My Daughter Susie

Taking my family to the zoo is really an adventure; it can involve tears, physical assault, acute attacks of retail-therapy bingeing.

The adults don't assault the children, but sometimes my older child claws my glasses off my face and throws them to the ground. I become visibly flustered, and the reaction is like a stimulus; my son just has to see that turbulent look in my eyes again, and again, and again.

My husband is the main zoo-lover in the family; at a certain point, I will ask, "Would you like to ride the carousel today?" ....and this question isn't intended for any non-verbal members of the group. It's intended for the guy with a graduate degree from Harvard. My husband shrugs. "I guess I should," he says. "It's only two dollars."

Later, we stand before the prairie dogs, and Marc assigns a first name to each one of them. Susie demands to be hoisted from her stroller, not so she can study the wildlife, but so she can walk off into a crowd of hundreds of New Jersey citizens. She isn't shy--and she has her own agenda. How maddening to have to deal with a lap restraint while the adults pretend to be fascinated by a sleeping, immobile "wolf" no bigger than a dog.

We in this house like to shop, and it seems that any zoo visit ends with an expensive Christmas-ornament purchase. The tree has belugas, elephants, lemurs, gibbons, red pandas, seals, turtles, polar bears, penguins, giraffes, yellow labs, tigers, rabbits, zebras, dolphins, sloths. This year we have limited ourselves to just one purchase (so far) -- it's a small porcelain border collie, with a little green scarf. I'm proud of our mature cost-cutting.

"Susie," says Marc, "I've gotta take you to the Africa section! It's pretty great--and I'm telling the truth. I'm not lion!!!!"

This is my life.

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