Like viruses, the insults of a young child evolve more rapidly under pressure. Weaker variants—”Daddy, you are not good at talking!”—are bested by the rational defenses of a parent’s adult mind and fall by the wayside. Inevitably, though, a random mutation will yield a more potent strain—one, perhaps, that pokes at Daddy’s advanced age. That mutant will in turn evolve, growing more and more annoying as the child gains purchase on the parent’s deepest neuroses. This is what we traditionally refer to as “pushing buttons,” which makes it sound like Kina has some sort of conscious control over me. Quite the opposite—she literally cannot help herself; she is evolving to become more capable of casually destroying me.

All weekend, as Kina has spun on her heels and called me “old man”, I’ve struggled to find the proper response. She seems moderately annoyed to be called a “baby”, but it’s barely effective. Worse still, it is embarrassing to be caught trading insults with a person who still can’t tie her shoes; there is too much to lay into, which really makes you question, generally, the morality of insults. Sometimes I tell her that it’s hurtful to call somebody “old”, even as I recognize that’s the point of the insult, but I want her to understand what she’s poking at.

What is she poking at? I’m not that old. I’m certainly older than I once liked to be, and older than I was when she was born—when I felt slightly too old to be having a kid in the first place. I do not go jogging with my child as younger parents appear to. I will never be mistaken for Kina’s older brother. I can’t spin her around like a carnival ride and skip off like I have a fully functional inner ear. Still, I am young enough to carry her around on my shoulders for long stretches. I am old enough to be able to reflect on her inner demons and fears, and to have the patience to negotiate with them. I am young enough to chase her around the running track (for a bit). I am old enough to feel capable of balancing my career and my parenthood.

Kina has not really understood Valentine’s Day before. When prompted to reflect on past Valentine’s Days, she offered that those were the days on which her nanny Hannah gave her two of her favorite stuffed animals—both of which are holding puffy little hearts. She doesn’t have a particularly sophisticated outlook on love, has never had a crush on anybody, and hasn’t really experienced the strange ritual of in-school card exchanges. There has traditionally been nothing to grasp onto, and so the day is principally about stuffies.

She has a slightly more focused perception this year of what the day is meant to be, in that she now realizes that Valentine’s Day is about chocolate (true) and nice flowers (sometimes) and drawing nice pictures for your friends (optimally). Unfortunately, this is all unfolding in a year in which friends are literally few and far between. She got a little heart-shaped pen and a card from her friend Sloane, and Hannah gave her a bag of snacks (which was extremely well-received), but school is still on Zoom and our celebrations of love are largely confined to quarters. We talk sometimes about the kinds of treats that her friends might like, and whether they might appreciate a little drawing of themselves—which we then produce, writing their names in chaotic jumbles with the little heart-shaped pen. We will convey these cards to their intended recipients, but it will not be as huggy as a four-year-old Valentine’s Day should be. We do our best to sustain.

Kina’s notion of love is broad and permissive. It does not take much for a child this young to express her love. That expression has a very low cost and an extremely high return, people are generally very nice to kids, and children hold fewer grudges and biases. I sometimes think about how the scope of your friendships changes as you grow—as your love for those who are close to you intensifies as your fondness for those who are more distant diminishes. In my twenties, I could be friends with almost anyone. Today, the bar is high. What happened to me? I want to be as expansive with my love as Kina is, but my trust in the world is just more fragile than hers. I can’t remember the last time I sent a Valentine to anybody other than Laurea, but I have a bunch of unicorn-themed cards that Kina will be scrawling her name in. I could steal a few; maybe it would feel good.

As a child, I learned that there were rules that came with the celebration of Lunar New Year: eat noodles, no haircuts, kids get money, forgive transgressions, everybody be nice. I’ve tried to convey these rules to Kina in the last couple of New Year cycles, but some are landing better than others. Let’s just say she’s good on the noodles.

