Alicia

Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her. She felt overwhelmed, stifled, confused and surrounded by an aura of anxiety she couldn’t quite comprehend. Her best friend knew what was wrong, that’s why she kept urging her to call when she felt that way, so she could talk her down. Better yet, haul them all over and they’d have a ‘play date’, all of the children together, a confused jumble of ages and personalities to confront one another’s little piques with life, young as they all were.

Things got a whole lot better for her, because of Nora’s support. She hardly knew how to repay her. She did just that, though by clinging fiercely to her as a life-saver, giving her the kind of adoring attentions he had once lavished on Bruce. Bruce, now that rankled. She had always been there for him, they were supposed to be inseparable, partners in life, think-alikes, both devoted to their two children, and equally devoted to one another.

She could see now how utterly one-sided that was. It was she and she alone who invested her emotions in their relationship, who trusted and believed in their future. She only fantasized that he returned the depths of her reliance on their relationship. It became painfully clear to her that in his opinion, unspoken, but real nonetheless, she finally understood that she represented to him an addendum to his life.

She still resented that he would anticipate, expect her to ask how his day had gone at work. That had become routine between them. An expression of caring. Unspoken, but understood that this rote enquiry and the response that it invariably invoked, pouring from his parched soul, represented their binary-clinging relationship. His resentment at the lack of recognition of his talents, his experience and academic expertise, obvious by his slow advancement in the ranking echelon within the university. The undeserved negation of someone of sterling quality whose opinion and knowledge should be valued and whose opinion should be assiduously sought and appreciated but was casually overlooked; its effect on him was incendiary.

The release her empathetic listening ear afforded him, unburdening himself of the depths of his antipathy toward his academic peers, and above all toward their departmental head, was important to him. She knew that. He, however, never acknowledged it, simply expected her to play her wifely role, sympathetic to his dissatisfaction with his employment. A mode of employment, however, that kept them financially comfortable.

She, according to him, had no need to take in other peoples’ children. Just to earn a few dollars of her own. What need had she, after all; wasn't he an excellent provider? What was she lacking? She had everything she needed, didn’t she?

“Bruce, there’s more to it than just that. I want to be able to feel that I can be kind of independent.”

“Independent? You’re married. You’re the mother of two kids, our kids. How can you be independent when you’ve got those responsibilities?”

“Financially. I meant financially independent. I mean I want to know that through my own efforts I’m able to earn my own money.”

“You’ve got money!” His exasperation with her was immediate and heated. As though she meant him to feel guilty that he was the sole wage-earner and she the hanger-on. He felt as ‘liberated’ as any man who had grown into adulthood with the aura of gender equality around him could be. But he didn’t get it. And wouldn’t. Because cause and effect eluded him.

His casual acceptance that her purchases were limited to household things, to operating their home, to maintenance, to seeing that they were well fed, the children clothed and their needs taken care of, limited her. If she wanted additional spending money she had always discussed it with him. Not that she hadn’t written cheques or used her credit cards for purchases he knew nothing about. She did, and then when he looked at the invoices it was always ‘explanation time’.

She resented that. She also resented that once she had begun her career as a child-minder, looking after the children of neighbours, making her own money and spending it the way she wanted to, without feeling obligated to discuss anything beforehand with him, he refused to listen to her exasperated tales of mental exhaustion. When she felt drained, without energy, depressed and upset over her inability to manage the temperamental vicissitudes of her pack of children.

She wasn’t even managing as many kids as Nora did. She had only three, when she knew by law she was permitted, operating a home day-care, to have as many as five. Not counting her own. Her own were temperamental enough, but they were her own. She was long accustomed to their petulant demands and time-outs and conciliatory promises for good behaviour.

Packing on an additional three other children to her preoccupation with her own children’s needs simply exhausted her. She could hardly complain to the parents of the children whom she was minding. The effort involved in providing five children with nutritious meals, half of the contents of which they refused, some happily eating items that others turned their noses up at, and vice versa, drove her to distraction.

That the children seemed unwilling to co-operate, interact with one another civilly; incapable of getting along together without calling upon her to separate them frayed her nerves. She had no opportunity to rest, no small blocks of time when she could just sit down and catch her breath.

She hardly knew what to do, yet she had convinced herself she wouldn’t ‘give up’. She had the respect of her neighbours as a hard-working, responsible and reliable day-care provider, and she meant to retain that. Besides which, it wasn’t always so awful.

And the money she earned represented a regular stream of income that she knew was hers alone to do with as she wished. It was all right for Bruce to sneer at her income level, to inform her that she was needlessly making her life more difficult, and he didn’t want to hear any complaints about what she had imposed on herself, but it was important for her to persist.

She knew she could. There was a formulaic mechanism to success that eluded her, but it wouldn’t forever. She had to be around Nora more often when she was in charge of a complement of five, not counting her own four. That was almost twice as many kids as she had been able to work into her little cottage industry, and Nora did it effortlessly, her quiet, confident voice was all that the children required for instruction, and they obeyed her.

Not so for her and the children she looked after. They were defiant of her guidance, as though they were instinctively aware of her inner sense of insufficiency. Taking advantage by some impossible inner realization of her insecurity, to slight her.

And, impossible as it was even for her to believe, three-year-old Alicia had her completely confounded. She truly did not know how to react, how to mollify that child, how to impress upon her that her aggression and miserable attitude was what was responsible for the other children’s dislike and avoidance of her.

Instead, Alicia, young as she was, insisted that the other children were ‘bad’ and she was ‘nice’. She tried sitting down with Alicia in her lap, stroking her hot, angry forehead after an altercation, to quietly explain to the child that she mustn’t pinch, slap, punch or kick the other children. Alicia, sobbing in frustration, would deny she had done anything wrong. It was the others, taunting her, making her unhappy; their fault, not hers.

