Monthly Archives: January 2008

I was told that during the weeks that I was away Caitlin was quite well behaved.

She would greet her elders (my parents, siblings) in the mornings, sit quietly and eat on her own during meals- just generally being a happy kid (sans the occasional “I want my Daddee” breakdowns).

Since coming home, she seems to have dropped all these traits, reverting to her somewhat rude and stand-off-ish stance, as if my presence immunes or exempts her to mind her P’s and Q’s.

For example, with Daddee in the same room / sitting beside her, her good behaviours seem to go out the window; constantly requiring reminders of “Please say ‘please’”, “What happened to your manners?”, “Hey, you forgot to greet so-and-so”…

And, come bedtime with the lights off, she gets into a sombre mood of not wanting to sleep. “I don’t want bad dreams“; and bad dreams she does get. Everynight since I have been back, she’s been very restless in her sleep, sometimes exclaiming “I don’t want!” or sentiments to that effect.

Come morning, if she is awake like this morning before I leave, she doesn’t want to let me go to work. Only after some coaxing that I will definitely be home after work will she relent. Last night I was to attend an adults-only dinner, she broke down not wanting me to go…

After this dinner I got home to sneak into our bedroom. She actually wasn’t asleep yet, and upon seeing me at the doorway she immediately breaks down. I had to calm her down in order to understand what she was trying to tell me. It was the same story, that she was afraid of having bad dreams again, and I guess seeing me she saw an outlet to vent her emotions (anticipation, fear? frustration?)

My feeling? She’s also not been handling my absences from her very well.

It is as though she was just hanging in there, tolerating the silent “suffering” of my long absence, the people around her (whom she wasn’t very familiar with), the new rules, and the occasional uncontrollable outburst “Why so long!“…

Or am I just over-psycho-analysing?

That was one of Caitlin’s exclamations on why I was away this long. “Why no ticket??” was her reaction when a response was offered.

To me, when I got home from the airport so late the previous night and seeing her already asleep, I recall thinking then that she seemed so big, bigger than how I remembered her. It was like she’s already grown somewhat during my few weeks away… It’s like I am living out what people say about their subjects when they have been away for a while..

So I spent yesterday with her. Before dawn on this day, she was awake and finally acknowledged my return home; even though throughout the night she was awaken by what I can only guess are nightmares & the occasional coughing, not really reacting to my voice, my reassuring patting on her back, my presence.

“You (have) come back..”
“Yeah; Daddee’s home..”
“Mummee and Babee?”
“Mummee and Babee are still in Australia, Daddee came home first..”
“Oh…”

Daddee was somewhat warmed to her quick one-two questions; given it was the first thing on her mind upon waking, & her anticipation of Mummee and Babee..

Throughout the day she pretty much wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She wasn’t clingy, but she was needy. Her afternoon nap time came around, and yet she was only asleep 3 hours after her established daily pattern, even though whilst coaxing her to sleep I myself had dozed off a few times. She wasn’t bugging me to do stuff with her- she just wouldn’t settle down and lie down, looking for excuses to do stuff like cleaning and blowing her nose repeatedly. During mealtimes she had also wanted to sit closer to me, almost touching (I know she would have preferred that!)

Last night, though, I had to tell her that Daddee was going to have to go (back) to work the following day. She seemed okay with that. Perhaps it was a glimpse of her accepting (back) the way things were…

I will humor her neediness to an acceptable extent, for I think she needs to adjust to the fact that I am home now, on top of the few times I have explicitly told her that I am home and not going anywhere anymore… for now.

I have snippets of Caleb’s first few minutes in the world. I was watching Caitlin watch (the footage of her) younger brother for the first time on my laptop.

Words cannot express the look of astonishment on her face, her reaction and imitation of when Caleb was pushing with his tongue the (amniotic?) fluid out of his mouth, his first cries and her palm on the laptop screen, stroking the image and uttering “It’s okay Babee.. it’s okay…”

Ann over at Autopsy of Ann has experienced it recently, when she started dropping her bubs off at child care before work.

You guys would know that Caitlin and I are very close, and that I recently have had to be in Sydney for a few weeks, away from her.

I don’t know if having brought her to Sydney once before (a short trip during Christmas) was a good idea; in that now she knows where I was going, the same place(s) she enjoyed while she was here.

The days before my departure I started preparing her for the news. It didn’t go down well. She completely understood the implications and started crying wanting both to follow as well as not wanting to be separated from me.

In absolute terms, I am not sure who felt more pain, only that one of us was in better control of our emotions.

Earlier last year my older brother had to go to London for a week or so from his family; this is a family whose members do not usually travel alone, and that usually travelled together on holidays. Like me (or I, like him; depending on how you see it) he is also very close to his daughter. So during his absence they were texting each other regularly, making his absence less impacting.

But of course, with Caitlin only being 3 yrs old texting was out of the question for us. Neither was online-chatting.

I can still recall during university days my elation when I discovered I could email my sister living in Singapore. This was the early 90′s mind you, when the rest of my family in Malaysia still didn’t know what an “internet” was. This was a phenomenal paradigm shift for me. It meant doing away with aérogrammes forever. But the biggest impact was the speed of delivery. My sister and I were soon carrying a conversation with the “reply” button.

In today’s terms, I guess a similar shift would be a technology that allowed life-size holograms of your subjects to appear infront of you, to carry on a live conversation… maybe it’s already here?

But in the present with Caitlin, I had to rely on my brother’s help in setting up his gear for video conferencing. He has broadband at home, & I had to get a webcam to be able to chat with his, from Sydney. Luckily webcams are cheap; the RM80 (thereabouts) one I got looked decent enough compared some slightly more expensive ones in the store.

It was a consolation, and for a toddler who still accepts things & circumstances unconditionally, Caitlin did not complain about the pixelation & lag time in the video. She was having a conversation with her Daddee many miles away from her. I made sure that my camera was physically close to the window of her image on my screen, so that I appear (almost) to be looking at her in her window on her screen. It didn’t matter for Daddee that she wasn’t looking into the camera (at me); Daddee was also having a conversation with her.

In our conversations, we talked about what she did during the day, if she had been good, Mummee & Daddee missing her.

But most importantly we recalled what was talked about when we were together. Toddlers like pattern and familiarity. I am pretty sure it made her days pass easier.

But it didn’t do it for Daddee though…