In the United States last year, we didn’t lose our Lunar New Year the way China did. This is, accordingly, the first official Chinese New Year of the American pandemic, and so it carries with it a little bit of extra grief, requires a lot more forgiveness. A lot. The burden that we’ve felt, and that Kina is feeling, as The Long Year drags out is hard to shake in the way we need to. Add to that a four-year-old who hasn’t napped, and you can see how so we are all rubbed a bit thin and exhausted. Sure, Kina is not always at her best—to herself or others—even on Chinese New Year. Who among us, et cetera.

A new year is supposed to mean something, to reset the board. It’s a fallacy, of course, but we hope that if we all believe it, we can trade against that sense of jubilee, like fiat currency. The only reasonable way to succeed at the psychological game of New Years is to admit that nothing has changed, and that you are simply making a choice—to eat noodles, to give gifts, to be nice. As a Chinese-American, you get two of those chances in under two months to make a choice. Have I made good use of those choices? Perhaps not. Can you blame me?

When I was a little kid, about Kina’s age, I had an imaginary friend. I think his name was Norman. I don’t remember being able to see him, but we went bowling together in the living room of our house and we would play together in the sandbox. He was a perfectly nice imaginary friend and a great comfort to me, but I imagine it would be slightly creepy to have been aware of him at the time. Kina also has friends, but they are monsters, and they live in the shadows behind us when we tuck her in at night. She whispers to them so that they don’t eat us. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice and good company to her as she falls asleep, but I wish she would wait to speak with them until after we leave her room. Maybe she could take them bowling.

dad

The kid now knows she has bones, at least two, likely more. Not sure what she’d do if she knew how many there actually are. I’m in my mid-forties and still don’t know them all. Bones are exhausting.

No moral of the story. Take the night off, folks.

dad

Last night was epic. Vexed by her inability to go to sleep in a reasonable amount of time, Kina fell into the dangerous middle space between overtired and enraged. At ten o’clock, we found ourselves on the floor of her bedroom, holding her gently while she whipped her body around in exhausted fury. In between sobs, she would issue sharp, quiet gasps—a tic that she’s had since she was a few months old (and which freaked me out intensely when it first happened). As she wept, she screamed repeatedly, “I want to take a break! I want to take a break! I’m tired of this roooooom!”

This landed as a mild insult, because we have spent the last year and a half really decking out her room to be perfect. It is far nicer than the room Laurea and I sleep in, and we often muse about what it would be like to switch rooms. It bears noting that we have slept in the same room for an extremely long time. If our relationship to our bedroom were a person, it could vote in an election for Best Room—and it would likely vote for Kina’s awesome room.

I have never slept in a bedroom for this long. When I was growing up, my family moved around all the time, and it wasn’t until I moved into this very apartment that I finally stayed in one bedroom for as long as Kina has had hers. Novelty, for me, is tedium. On nights when I cannot sleep, I sometimes try to find something in the room that I’ve never seen before—a particular shadow or shaft of reflected light that will pull me out of whatever spiral of thought is keeping me awake. Sometimes I just stare at the curtain rod on one of our windows, which is mounted just perfectly to project a diffuse pinhole movie of the outside world, smeared across the ceiling. The shifting of the light makes for a new room. I wished, last night, that I could convey that to Kina.

Mornings are when we share our dreams. Our entire family has been dreaming more frequently in the last few months than any time in recent memory, and some portion of our breakfast time lately is spent updating each other about the dreams we dreamt ourselves the night before. Kina seems to read this as competitive storytelling, which leads to some outrageously detailed dream logs—but it is impossible for me to assert that she did not in fact dream that her ice cream was stolen and that I was eating a huge plate of eggs as quickly as possible. That seems plausible, in a genre largely composed of the implausible. What is the difference between a dream she invents for me and one she (unwittingly) invents for herself?

By that measure, I have no way of knowing what it would mean for a four-year-old to dream, but we suspect she’s doing what we think of as “dreaming”. She started talking and moaning in her sleep when she was much younger—a spooky reminder of the mysteries of child development, but a good sign that we have a normal little dreamer. At the time, I wondered what she might be dreaming of, if she knew what dreaming was, how a kid that small might distinguish waking life from dreams, and what it means when the spectrum of your lived experience includes events that your brain makes up from plain cloth.

