Small children are creatures of habit. They thrive on repetition. Having been in the parental mindset for three years now, I’ve learned to stay on this side of sanity’s fine line by joining in (read: giving in) to these routines.
A devoted reader of this blog, I’ve come to accept that many of my fellow contributors lead exhilarating lives—embarking on cross-country hitchhiking adventures, teaching in faraway countries, daring to dwell in NYC—but lest I romanticize these experiences, I recognize that habit features largely in these lives as well.
So let me impart my particular experience with habit. Fatherhood is more than I ever dreamed it could be: full of humor, quirks, tears, and love. But you better believe that habit and repetition mandate the everyday. Take a look at the banner picture accompanying this post: see Liam (two and a half) and me fiddling with Legos? Activities such as this make up large chunks of my day. I count myself fortunate that I love Legos, puzzles, tower blocks, and the like; look closely, though, and you’ll see a certain glaze over my eyes. Switching to autopilot is an easy temptation in such tasks, but autopilot as a default setting is a dangerous mode—to do so would be to risk missing out on my kids’ slow-but-steady learning and on the day-to-day joy of being a dad.
The tricky thing is, however, that my boys seem distinctly in tune with endless routine. Oliver (four months) would have me play peekaboo for the better part of, oh, forever. And Liam doesn’t just play with blocks and Legos and refrigerator magnets; he repeatedly dumps out and refills the containers with their contents. He’s not so much as creating as he is organizing, arranging, and distributing with an enviable methodical flourish. He loves to sing, a habit he absorbed from both Charis and me. So he’ll sing the ABCs on a loop, a ditty that doesn’t even register in my ears until he hits “J” (give it a month and it’ll be “M”). When we go to the zoo, we begin and end at the sea lion per Liam’s request, and we watch (Liam with glee, me with those glazed eyes again) the sea lion’s own routine of swimming in circles around the figure-eight tank.
Countless examples. I’ll resist sharing them all, restraining my proud daddy impulse of talking an ear off about my kids. I’ve waited to post about them for three months, after all. Rather, I will outline my bulwark against parental lassitude. I’ve adopted Gertrude Stein’s stance that, “I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.” This declaration comes from her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” in which she develops her take on repetition in the creative/compositional process, but her sentiment is readily applicable for everyday life as well. It’s easy to balk at her phrase, especially given her characteristic writing style, but it carries some undeniable practical import. In place of repetition, Stein offers “insistence” as a viable alternative in citing the necessity of an expression’s emphasis: “…if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”
Neglecting the emphasis of this mode of insistence robs the novelty of experience. Such is the nature of habit—disregarded and emptied of observable significance. What seems like repetition appears so because we’ve stopped noticing the small changes and developments within life. Nothing is ever emphasized twice, nor repeated in exactly the same way, with the same insistence. And it is this mindset that keeps me shaking off the blinders so that I can notice—and marvel at—the moments of life, especially those two that I’m thrilled to have been charged with. And with that, if you’ll excuse me, a bucket of Legos is waiting to be filled.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
So, Gertrude Stein, how do you feel about being quoted as a parenting expert?
Gertrude (back from the grave): WHAT??!!!
Oh, yes. After all, a kid is a kid is a kid is a kid.
Thanks, Jacob; this helps.
I spend every other day at home with my own Liam (age three), and I often find the repetition of his activities and questions monotonous. I have a rule against checking email, FB, etc., while I’m with him, but find that I’m equally distracted by gazing absently out the window, playing the guitar, or even building with Liam’s own Legos. (Straight truth: I’m still way better at Legos than he is.)
But your point here brings me back to a truth I often have to make teaching Renaissance literature (or any literature, really): imitation isn’t the same thing as redundancy. I need to think more about how that bit from my classroom works in Liam’s playroom.
Heraclitus: “No man can step into the same river twice. It’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” (The same also applies, I’m reasonably sure, to women.)
Happy to share my thoughts. And I can definitely relate to your experience with monotonous questions, too! It’s like the Schrödinger’s Cat of toddler inquiry: “if I ask the same question THIS time around, maybe I’ll get a different answer.”