Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love
Edited by Jennifer Margulis
Seal Press
Paperback 256 pp $14.95

As anyone who has ever tried it knows, raising children is an uphill journey with an impossibly steep learning curve. This is particularly true when it comes to toddlers: Parents who try to keep up with these small whirlwinds find themselves left in the dust, feeling baffled, very, very tired, and sometimes both disconsolate and foolish. After all, how can a mature, fairly smart adult be completely defeated by a 2-year-old human who barely reaches her thigh? There must be a way to get this small person on track.

Ha!

Just as you imagine -- and "imagine" is the key word here -- that you are getting a grip on some aspect of their behavior, they toss you an impish grin and move on to the next challenge. You think food flung on the ceiling is a shock, they seem to smirk, well, try keeping up with me now! And off they go, toddling into the future with more energy and gusto than six adults could ever muster.

I would have loved a copy of Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love a few years ago, when my own two children were toddlers. In the rare quiet moments in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, I could have crept into my children's room, seen the beatific looks on their sleeping faces, and then sat down and read an essay or two, comforting myself with the knowledge that I was not, after all, alone.

Although every parent goes through it, because of the sheer intensity of the time commitment, raising a toddler can feel pretty isolating at times. There you are, in the company of a small person who takes up huge amounts of energy, but who falls a little short in the give-and-take conversational department; a person who prefers rubbing honey in her hair or throwing peas down the furnace vent to meeting any expectations you foolishly might have.

This collection, edited by Jennifer Margulis, offers both wisdom and companionship. Composed of 46 essays, it's put together in a perfect format, easy to dip into when you have just a minute or two, but with enough variety to amuse, enlighten, and comfort the reader at every turn. The essays are short, no more than a few pages -- just right for the available time and attention span of a toddler's parent.

Like a toddler, the book proceeds in nonlinear fashion. You can just flip through it, saying "Surprise me," and it will. If the range of the essays is broad, so is the collection of writers. Some are well known -- Joyce Maynard and Louise Erdrich -- others are unsung. Some I met for the first time in these pages and hope to encounter again. Many of the writers are fathers.

Some stories are sweet and heartwarming; others depict our worst nightmares -- life-and-death emergencies, a mother who goes blind during birth. By turns lovely and lyrical, chaotically funny, surprising and somber, the book manages to offer something for every parent whose head is spinning.

Bravo to the editor for including Brett Paesel's essay, for instance, which had me laughing out loud at the secret, dark, lusty thoughts of a misfit mother in the sandbox. I felt exonerated for my own sense of inadequacy and for the many times I felt like an alien when chatting with other, far more "reasonable" and competent moms.

There is frustration here, too, as well as tenderness and hilarity. In "Is It Day Now?" Shu-Huei Henderson courageously portrays what it's like to care for a nonstop child, admitting that her favorite photograph of her active little son is one that shows him asleep in his car seat -- "confined ... safe, peaceful, and above all, quiet. No threat of him talking back... no threat of him scattering toys. ... bending my CDs with his greasy fingers, or soaking the carpet with milk."

Lest any outsider think that toddlers are all drool and spilled milk, however, the book makes clear that they are amazingly complex little characters whose worlds are constantly expanding and changing, sometimes in ways that challenge parents beyond their expectations. Catherine Newman, for instance, writes of the day her son Ben first grasped the idea of death:

"Ben's face becomes a still life of terror. It's as if a door has cracked open from the sunny, flower-filled meadow where his brain has been living onto a howling hurricane, teeming with demons, just outside. Mothers die. His eyes turn into black saucers and he stands perfectly still. The fear is so huge and palpable, it's like another person hulking in the room with us. I kneel down by him. 'Is that hard to think about?' I ask, but Ben doesn't want to talk.

"So now we've graduated to a new level of worry -- and we'd barely grown accustomed to even the most mundane of Ben's fears. Of course it's entirely normal for toddlers to be fearful, but it's just so sad. One day you have this joyful child bouncing through your house like a piece of Silly Putty, and the next day he staggers to the breakfast table all haggard with worry, like a promising extra on the set of A Clockwork Orange. You can practically see the fears lounging around in his psyche, helping themselves to another bowl of cereal while they plan their latest attack... We miss the relatively relaxing days of Ben's simple aversions -- pubic hair, hard-boiled egg yolks, jazz -- however passionately expressed. Now the world is suddenly populated by malevolent forces -- lions, reptiles, the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up -- that are too, as Ben puts it, 'afrightening' for words."

Just about everything parents struggle with is, in fact, reflected somewhere in the book --the angst over choosing the perfect preschool, the mind-boggling circular conversations, the guilt about paying less attention to a second child than the first.

There's a comforting air of confession, humility, and surrender on the part of the authors. An essay by a doctor reveals that she finds it easy enough to give others advice but is having no luck at all getting her own 4-year-old triplets potty trained. Ericka Lutz, who once streaked her hair pink and sat in Parisian cafes, now finds herself sleeplessly fretting over a child's birthday party. In writing about children, the authors also confront the larger world. Yvette Bonaparte's essay, "Under My Skin," for instance, eloquently probes the challenges of mixed-race families.

From the small worries -- "Am I raising a brat?" -- to the greater fears, the book offers solace. We're all in it together. As Rebecca Boucher writes, "I used to think of myself, a mother of a toddler, as a sort of twenty-four hour EMT. I was supposed to watch Faith constantly to make sure she didn't choke or drown or take a header off the jungle gym." And then comes 9/11 and the realization that there is no way, ultimately, to shield our children. "We can only sing to them while the fires are burning."

Amid all the frustrations and fears and uphill battles, of course, the toddlers' innate charisma shines through. Why else would we keep chasing after them, hugging their little bodies close to ours, and wiping the jelly off their faces? As the subtitle suggests, they are indeed fickle, irrational, urgent little people. They are also incredibly charming.

I didn't love every essay in the book, but the contents are varied enough to make up for its weaknesses. Perhaps most important, dipping into the book gives you time to catch your breath and count your blessings, because with all its frustrations and challenges, toddlerhood -- as well as childhood (and life itself!) -- is over all too soon. As one writer notes in these pages, "You pack enough lunch boxes and sign enough permission slips and comfort a child through another bout of the flu and you're there. Your baby is a toddler and then, poof, a toddler no more."

-- Karin Evans is the author of The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past (Penguin Putnam). She is currently at work on a Ford Foundation-sponsored training manual for China's social welfare institutions titled A Kind Word, A Gentle Touch, and Someone to Help Us Learn.

First published October 25, 2004
Last updated November 28, 2007
Copyright © 2004 Consumer Health Interactive