He is a particular fan, for instance, of “bed jumping.” You’ve got to have a long runway, he explains; it’s best if you can start out in the corridor with the bed covered with a huge pile of pillows and the sofa cushions from downstairs. It’s crucial that you get your arms properly up in the air as you run towards the target. When older people like Mama and Dada have a go, they tend to hold back and keep their arms down by their sides, or else they do that halfhearted thing where they kind of clench their fists and keep them up near their chest. Either one reduces the payoff quite a lot.
Then there are the many important questions that need to be asked throughout the day: “Why is there dust?” “If you shaved a baby gorilla, would it look like a human baby?” “When will I stop being a child?” Anything can be a good starting point for curiosity when you haven’t yet got to the stifling stage of supposedly knowing where your interests lie.
He’s not worried about seeming abnormal, for there is as yet, blessedly, no such category in his imagination. His emotions remain unguarded. He is not afraid—for now—of humiliation. He doesn’t know about notions of respectability, cleverness, or manliness, those catastrophic inhibitors of talent and spirit. His early childhood is like a laboratory for what humanity in general might be like if there were no such thing as ridicule.
Sometimes, when the mood strikes, he likes to wear his mother’s heels and her bra and wants to be addressed as Lady William. He admires the hair of his classmate Arjun and tells Kirsten with considerable excitement one evening just how much he’d like to stroke it. Arjun would be a very nice husband to have, he adds.
His drawings add to the sweetness. Partly it’s their exuberant optimism. The sun is always out, people are smiling. There’s no attempt to peer below the surface and discover compromises and evasions. In his parents’ eyes there’s nothing trivial whatsoever about such cheer: hope is an achievement and their little boy is a champion at it. There’s charm in his utter indifference to getting scenes “right.” Later, when art classes begin at school, he will be taught the rules of drawing and advised to pay precise attention to what is before his eyes. But for now he doesn’t have to concern himself with how exactly a branch is attached to a tree trunk or what people’s legs and hands look like. He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe. He cares only about what he feels and what seems like fun at this precise moment; he reminds his parents that there can be a good side to uninhibited egoism.
Even William’s and Esther’s fears are sweet, because they are so easy to calm, and so unrelated to what there is truly to be frightened of in the world. They’re about wolves and monsters, malaria and sharks. The children are, of course, correct to be scared; they just don’t have the right targets in mind—yet. They aren’t informed about the real horrors waiting for them in adulthood: exploitation, deceit, career disaster, envy, abandonment, and mortality. The childrens’ anxieties are unconscious apprehensions of the true midlife terrors, except that when these finally have to be confronted, the world won’t find their owners quite so endearing or such fitting targets for reassurance and a cuddle.
Esther regularly comes into Rabih and Kirsten’s bedroom at around two a.m. carrying Dobbie with her and complaining of some bad dreams about a dragon. She lies between them, one hand allotted to each parent, her thin legs touching theirs. Her helplessness makes them feel strong. The comfort she needs is entirely within their power to provide. They will kill the daft dragon if he dares to turn up around here.
They watch her fall back to sleep, her eyelids trembling a little, Dobbie tucked under her chin. They stay awake awhile, moved because they know their little girl will have to grow up, leave them, suffer, be rejected, and have her heart broken. She will be out in the world, will long for reassurance, but will be out of their reach. There will, eventually, be some real dragons, and Mama and Dada will be quite unable to dispatch them.
It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are—beneath the bluster—intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation and forgiveness.
We’re well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness, and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we’re slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.
It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.
The Limits of Love
Rabih and Kirsten’s first priority with Esther and William—it is ranked infinitely higher than any other—is to be kind, because everywhere around them they see examples of what happens, they believe, when love is in short supply: breakdowns and resentments, shame and addiction, chronic failures of self-confidence and inabilities to form sound relationships. In Rabih and Kirsten’s eyes, when there is insufficient nurture—when parents are remote and domineering, unreliable and frightening—life can never feel complete. No one can hope to be strong enough to negotiate the thick tangles of existence, they maintain, without having once enjoyed a sense of mattering limitlessly and inordinately to one or two adults.
This is why they strive to answer every question with tenderness and sensitivity, punctuate the days with cuddles, read long stories in the evenings, get up to play at dawn, go easy on the children when they make mistakes, forgive their naughty moments, and allow their toys to remain strewn across the living room carpet overnight.
Their faith in the power of parental kindness reaches a pitch in Esther and William’s earliest years, particularly at those moments when they are finally asleep in their cots, defenseless before the world, their breaths coming light and steady and their finely formed fingers clenched around their favorite blankets.
But by the time each of them turns five, a more complicated and troubling reality comes into view: Rabih and Kirsten are, to their surprise, brought up against certain stubborn limits of kindness.
One rainy weekend in February, Rabih buys William an orange remote-controlled helicopter. Father and son spotted it on the Internet a few weeks before, and since then they have talked to each other of little else. Eventually Rabih caved in, even though there’s no impending birthday or gratifying school mark to justify the gift. Still, it will surely provide them with hours of fun. But after only six minutes’ use, as the toy is hovering over the dining table with Rabih at the controls, something goes wrong with the steering, the machine collides with the fridge, and the back rotor snaps into pieces. The fault lies squarely with the manufacturers but, sadly, they are not present in the kitchen—so, at once and not for the first time, it is Rabih who becomes the target of his child’s acute disappointment.
“What have you done?” shrieks William, whose sweetness is now very much in abeyance.
“Nothing,” replies Rabih. “The thing just went berserk.”
“It didn’t. You did something. You have to fix it now!”