February 4, 2002 I know she's 20 months old and kids that age are an armful, but she is starting to be really difficult, too. She is into everything. You tell her "no, baby" and she persists. We've finally taken to giving her a diaper swat to get her attention. Her favorite thing to do by far is to stand in her high chair, in lieu of eating. If we strap her in, she Houdini's her way out of the thing and grins at us, while standing, of course. Yesterday, I was rushing around to get ready for skiing. I'd pulled open a couple drawers looking for clothes and ran into the bathroom to take a shower before determining what I wanted. I'd left my drawers open, in my hurry. As I was getting ready, Mike brought Genny in because she was missing mommy. I gave her a hug and a kiss and put her down. First, she took my bowl of cottage cheese and fruit and despite my protestations, managed to drop the whole thing all over the floor. Mike came in and started to clean and I groaned and ran into the shower. As I was drying off in the bathroom, I heard Mike tell Genny,"No, baby!" and looked out in time to see my highboy dresser crash down onto the floor. Mike plunged his arm into the back of the dresser, through the particle board back, and pulled it off of her. I stood there paralyzed because he was right in front of me and I couldn't help her as fast as he could. Hearing her scream was the best damned noise in the whole world, though. She's not dead or unconscious if she's screaming -- scared shitless maybe, but not dead. We kept checking her head for bumps and we looked her over for bruises. Amazingly enough, she was fine. I don't know how, but she was fine. We had her go with Russell into his room to play while we cleaned up the catastrophe left in the wake of Hurricane Genevieve. I was in a towel, crying and shaking and picking up all my jewelry, knickknack boxes and stuff off the floor and I heard myself say to Mike as he picked up my drawers,"Shit, she's worse than him!" Mike quietly said,"Maybe she's got *it*, too." Oh, the infamous *it*. I replied more quietly,"Maybe so." Then we started talking about Mike's younger brother who has Tourette's syndrome and the genetics of things. Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I asked Mike,"Do you really think she has *it*?" In the quiet room, I heard him say,"I don't know, honey." For a second, I flashed to my early adulthood, remembering years of abusive relationships, bad money management, drugs, and the accompanying haunting of those things for years and years (and still). "I sure, hope not," I said, purposely hiding behind the bathroom door, quietly holding back tears. I realized last night between freezing my ass off and hunting for covers, that I was nightmaring about her. I kept having an emergency sense of impending danger. I'd wake up and realize how cold I was and I'd go back to this horrible nightmare thing. As I brushed her hair this morning, I experienced my creepy tingle freakazoid thing about hair brushes. I had my hair pulled a lot in one particularly brutal relationship. After one particulary brutal episode I could feel my bruised scalp as I brushed my hair. So sometimes, when I brush my hair, it triggers these memories. As I brushed hers this morning, all of this was going through my head. I sprayed her hair carefully with detangler, pulled through the tangles, put a matching barrett into her hair and it brought back the previous night's dreams. I kept thinking about how much I want to protect her from all the rotten things I went through. I hope she doesn't have *it,* but if she does, I can help.
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