Fears That Make You Smile

by Beverly Beckham
Sept. 9, 2009

I can see it from her point of view. Literally. I walk into the bathroom, kneel down, look up, and the cow on the wall does appear to be glaring at me.

“I no like. I ‘fraid,” Charlotte says, beeline-ing it past this bathroom and actually detouring — walking through the dining room and living room — to get to the steps that lead upstairs.

Charlotte is 2 and short like a fire hydrant. And the cow, though not real and not even three-dimensional — it’s painted on the bathroom wall — does loom over her. So I respect her feelings: The cow can look a little menacing.

Knowing this, I attempt to reassure her.

“The cow is smiling at you,” I tell my small granddaughter. “She likes you, Charlotte. She is a very nice cow.” But Charlotte is buying none of this. My spunky little Charlotte who is not afraid to climb on boulders and over fences, who jumps on and up and down and through just about anything, who picks up worms and ants and spiders (and sometimes pretends to eat them!), who swaggers through life doing all of the things the bigger 5-and-6-year-old kids do, wants nothing to do with this big stuck-on-the-wall inanimate, acrylic, huger-than-life heifer.

“Cow scary!” she insists as she climbs the 13 steps to the upstairs cow-free bathroom.

I shake my head and laugh because the cow was never meant to be scary. Quite the opposite. The cow and the sheep and the rooster and the duck with her ducklings and the pig and the mouse and all the little spiders and bees and butterflies and flowers lovingly painted on the walls by Sarah Bonnanzio three years ago were meant to be entertaining and fun.

I’d seen Bonnanzio’s work at the Public Library in Canton, Mass., where I live and where she’d donated her time and her talent. And I called her because I had a tiny space that I knew she could make cheerful and bright.

And she did. She painted a pig over the sink and ducks over the toilet and a rooster over the window and cow’s backsides over the door and a great big solemn-looking cow surrounded by sunflowers over the towel rack.

Solemn, but to Charlotte scary.

The other grandchildren sang “EE-I-EE-I-O” in the bathroom when they were 2 and 3. They counted the butterflies. They buzzed like bees. They mooed and they oinked and they bah-ed. They loved all the animals. They still do. Not Charlotte. She hollers as she races by.

Avoiding the Area

For months we chuckled at all the racing and hollering and the more recently “I no likes.” Because, really, Charlotte not liking the cow was just a funny quirky thing up until a few weeks ago when she began to actually use a bathroom.

Before it was an occasional trip up the stairs to check out the bathroom just in case. “Here’s the potty. Want to sit on it, Charlotte?” And Charlotte, just like her brother before her, refused.

Now Charlotte is potty-trained and the upstairs bathroom is an issue because from the backyard — where we’ve been spending our time, where there’s a playhouse and a tiny blow-up pool, where the kids run around all day — there are 13 steps leading just to the house, nine to the porch. Three to the garage. And a single big step into the kitchen.

Then there are 13 more steps to the second floor cow-free safe zone.

Twenty-six steps up. Twenty-six steps down. Up and down. Up and down so many times a day!

“Maybe you should paint over the cow,” Adam, Charlotte’s 5-year-old brother said last week as I sat splayed out and gasping on a lawn chair.

Charlotte’s mother suggested draping a towel over the bathroom door, then pushing the door wide open. This actually worked. It covered most of the cow’s head and all of the cow’s eyes. “Look, Charlotte,” we trilled. “The cow can’t see you anymore.”

But she could see still the cow.

“Cow big!” she moaned, bolting out of the bathroom, and back outside, putting as much distance between her and the bloated bovine as possible.

No Cows, No Dogs

Last week she decided that she didn’t like the big stuffed black dog that has stood by my front door since before she was born. She used to like it. She used to sit on it! But not anymore. “I no like dogs,” she told us, furrowing her brow.

A stuffed dog and a fake cow’s face give Charlotte the vapors. But two live groundhogs that live under a shed in my backyard? Charlotte says, “They fun!”

She chases them and laughs as they disappear under the shed and she’d be poking at them with a long stick if we let her. “I see hogs?” she says and we say, “No, Charlotte, not now. Maybe they’ll come out later.” And she’ll sit and wait for as long as it takes, as long as she’s not near the cow and the dog.

Source: Grandparents

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