The last year has done strange things to my dreams. I’ve come to cherish the classic David dreams: staying in a massive and dimly-lit hotel, but not knowing where my room is; taking elevators that go sideways; jumping great distances with little effort. More recently, those dreams have been complemented and amended by the pandemic: working in a crowded office with people singing karaoke; taking the wrong train; having long conversations in restaurants. I’m not sure whether to interpret these new dreams as nightmares or not—they’re not entirely unenjoyable. I wonder what my toddler mind is working out. My waking pandemic existence and my dreamy post-pandemic existence run together in a continuum of mundane neurosis and absurd complacency; after I leave the mess of this world behind, I get a little time to take the mask off, eat lunch with friends, and leap over shopping malls.

We did not watch the Super Bowl™ last night. During your average playing of America’s football championship, Laurea and I escape for a dinner on the town with nobody around, marveling at how many people really love sports. Kina, who knows what sports are because her seven-year-old friend Julian plays all of them, finds them mildly amusing but also annoying, in that they prevent her from playing with her best friend—and Julian’s sister—Sloane, who has to tag along with her brother. The end result is that Kina is aware of sports and their effect on her life, but tries as much as possible to avoid them; this is also how her parents feel.

So, this morning, when we explained why Kina’s friend (and fully-grown Tampa resident) Des was so excited by the Super Bowl®, we also had to explain what the event was, why cities were involved, and that the whole thing was about football. Kina was stunned. Why would adults, with so many other options for what to do with their time, play sports? “That’s so silly!” said our perfect and intelligent daughter.

Will I sign her up for kids sports, in a wave of neurosis regarding her gross motor skills, one year from now? Probably. Will it make me enjoy football, hockey, or baseball any more than I do now? No, unless she is dressed in an enormous padded suit and staring idly at the sky while her opponents run straight past her—just like her parents learned to do when they were small.

I want to tell you about two of Kina’s friends.

The first friend is Panda—a stuffie given to her two years ago by our downstairs neighbor Arcangel. Panda is a panda, with all the trappings of a panda, but he has emerald green eyes that have been scuffed up in the dryer from all the banging around, giving him a lived-in look that fits with his general scruffiness. Panda has been among Kina’s favorite stuffies since she first met him, despite his humble origins at the local dollar toy store. She’s loved him literally to pieces—he recently burst a seam between his head and torso, leaving a hole that grew larger as time went on, because Kina would soothe herself, somewhat disturbingly, by hooking her finger into it. Until very recently, we had been thinking that his days were numbered.

The second friend is Kelvin—the owner of the dry cleaning concern on the corner of our block. About a year ago, when Kina got really into careening down ramps on her scooter, she would end her outdoor routine with a stop at the front door of Kelvin Cleaners, where she would wave briskly before shoving off down their access ramp. After only a few weeks, the crew of guys who work there (who are not generally friendly people) started rushing from the back of the shop anytime Kina showed up, so they could wave back at her before she sped into the distance. Over time, Kina took to waving both on her way out of the building and on her way back home, which has made Kelvin and his staff her very best neighborhood friends. The other day, I took her winter coat down to Kelvin for a cleaning, and he grilled me for a full two minutes on the quality of her backup jacket. In twenty years, I have never gotten an overnight turnaround from Kelvin, but Kina did.

Kina’s bedroom door opens onto the kitchen. It’s covered in paintings she’s made, and it doesn’t close easily, because the floor of the kitchen is warped in places from leakage that predates my arrival here. When the door is properly closed, you have to really budge at it, and so when we close it, we leave it cracked open just a couple inches.

For the first two and a half years of Kina’s life, that’s how we’d leave it at night. We’d say “good night”, give her a kiss, and pull the door closed. Early on, she had no concept of what darkness portended, and so she had no objection to it; an open door and a closed door don’t signify much when doors are meaningless. By the time she was two years old, we’d have to call out to her through the gap in the door to make sure the light was okay—which it nearly always was. She liked to see a sliver of light from the kitchen to remind her that we were outside. Doors meant separation, but the gap in hers could let the idea of her parents through. If I’m being honest, I liked it open when she was little, so I could look in on her and make sure she was okay on a night when she was sick, just to make sure she hadn’t tangled herself in the blankets. I was a nervous father (am I still?) and the open door gave me access to her.

