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Character Disorder Thomas and I finish reading Stuart Little,and he asks me if there is another volume. I check Amazon and then tell him there isn’t, trying to conceal my delight. I’m sick of Stuart Little. He’s a dandy and a prig. I send my brother an e-mail telling him this. One of Ben’s serious avocations is writing and illustrating children’s books, so I feel I’m telling on one of his friends. But apparently I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. He writes back that characters in children’s stories are not really characters. They are character disorders. “Look at the vehicles in the Thomas the Tank Engine,” he tells me. Since Thomas only likes stories with animals in them—not trains—I don’t know Thomas the Tank Engine very well. I recall, though, that the last time I visited Ben’s family, his son, Harry, was carrying around toy versions of some of these characters. To make conversation with him, I pointed to his hand and asked, “What are these, Harry?” “Troublesome Trucks,” he said. Then he squeezed one of them and peels of mechanical laughter poured out of his hand. “Look!” he said, with a serious face, “They giggle.” I asked, “Why is giggling troublesome, Harry?” He looked at me blankly. “It isn’t.” But Stuart’s disorder—what should we call it? He’s overly concerned with convention, worried about his appearance and vocabulary, fearful of looking incompetent. There’s no need of fancy, psychoanalytic terms here; he has his panties in a wad. An unwelcome thought comes to mind. I am Stuart Little. After a telephone conversation with Thomas’s preschool teacher, I can’t sleep. He’s been testing her every minute. He pokes her when she is working with other children during art time. He taunts his friends while they practice writing their letters. He yells at anyone who gets into his private space. “And his space,” she tells me, “is about three feet in every direction.” Miss Keri’s sentences are void of blame, loaded with affirmation. I can hear her telling her class of rowdy 4-year-olds, “Miss Keri’s friends, you all need to help your bodies make good choices right now.” But right now she is struggling to describe Thomas’s behavior diplomatically. “Can you recommend a book?” I ask, “You know, something that talks about how to handle this sort of behavior?” There’s a pause. “I’ll ask the other teachers,” she says. “The books I use aren’t working very well on Thomas.” The books are failing. This is trouble. Since there is no second volume of Stuart Little, Thomas and I have begun reading The Borrowers. Like Stuart Little, the Borrowers use domestic objects in unconventional ways to accommodate their tiny size. I’m surprised Thomas likes them, wonder if he is really following the plot, since so many of their objects—like blotting paper and dance cards—are obsolete. He hopes they’ll think to use a sewing needle as a sword. I like them because they make family life look difficult. The daughter, Aretty, escapes from her mother’s nagging by writing in her journal with the stub of a pencil as long as her arm. And the mother, who has been fussing for her husband to “borrow” a toy teacup from the cupboard in the children’s old school room, later suffers a fit of hand-wringing when he’s late coming home. She worries he may have fallen while scaling the curtain. Or maybe the cat got him. She wonders why she was so selfish as to want that china cup anyway? Aretty waves off her mother’s worry and guilt. But Homily still looks toward the door every minute trying to imagine how she’ll do all this mothering by herself since her husband is surely a cat-licked smudge under cupboard by now. Homily doesn’t articulate this particular anxiety, but I know what she’s thinking, so I feel I can speak for her. She suspects she is too small to perform the big task of mothering, and she craves evidence that her family will be OK. I want someone to certify my efforts as a mother. I want placards that read “Ex Libris Parenthood Perfected” or, at least, “From the Library of the Mother of Well Adjusted Children Who Promise to Become Valuable Members of the Human Community.” Then maybe I would be able to stop reading every moment my children are difficult as evidence of my weak maternal character. I already have so much other evidence: I prefer folding towels to playing with superheroes. I pack my children green beans for lunch and sneak Girl Scout cookies for myself. I spend the first two hours of every morning trying to keep my mouth closed so hostility doesn’t leak out before caffeine can take effect. And while I am always forgetting what I am doing or what I need to do, I always remember what I’m missing by having these children: sleep and exercise and travel and sex, time alone, time with friends, time to plant flowers in the garden. Against all logic, I sometimes feel my children should compensate me for these privations by being perpetually sweet. Then when I think that, I feel guilty. My mommy-self is a character too extreme even for the books of children. Vince turns over in bed, pats my head, talks me down from my ledge once again. “Thomas is fine,” he says. “He’s just a lot of work. Like us. You and I are a lot of work.” “Hmm,” I say, tentatively. I consider saying more but don’t want to risk making his point for him. One day about five years ago, some colleagues of mine invited me to sit with them for lunch. They were all experienced mothers with almost-grown children, and I, uncomfortably pregnant with my first child, welcomed the chance for their maternal company. They moved their chairs to make space for me and then turned their attention back to the senior mother of the group (She was almost my mother’s age.) who was in the middle of a long narrative about her youngest child, a tall bearded man nearly 30 years old. He was shacking up with an opera singer. When she finished the story, the others helped her tut-tut over him. They offered up examples of the mistakes their own children were making, mixing them together for her like a salve and eyeing me with mild suspicion since I was a representative of the generation causing all the trouble. I listened to their stories through my salad and half a slice of cheese pizza. Finally, I swallowed, wiped my mouth, and paused to speak. “You mothers are really . . . something,” I said. They all laughed because they knew that what I meant was that they were—perhaps not certifiably but still without a doubt—nuts. I went on: “My mother worried I would marry my high school boyfriend and not go to college. When I was in college, she worried I wouldn’t ever find a job. When I finished graduate school, she worried I would stay single forever, and when we got married, she worried there wouldn’t be any grandchildren. Now,” I said, gesturing toward my swollen middle, “she worries we’ll raise them as vegetarians.” All the mothers laughed some more. They laughed at my story, at me, at my mother, and at all the troublesome children in the world. They laughed especially at themselves for taking sons and opera singers so very, very seriously. When the mothers left the table, faint giggles were still rising up over them toward the ceiling. As they chuffed off to work again, leaving me by myself in the hallway, one of them said something I couldn’t hear, and another round of laughter began. Even after the mothers had gone out of sight around a corner, I could still hear their laughter. Amy Fuqua is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Black Hills State University and Director of the Honors Program there. She lives in Spearfish, South Dakota, with her husband and two children, Thomas and Sam.
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