Humor - Joel's Toddlerhood

Watching the Son Rise

by Karen Williams - April 28, 2006 - Seminole Chronicle

My son Joel will soon graduate from University of Miami law school. People say, “I bet you’re so proud of him!” I nod, but he didn’t need to go to law school to make me proud – all he had to do was survive. In fact, as he receives his sheepskin, I’ll run to him, grab him by the cap-and-gown, and cry, “Promise you’ll never again do anything more dangerous than get a paper cut!”

Flashback: Joel was a mischievous toddler – Attila the Hun meets Bart Simpson. Through a series of unwelcome circumstances, including divorce and chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease, I moved back home with my parents, bringing mellow son Smitty and rambunctious Joel along.

My parents were in their 70s, and I was sicker than a dog on D-Con. It took everything we had to cope with Joel’s shenanigans.

Joel the escape artist would drag a kitchen chair to the back porch screen door, climb up, undo the hook-and-eye, and exit the house. Thankfully the door made a loud “bang,” so off we’d go – my parents and I – out of breath and bumping into each other, trying to capture the tot before he made it to the edge of town.

My dad installed another hook-and-eye high on the screen door so that Joel, even on tippy toes in his Star Wars boots, couldn’t undo it.

At least until there was a “bang” that informed us Joel had cracked the code. An old mop, lying on the back porch floor, had been used to push the hook out of the eye on the door. When I spotted him, Joel was toddling down the middle of the street. It was the one time I ran faster than Jackie Joyner-Kersey.

Further installation of door locks prompted me to frantically check the windows one day when Joel was nowhere to be found. “His theme song should be ‘Over the river and through the woods from grandmother’s house I go,’’’ I muttered with chagrin.

After ten minutes of terror, I noticed a pair of red corduroy overalls on top of the refrigerator and a little boy inside them. “Omigosh, what are you doing UP THERE?” I screamed. With indifference, Joel turned to open a high cabinet containing canned goods.

Climbing onto a chair, I demanded the trickster deposit himself in my arms, which he did, only after he’d grabbed a jar of my mother’s home-canned tomatoes. It was as if he needed a souvenir of his climb. We never determined how he got up there. It became one of the sweet – or acidic – mysteries of life.

In weeks to come, a ball took out the dining room light fixture. Curtains and their rods collapsed on the floor after failed climbs. A cabinet full of figurines bit the dust when Joel attempted to ascend the shelves. A metal cabinet in the kitchen, holding the relics of decades, met a similar fate.

Sometime between the mysterious slash in the living room carpet and the bald spot that appeared on my parents’ dog’s rump, my usually sweet-tempered mother confronted me: “Don’t you DARE die from that cancer and leave me to raise Joel. If you even THINK about it, I’ll kill you!”

At my next chemotherapy treatment, I told the startled doctor to double my dosage.

“I MUST live to raise my child, “ I explained bravely, suspecting that no one else would touch the job with a ten-foot pole – or even a long-handled mop.

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