Still, after a while, we all got used to the closed door. It wasn’t until late 2019, before she turned three, that she wanted it kept open. She fell into a horrible multi-month sleep regression (an episode I alluded to briefly on December 11th) that started in a vacation rental, as she wept in the shadows of an unfamiliar room; she’d suddenly grown afraid of a darkness she now better understood. By the time she got home, she refused to let us close her door at night, insisting it be kept wide open with the kitchen lights as bright as they could shine. We’ve since gotten her back to a normal sleep schedule and bedtime ritual, but the door cannot—under any circumstances—be closed.

Kina is eating a lot of snacks lately, because she is a Big Girl, and she is very particular about her choice of snacks, by which I mean: she demands that she be able to put her hand in a crate full of snacks to physically grasp one. This crate-of-snacks thing is not how I thought things might play out—like many idealistic urban parents, I imagined we would be the carrot stick house. As it turns out, we are the house with a snack crate in the pantry. This crate holds a few snacks—some crackers, rolled fruit, Bunny Grahams. I will sometimes walk into the kitchen and see her standing in front of the open pantry door, staring at the crate of snacks and waiting for one of her two parents to bring it closer to her.

“What do you want?” I ask her.

She grunts and points at the crate.

Kina is pretty heavy now, which means that playing the “Oof I’m Pregnant” game with my four-year-old kid is an ordeal. My sense of things is that the way I felt after carrying a thirty-pound child around the apartment for three minutes—nestled in my stretchy waffle knit shirt with her Baby Rainbow Cat stuffie—is equivalent to roughly a day of walking around with a seven-pound baby inside your actual abdomen. Kudos to the pregnant people.

It was not always this hard to carry the kid around. When she was small, I used to toss her into the carrier and spend a whole day in the city; she’d sleep, I’d eat, we’d go to museums. It was like being a paranoid tourist, except instead of a Jansport backpack hanging off my chest, it was my progeny. Until very recently, I could carry Kina on my shoulders for an hour at a time, but I’ve started to feel like I’m boring myself into the earth as we make our way around. I feel sad about this! Now she walks everywhere and is generally less whiny, which is everything I wanted when she was dependent and whiny.

This morning, when she demanded that I stuff her into my shirt and carry her around like a baby, I felt my back giving out, but I also felt the warmth of her head on my torso and the weight of her body in my arms as I waddled around. It reminded me of the week she was born, when she was still smaller than a person ought to be, her cheek resting on my chest. She, who had spent her entire existence surrounded by a body, found comfort in that moment in being pressed up against mine. I don’t know what it was that gave me comfort—the same lingering memory of parental contact or the sense of purpose in sharing my own warmth with Kina.

It must be strange to be a child, having everything you need provided for, and yet somehow always being obsessed with the various freedoms you don’t have. I want sometimes to tell her about getting older, and the moment when you realize that the comforts people take away are not replaced with more satisfying forms of freedom. In the category of obvious things that seem curious to parents: It’s interesting to observe that the craving for independence is so deep seated in us, that the instinct to go your own way is human nature—and that we encounter it at such a young age. On one hand, I find myself asking why we have evolved to need independence so badly all the time; on the other, I am troubled by the notion of “an obedient child”, and what that archetype suggests. Kina is a good kid, to be sure, but I’m comforted by her fierce annoyance at the (very reasonable) constraints we put on her life and behavior. We need her to be strong, and we want her to yearn for more—even though we do provide for everything, and I could honestly use a little complacency some days.

