The Fabrication of Our Lives; or, Happy Cows Give Chocolate Milk

For better or for worse, we read a lot of comics while we were in the hospital with the twins. Susan Sanders was an angel during that ordeal, organizing meal delivery, visiting in the hospital, and doing a boatload of laundry once the twins were safely home and spitting up all over everything. Best of all, she brought reading matter for the long, dreary hours.

The magnesium sulfate relaxed every muscle of my body. The ones in my tummy were pretty stubborn, contracting regularly the whole time, but the ones in my arms and legs and eyes pretty much turned to jelly. I'd had grand hopes of doing all sorts of needlework, of reading Plato and Aristotle and Austen and Dickens... In reality, I ended up watching How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and What a Girl Wants. Repeatedly. In Spanish.

It was the scariest time of my life. My children’s lives depended on my staying calm, and there sure wasn’t much to distract me from the potential tragedy that loomed over us, just a few hard contractions away. My eyes couldn’t focus on small print, and I was so drugged up I couldn’t sustain a serious train of thought for more than a few minutes. I could read comics, though, and thank God, the Sanders family had about 20 years worth of For Better or For Worse.

I’d never really gotten into the strip before that. When you flip through the Sunday comics every once in a while, Dilbert and Foxtrot are always funny. Doonesbury is usually funny if you’ve been following the news faithfully. But FBorFW is hardly ever funny... at least, not if you take any one strip on its own. Put it all together, though, and the plot arc is winsome and delightful and real. And so as the clock across from my bed ticked away the seconds, and Andy’s red scratchings on the whiteboard marked the days and the weeks, we followed the Patterson family as they grew, and dreamed of the family we were forming.

Is it any wonder, then, that even before they were born, we’ve always envisioned our little wuggies with thought bubbles over their heads?

Perhaps it’s because children tend to become precisely whoever it is you expect them to be, or perhaps it’s because we really had forged a deep metaphysical bond with their tiny, unformed souls. Those weeks and months, those hours and minutes, keenly attuned to their every squirm, their galloping heartbeats amplified over the monitors... I was their entire world, and they filled up mine. But whether we dreamed with knowledge, or whether we shaped our children into the image of our dreams, it is with astounding accuracy that the wuggies have grown into the little characters that we wove together there in the hospital, that danced through all our dreams and all our conversations.

And I must say, they certainly are just the sort of characters that you’d expect to see walking around with thought bubbles floating over their heads. Meepo looks like something of a caracature of himself, with big head and bigger eyes, and a crazy shock of unruly blond hair to top it off. Wildly gleeful in his joy, melodramatic in his little sorrows... he is a boy of strong passions. With Nate-bug, everything is larger than life, yet always there is a glint of laughter somewhere in his eyes, no matter how terribly, horribly, dreadfully, magnificently devastated he may be.

And then there’s Mr. Wuggidy, measured and balanced and sober, a perfectly proportioned little man. A very different sort of person from his brother, his seriousness is the ideal foil for Nathan’s goofiness. But Isaiah is so very, very, serious, that at times the overall effect is quite as exaggeratedly comical. He is most particular about his clothing, for instance. Nathan is happy to wear any old thing that mom picks out for him, but Isaiah is downright finicky. Everything has to be just so. He loves bright colors, and pairs his stripes and his paisleys with exquisite taste. At times he likes to go for the layered look, with one shirt worn normally, and up to six more looped over head and one shoulder toga-style.

Like I said, it’s only natural that characters of that sort should have thought bubbles floating over their heads. And when children have thought bubbles floating over their heads, it’s only natural that the parents should read them aloud.

But the boys have taken to narrating their own lives by now, and it’s a good thing, too, because with big brothers like that, the Bean of Cuteness has to share in the fun. In fact, she’s by far the most chatty of the three. Her thought bubbles seem to perpetually float up and interrupt every conversation. She is very small, so her world is small, and she’s usually not quite sure what we’re talking about. That never keeps her from chiming in, though. “Well, I’m pretty super,” is a great all-purpose response that fits in neatly with any conversation. Or, “Well, at any rate, I have a nose.” Or, “Did you know that I have fingers? They’re for grabbing stuff. It’s pretty super.” Hey, you gotta stick to what you know.

One evening last week, we were all enjoying a refreshing snack of chocolate milk. At least, most of us were. All of us who are old enough to drink cow’s milk. The conversation turned to how much Tembo wished that she could have some too. It’s really not fair. Everybody else likes it so much... why can’t she have chocolate milk? I told her it’s because Mama doesn’t eat enough twix bars, and I promised to try to incorporate more chocolate into my diet.

It was at that moment that we looked over and saw that Tembo had just found a more immediate solution to her problem. Isaiah had knocked his cup over, and there was Baby, eagerly lapping it up off the floor.

Um... kiddo? Let’s just stick to the twix plan, shall we?