Bridgette’s bed, perched against the wall just below the ceiling posters of Hillary Duff and Usher. By now, I had assumed, Bridgey had outgrown her stuffed animals. To be sure, a veritable plush menagerie occupies the lower bunk bed, where Audrey sleeps. But that’s understandable—she’s seven. Bridgey, on the other hand, is my unrepentant tween—my sophisticated sixth grader for whom Saturday morning cartoons can’t hold a candle to the cutthroat couture of Project Runway; for whom no complicated computer program can’t be tackled with a few swift clicks of the mouse; for whom Dr. Seuss and Madeline long ago ceded their place on the book shelf to Lemony Sicket (all 13 volumes!) and Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord. Standing next to the bed, I froze, stared at the grinning simian, then surrendered a sigh. I also felt a knot in my stomach. How did a throwback like Chip figure into the ever-changing life of my older-than-her-years grammar school kid? And, more important, why did the sight of him make me feel like crying? “Like toddlerhood, pre-adolescence is a constant dance of backward and forward motion,” says Sherry Cleary, Executive Director of the Early Childhood Professional Development Institute at The City University of New York. “As children develop new components to their identity, they take inventory of the identity they had before. It’s as if they always need to check in with who they were as they become who they are.” Cleary’s observation made me think back to an earlier time in Bridgette’s life and take stock of the kind of traveling companion I’ve been to her as she’s made the journey from little girl to, well, bigger little girl. I remember the tears she spilled as she climbed down the subway stairs with her friend Bebe, and Bebe’s mom, on her way to her first sleepover. Bebe’s family lived in Brooklyn; and at five, Bridgey had never flown solo through the night, not even at a pal’s place in our own neighborhood, let alone in another borough. To be honest, I’d given Bridgette mixed signals when she first broached the idea of this long-distance sleepover. Meaning well, I reminded her that Bebe’s family had a dog—and that she wasn’t crazy about dogs. I told her that it’s sometimes scary to wake up in the middle of the night in a strange place. I cautioned her that Brooklyn was a little too far from Manhattan for a midnight bail-out. In other words, I did my best to change her mind. But Bridgey was blessed at birth with a steely determination. So as she trudged down those subway steps, looking over her shoulder with that sweet expression of conflict, I frantically tried to make up for my earlier selfish counsel. “You’ll have a great time!” I shouted with a fake smile. “And don’t stay up too late!” Bridgette wasn’t buying my counterfeit cheerfulness, I’m sure. She must have seen my eyes filling up, too. The next afternoon, Bridgette barreled into our apartment, raving about how much fun she’d had. This would be the first of many times that my oldest daughter would momentarily toss off the security blanket of childhood as she climbed, almost imperceptibly, one rung higher on the jungle gym of young adulthood. But now it was six years later, and I was staring that damn monkey in the face. For a guy who takes pride in keeping a close watch on his kids’ growth, I felt humbled, as if I’d suddenly lost track of who Bridgette actually was. Experts say this is natural—that most parents inevitably feel lost in the fog as their children enter the tween years. The backswing to stuffed animals and other trappings of babyhood, so they say, not only helps kids negotiate the road ahead of them, but also allows them moments of “safety” during those head-spinning moments of pre-adolescence. “If your daughter is feeling particularly young,” Cleary tells me, “she may cuddle up with Chip and express how much she loves him. But it she’s feeling teenage that day, she might push him aside, or even be embarrassed by him. It’s a minute-to- minute thing.” OK—so if all of this explains the presence of Chip on Bridgette’s bed, what I still didn’t understand was my feeling of melancholy. Shouldn’t I be thrilled watching my child grow? Cleary, herself a Mom, answers that question with a wistful smile of her own. “It’s fascinating,” she says. “As much as we’re committed to supporting our children's growth, we feel a nostalgia for the past, and we know we won’t get it back. We hold onto glimpses of their childhood, understanding that we’re on borrowed time. And yet we have to let them grow up. That’s what parenting is really all about.” Although Cleary’s words comforted me, I was still unsure. So in recent weeks, I’ve discovered a fool-proof way to reconcile the complicated push-pull of Bridgey’s pre- adolescence, especially during those heart-tugging moments when I imagine her hand one day slowly slipping from mine: I hang out with Audrey. Indeed, now that my “wild child” is in the second grade, she’s starting to exhibit restless feet herself, trying on Bridgette’s clothes, experimenting with sixth-grader slang, even lingering in the background during Bridgey’s playdates. But when she’s alone—out of Bridgette‘s eyeshot—she’ll confess a certain weakness for one of her old My Little Pony disks, or play dress-up, or get out the crayons. And she’s always a pushover for a storybook cuddle. Oh, yeah, and I also try not to look at Chip when I’m in the girls’ room. This would be a lot easier, of course, if my daughters made their own beds. But like I said, don't get me started on that.
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