Sorry, Buster. I wish I could tell you it gets better. You’ll get stronger. We’ll let go. Maybe.

dad

Every morning, sometime between five and six AM, I can hear Kina through the wall that separates our two bedrooms, furiously banging around as she prepares her morning tableau. I try to sleep through this, but I know that the banging is invariably followed by the sound of her running through the kitchen to our room, her entrance statutorily permitted by her wake-up clock. As the light streams through our door, she breathlessly announces that “the light is green” and that she has a beautiful surprise for her mother. Laurea, still groggy, follows her into her bedroom, where she is granted the very first look at Kina’s daily panorama. Recently, this panorama has included:

• an array of treats, including various ice creams, three kinds of cake, and four pieces of chocolate

• a picnic blanket on which various delicious foods are laid out for Mommy’s enjoyment

• Three cups full of green puffballs placed at the center of her room

• Two Lego telephones, each with a tree attached to it, for important conversations

It is not always true that we are surprised by Kina’s offerings in the morning, but the ritual she employs in their construction is impressive, and it’s good to start the day by honoring that ritual (rather than, say, by watching her go to the bathroom). It’s not like anybody else I’ve ever lived with has offered me an ice cream cone while I’m still asleep. The gesture is touching, even if I’m far too sleepy to enjoy an ice cream—and the ice cream is made of wood.

Remember snow days? I have a distinct memory from my childhood of wading chest-deep in snow, liberated from the tyranny of desks and food in trays, recognizing in the falling snow the existence of the Divine. I also remember my parents running around with me in the cold air, our footsteps muted; on a really big snow day (like today), they took the day off, too.

You know what the internet did? It stole our snow days and replaced them with the opposite of snow days—a day in which you must work and also care for your child while they work. Contemporary parents may recognize this as “the thing we have been doing since last March”. The modern snow day, in other words, is a pandemic Monday. We have replaced the best kind of day with the worst kind of day.

As the fluffy stuff piled up in great blankets outside our windows today, Laurea and I were trading Kina time—helping her through school, making her lunch, painting, watching Frozen, and attempting to take her out to play in the miraculous snowy landscape that she loved so much last December. She loved it! Remember? Today, not so much. On two occasions, Kina returned sobbing from the great outdoors, deeply concerned about the cold (for which, dear reader, she was amply clothed). No snowmen were assembled, nor angels smooshed out.

Ever since the start of the pandemic, I’ve taken great pleasure in going to the bakery. This is a sharp departure from my prior relationships with bakeries (note the generalizing plural), which could best be characterized as occasional cookie dalliances. This bakery is, in fact, a single bakery—La Bicyclette in Williamsburg—that I had overlooked for several months prior to the onset of the current pandemic, because I did not pay attention to bakeries. I have visited this bakery more than any other bakery in my life. I have purchased more numerous and varied bready products at this bakery than at any other bakery in my life. This is now my bakery.

I realize that I am not alone in my renewed interest in bread. It’s clear not only from the block-long line in front of La Bicyclette, but from similar lines (literal bread lines) in front of other bakeries, from the legendary home sourdough boom of 2020, and from wildly popular Instagram bread-delivery accounts that are semantically identical to those of drug dealers. Bread, and the bakeries that produce it, are the signature pandemic vice of the gluten-tolerant. I spend too much money on bread, but it calms me down, and you can’t judge me.

On my average trip to the bakery, I buy a couple laminated pastries, something savory, and a giant crusty loaf of bread, whose long-fermented crumb is mildly tart and perfectly tender. For several weeks during the summer, though, we would stop at La Bicyclette on our way to the beach for a giant bag of bread, which may not sound to you like the absolutely amazing idea that it actually is. You eat the croissant in the car, take a few bites of a baguette with little boulders of gruyère baked into it as you wait in traffic, and then rush down to the sand (leaving the country loaf packed tightly in a paper bag in the trunk for the morning), where you and the family can rip apart two ham sandwiches with your teeth while going back and forth from the water to your beach towels. After several hours of swimming, during which you gradually consume a handball-sized pain sportif, you will have three madeleines tucked away in the side of your beach bag for a treat on the way home. This is all so much better than oversalted chicken fingers.

While I’m on the topic of games, I would be remiss if I did not mention the multiple daily games of hide-and-seek played in our household; in fact, it is shocking that I have not yet discussed this most important form of quarantine entertainment. Kina seldom goes more than two hours without playing hide-and-seek—which, if you saw the size of our apartment, might prompt you to ask, “but how could you find enough hiding spaces to make the game fun after a full year in the same five rooms?” Reader, I ask myself that question every single day.