The thing was, it was the other children who had a tendency to listen, to behave themselves more or less well. And it was Alicia to whom she was forever saying “don’t touch”, “don’t do that!”, please, behave yourself”, and which obviously represented more of a red flag to this child than it did to the others. They tended to listen for the most part; her reaction was to set her little face into a grim mask, determined to continue doing whatever it was that had drawn attention to herself.

She feared for the child, yet continued to be exasperated by her unwillingness - or inability - to understand that she couldn’t simply forge ahead and do whatever she felt like doing, there were repercussions. Invariably, out of such situations the child was physically hurt, stung by a bee, smacking herself with a stick too heavy for her to manipulate, falling and skinning her knees when she was prevailed upon not to run on the playground pathway; to wait until they reached the grass.

She hardly knew what to do, how to react, how to impress upon this obdurate child that listening to the advice of an adult was a positive attribute for a vulnerable little girl, not a signal to run amok.

She felt certain that Alicia’s behaviour was motivated by emotional neediness. Yet, unless the little girl was in a state of emotional upheaval as a result of having harmed herself, she behaved standoffishly, as though hugs and laughter were foreign to both her experience and her needs.

She had discussed the situation endlessly with Nora, in countless frantic telephone calls. She had taken Nora’s advice, done whatever she suggested, and nothing appeared to dent the child’s determined venturing into a physical world that she saw in aggressive terms, to be challenged, as though she had the heart of an extreme adventurer, in the body of an, excitable, emotionally friable child.

As for her, she needed some relief, a release from the stultifying atmosphere of tension that arrived with Monday morning, and refused to leave until late Friday afternoon. Leaving her so emotionally spent she was hardly able to pull herself out of an aura of dull disconnectedness with her own life. Unfair to her own two children, and certainly to her husband.

She badly needed those times when she was able to be with Nora. Those get-togethers she hosted with a few other area care-givers were her life-savers. She could never adequately express her admiration and obligation to level-headed, competent Nora. She did try, and that embarrassed Nora. She tended to shrug, look away. Obviously uncomfortable at the level of her own obvious neediness. In that sense alone, she told herself, a counterpart in neediness with her tiny charge.

Her spirits always lifted when she knew Nora had another get-together planned. Nothing seemed to faze her quite as much when things went awry as they most certainly tended to, whenever that child was around, and that was always. She couldn’t find it in herself, despite the constant concern and pressure, to inform Alicia’s glum-looking mother that she’d have to find another sitter.

It wasn’t fair to Alicia, she had concluded, after much introspection. And despite all of it, the daily struggle, the difficulties of balancing the child’s temperament against the needs of the other two she looked after - without even taking into account her own children’s needs - she had become fond of the child. Even as she deplored Alicia’s constant obnoxious tantrums, doing her best to halt the inevitable before it developed into a full-scale breakdown, both for Alicia and for herself, her heart ached for the child.

The few times she had mentioned this to her husband; before she stopped saying anything to him about it altogether, he had commented that it sounded to him as though the kid needed psychiatric care. That amazed her. Just like a man to take that route, wash his hands of any concern for a child whose confused view of the world and how she fit into it frightened her and baffled the adults caring for her.

She readied the children, made sure they all had their little towels and changes of clothing, and marched them down the street to Nora’s expansive backyard. Before even entering the gate, she could hear the excited tones of many children’s voices. Her own little troupe reacted as though some kind of electronic communication had excited a response, an anticipation of group fun and games, and they began chattering excitedly even as she ushered them through the gate into the backyard.

She felt her own heart skip a beat in appreciation of the fact that she could relax a little. In the general melee, children moved purposefully about, a few with sand pails, others with water wings strapped to their backs, some throwing balls, and it seemed as though everyone was on their best behaviour; there were no shouts, no challenges, no weeping children. Her own moved quickly into the crowd that the 20-some-odd children represented, heading directly for a pile of outdoor toys and small-child game equipment.

And there she was, finally, in a small group of two other care-givers, not including Nora, who was busy with another clutch of women, all of them half-turned to one another, talking animatedly, but keeping an alert eye on the children, the while.

She had quite a lot of stories to divulge. Some of them irritatingly maddening, some hilariously amusing. They all did. They exchanged these stories, a kind of ritual of unburdening, eliciting groans and laughs from among one another, as they could feel their tensions ease.

She hardly knew how long it was that they were busy listening and remarking on one another’s stories. Her eyes half-cocked to the story-tellers, her mind chalking up another possible solution to some of her own problems, glancing periodically toward the children, counting off her own and what they were engaged in, then turning her attention back to the group which now included all six of the care-givers, including their hostess. They were all feeling pretty good.

And then there was that dreadful, piercing, heart-stopping shout. For help. An older child, crying for help. Not for himself, but for assistance. He was in the process of hanging on to the edge of the rim of the above-ground pool, and frantically trying to haul something out of the pool. Something limp, small, and colourful.

Alicia could not be resuscitated. They tried, desperately, tears streaming down their faces, with children running about screaming, half in excitement, half in distress.

Most of them hardly knew what had happened, but they sensed it was something alarming, because four of the adults were gathered about an unresponsive child, while the other two were trying to hush and round up the rest of them, to take them into a huddle of silence, where they could be kept busy doing things that would not hamper the futile attempts of the others.

Alicia’s mother did not blame her. It was an accident. It could have happened anywhere, for any reason. She knew, she said, how difficult it was to keep track of her own child. She half expected to lose her little girl to another kind of accident that might occur. Any kind of accident, anywhere, at any time. She’d had a premonition….