When I met her three months ago, Buttercup was reserved to the point of being completely passive. She let other kids grab her toys. She listened to adults speaking to her, but usually didn't respond and never answered with words. She spoke only in a whisper, and only to her sister. She cried only under great duress, and then ceased almost immediately. She was almost bald, peed in her pants and then sat in the dirt, and her face was not expressive.
I wrote in one of my first posts that I would just wear her for a few months and see what happened, and that's has kind of been the case. At the beginning, she was so uninterested in engaging, and her sister was so very interested in engaging with me, and her now-brother was so defensive of my time, that probably the most meaningful thing I did was just pop her in the ring sling so her body was next to mine as I went around and tried to avert chaos among all the other orphanage children. She neither sought out being carried nor avoided it, and she did not actually cuddle me. She spent the time (on my left side, which is near the heart and apparently scientifically proven to be a special place for bonding -- but is also the natural place for a right-handed mother to place her baby, especially when she needs to do things with her hands) sitting there staring at me. The first thing she was brave enough to bother to touch was the gold-ish sling rings, which she fingered very carefully and solemnly. She watched the older girls fiddle with my hair, and then stared at it hanging down near her, but she didn't touch it until I moved her fingers up to it. Then she solemnly and quietly explored the strange, bright texture for some time.
It took two or three weeks before she spoke to me, when we were walking outside with her in the sling. I kept trying to talk to her, even though she was so expressionless, and she got the idea that I like flowers (which I do). The whole walk, she would suddenly say in her tiny voice "fow-ah" and I would agree and praise her. It also took that long before she let her body relax against me. Once when I arrived at the orphanage she had just been badly knocked over and was crying disconsolately, and I immediately went over and put her on my lap and she soothed a little. I tipped her head to rest on my chest, and she let it stay there. That was the first thing that was close to a cuddle. It took more than another month until she reached out for me.
I do believe touch is magical, and that children's need for it is incredibly deep. I think she needed to feel safe and listened to, but I think most of all she needed to be held and held and held. I think she had all her babyhood need for touch just stored up and waiting, a deep hole that we just need to take the time to fill. Once she started to be able to count on this basic nurture, even though at the time I could only hold her for a few minutes or an hour, and not even every day, her actual human-ness started to emerge. Still at this point she is spending hours every day wrapped on me or in the sling, and significantly more time sitting on my lap and just being carried back and forth.
By the time she moved in with us, Daddy arrived, and our relationship was almost at the three-month stage. A charming and happy personality was starting to emerge. She laughed and loved pony-knee games, she was highly adorable when she copies every little action we make, she was admirable when she tries to do little chores around the house. When I took the older kids out on a morning errand, she sat next to Daddy and ate breakfast and chattered away in Luganda the entire time. Besides, she's clean and no longer peeing all over herself, growing hair, smiling, and generally adorable. I was mentioning how wrapping Buttercup helped me to bond with her, and Mark, surprised, answered "actually, I think she's pretty easy to bond with." Well yes, I suppose this version of Buttercup is pretty easy!
Now we're coming up on a month of living together, and what have we now?
I think it might be a two-year-old. Almost.
Instead of watching quietly and carefully copying me stack the stacking cups, she takes the bag and shakes it in delight, watching the little pieces fly all over the room. Instead of thinking that "in the bag" is the best game ever (in fact, it was almost the only thing I could get her to do at first), she turns around and refuses to help when it comes time to put it all away. She is realizing that she has opinions -- a great number of them, in fact. She has even found her preferred method of expressing them: shrieking loudly and flipping her body over backwards while turning into a limp strand of spaghetti. I'm sure she has not had much chance to practice the screaming spaghetti act, but she's really a natural at it. Although I'm sure an American toddler could probably show her a few more tricks to keep up her sleeve!
Now she screams possessively when her big brother or sister grab her toys away from her. (Hard on the ears, but good progress, and a good lesson for them.) When she hurts herself, she starts to cry and runs towards me for a snuggle and a kiss. In fact, she's getting so good at this interaction, that when she just banged her fingers a little bit, she fussed a little bit and held her hand out for kisses; she trusted that she could use a smaller request for a smaller owie and that I would still respond to her. She likes to throw toys, and then throws a fit when I take them away. She wants to grab randomly at everything around dinner time, and screams and thrashes when I limit her freedom by putting her in the wrap. (Then she snuggles in and enjoys her good view of all the action, and singing songs together.) She likes to climb up on everything she sees, and falls off of half of it. She wants to do everything her big brother and sister do, and her mother has to pick her up and bring her back inside where she won't fall down the stone steps and off the railings, and then she screams and flails, and attempts to sneak out the door as soon as mama's back is turned.