There are exactly ten hiding spaces in our apartment, which I will share with you as long as you promise to keep them to yourselves. They are:

1. Behind the puffy coats hanging on the door in our entryway

2. Underneath the table in the living room

3. Behind the chair in the living room

4. Behind Kina’s bedroom door

5. Behind the curtain in the corner of Kina’s room

6. Behind our bedroom door

7. At the foot of our bed

8. Hiding under the blanket in our bed

9. Standing on the stepstool in front of the mirror in our bathroom

10. In the shower

Kina and I have a game we play, in which various celebrities and household friends attempt to wake Queen Elsa from a feigned deep sleep. In most of these games, she is flying on an airplane to Italy and sleepy because she has eaten unlimited gummy bears. It is assumed that she will not be easy to wake; still, should her competitor succeed, the penalties are enormous. This game is related to, but distinct from, a game I have talked about before in these pages. In that game, the penalty for waking Baby Rainbow Cat is that the waker cannot stop farting. In this one, however, you are frozen forever by Queen Elsa in a block of ice.

It seems strange that we have a game in which the entire goal of the offensive team is designed to result in a debilitating existential penalty. The closest analogy I can think of is boxing, except the loser in this game is always predetermined (and is never Kina). My favorite part of “Queen Elsa En Route To Milan” is the part where I feed her imaginary gummy bears. My second-favorite bit is simultaneously playing the part of the antagonist and pretending to be the flight attendant who warns the antagonist to leave Queen Elsa alone, on pain of petrification. My least favorite part is pretending to be frozen while Kina walks out of the room, expecting me to be in the exact same position when she eventually returns. My second-least-favorite part is the repetition, once she does return.

It is fun, I have learned, for kids to play games in which their parents pretend to be grievously injured or frozen forever. The exercise of control and wanton abandonment of care feels like a tender bud on the thorny branch of adolescence. “She is training to leave us behind!” I fret, and yet she calls me back for the eighth time to be melted and feed her gummies as she takes her seat in business class. Maybe it’s just an elaborate revenge fantasy, punishment for whatever trivial constraint I’ve put on her in the last day. Maybe she just likes Frozen.

The reluctant puker has returned to form, having navigated a wiggly final night and one last low-grade fever. With the morning came our standard 6:24 green-light wake up call and a chipper young girl with stories to tell, of Des and Andrew playing banana basketball and Daddy going to space. She’s picked up some of the rhetorical quirks of good gossip, like saying “and here’s the funniest part” and putting her hand on your arm as she really drives it home. Would a four-year-old in actual school with actual kids be telling stories like a local neighborhood matron, leaning out of her first-floor window and smoking a Virginia Slims? I only have one four-year-old, so we’ll just have to see if kindergarten is full of neurotic little adults next year. I’m just glad she’s keeping her food down.

Child Eats Bland Foods

Speaking of which: After a day of eating plain rice, Carr’s crackers, and porridge, Kina’s just about fed up. This morning, she insisted on some frozen mango just to stir things up. We acceded to her request, bracing ourselves over the next hour for a spray of fruit. The gods smiled on us, and she’s spent the rest of the day cautiously testing the waters while sipping Pedialyte. We appear to have weathered the storm, which means that Laurea and I will also eat food with color for the first time in 48 hours tomorrow. A BRAT diet, they call it. No comment.

Be forewarned: I say the word “puke” a lot in this one.

It started with a tummyache, shortly after dinner. This is, on most nights, how Kina tells us she needs to go to the bathroom, but a visit to the potty yielded no meaningful result. After her goodnight kiss, more complaints of a bothered tummy, which probing suggested was likely constipation. We offered Kina the standard guidance on post-sleep poops, and Laurea and I made our way off to bed.

Three hours later, the pukes began, as they did the last time she got sick, over a month ago, but with more projectile vigor and drama. I’ve stripped both our beds in the last twenty-four hours, have cleaned the entire bathroom four times, put the kid through as many sets of pajamas, and am currently running a huge load of laundry in the basement. She will, to be clear—and this goes out especially to her grandparents—be fine.