Does this sound kind of like a two-year-old you know? But she still isn't quite.
I don't think she really knows how to play, or to engage herself naturally in any way. Encouraging independent play, and thus independent thought, in my children has always been very important to me. Unlike many American children, she doesn't expect to be entertained, but she doesn't do anything else, either. Imitating adults, especially doing household tasks, and throwing things, seems to be about the natural limit of what she has explored. In the last few days, the older children have started playing well together, so I've been letting them run around together. But a lot of the time, they are playing wildly outside, and neither of them are able to be aware of how to protect her from hurting herself, or not to run off at full tilt towards the other side of the building, leaving her confused and alone. Or, they are playing something that the local toddler doesn't understand and messes up, and Hibiscus calls "mama, take for Buttercup." (I think it's a positive development that she wants to play independently of her sister and trust me to take over Buttercup's care.) So Buttercup has been left inside to play with me while I am doing something. I try to get out a toy and start her playing with it, but she usually just ends up wandering around. She is content to sit on my lap and watch me do whatever I'm doing, even though typing on the computer or reading something is surely not actually interesting for a toddler. Maybe she holds something and kind of bangs it up and down. It's not real play.
She also doesn't seem to know how to engage herself in coloring. She did it with the older kids a few times, so I know she technically understands that she holds the crayon in her hand and scrapes it around the paper, and she actually has asked for "coloring" a few times. But once she has the crayons she picks them up and puts them down, and then after a little bit starts to throw them. Similarly, she has started to play with a toy for a minute or two, but then distracts herself and wanders away. I have seen her focused on something for an extended time, so I know she is capable of it, but it's like she doesn't know how or why to turn that part of her brain on. Maybe she just needs more snuggling and learning about safety and love before she's ready for thinking and playing and creating.
As I said, I want my kids to develop the ability to play and think independently, so partly I philosophically don't want to be on the floor providing entertainment by sorting wooden fruit or having stuffed animals wave to each other or something. I've read that sometimes you have to teach children with deprived backgrounds how to play, but I'm also not sure there's a reason to do it myself. After all, she lives with some of the world's experts on play: kindergarteners. They are providing excellent natural examples all day long, and I don't think I could improve on it by deliberately acting in a way that isn't natural to me. Besides, whether or not it's an admirable reason, when the older kids are occupied and the little one is calm, I am tempted to just get something done -- or just do not much at all, as the case may be.
She also doesn't really know how to ask for things. So far, she's developing the ability and desire to say "no," but rarely to request. I'm not sure if she doesn't technically know how to ask (she can use the words, but how to frame a request), or she doesn't know she is allowed to want things, or she simply doesn't know what she wants.
Actually, as I have been writing this, she has been engaging in some of the first genuine and age-appropriate play that I've seen. She's sitting next to me at the table, and she found some lego wheelbarrows from the basket the older kids had out earlier. She wheeled them back and forth, and we gradually added a few little things to put in the wheelbarrows, and another little vehicle. She took the wheels off and had me put them on again. She wanted a little man and handed me another little lego man, and we had them say "hello" back and forth a dozen times and moved onto "how are you." She bounced them up and down facing each other. She put things in and out of the wheelbarrows and named their colors (incorrectly) and counted them (randomly). It is toddler repetitive and in-and-out play, not preschool imaginitive play, but that's normal and she initiated it and stayed involved in it for a long time. I was near her and she liked interacting with me, but it came about naturally and she was the real initiator. (It's not that I have some weird idea about never playing with my children at all, but that I don't want them to both depend on me to for ideas, and to get the impression from me that there are "right" ways to play.) Maybe the instinctual good-ness of this kind of natural play led to other natural interactions, like how when I took a picture and put the camera away, she asked me to bring it back. In Luganda, which I understood, by the way! And then she started saying "my Daddy," and I found and showed her a picture of Daddy. Oh, how her face glowed with smiles! Then I got out a book with family pictures and she flipped back and forth and she pointed to pictures and said "Daddy" and "dog," and I agreed. That's quite a lot of asking for interacting and receiving it and coming up with ideas and discussing them.
Maybe we've got a new version of Buttercup on the way!
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