Through the Eyes of Children

By Melissa Ludtke

KATIE DAVIS ENJOYS READING stories about kids who are a few years older than she is. As school ended for the summer, she started Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater. "I love it," Katie says enthusiastically. "It's about a boy who is twelve. He's remembering last summer when he was eleven and his parents were away. He's left with his sister, but then his sister goes away for the weekend with these hippies at a camp. I don't know yet how it ends but maybe, because of the title, the boy will meet a lizard that makes music with a flute."

An imaginative world of fantasy complements the otherwise complicated and often hectic pace of Katie Davis' life. Much like the boy in Lizard Music, Katie will be spending the summer hanging out with her half-sister Mona Wessels, 16. "It was weird when Mona came to live with us," says Katie. "It was like a new person, like we're adopting someone because you are taking someone from your family who doesn't live there into your family again. It's a funny feeling. It's nice but it's kinda weird."

Katie is the only child of Bruce and Mary Davis. He is a doctor, and she is a family nurse practitioner. Both work at Seattle's Group Health Cooperative. Mona is Mary's daughter by a previous marriage. Two years ago, Mona moved out of her father's house and settled in with the Davises, as had her older brother Jason, 17, a few years earlier.

Now Katie and Mona spend a lot of time together. Before school let out for the summer, Katie was sometimes picked up by her sister from an after-school day-care program and walked home. This summer Mona and Katie will take field trips around Seattle while the Davises work. Katie and Mona will travel to the zoo or the aquarium or the science center on city buses. Or because they share a passion for reading, they will walk to the community library and find more books. "Mona teaches me all this stuff," says Katie, who asks Mona to dress her up like Madonna, or mousse her hair to make her look like a punk rocker. "I mean, I probably am not going to have cigarettes when I grow up because Mona says she was really addicted to them and it was hard for her to quit," says Katie. "She'll beat me up if I ever smoke a cigarette."

Katie is an energetic, bubbly girl with sunny, shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes that shine from behind jet-black eyelashes. Last year she wrote and illustrated a book (one copy in circulation so far) with the tongue- twisting title Xavier Xanax Excitedly Xeroxes X-Mas Xylophones and X-Rays in Xanadu. It is subtitled A World Alphabet Book, and all 26 letters receive similar treatment. In a blurb about the author, she writes, "Katie Davis lives in Seattle, Washington, in a house of five. And whenever she gets lonely she just goes off to play with her puppy, Taffy . . . and a lot of times her friends get in fights so she has to make them friends again. She has gone to many places like Disneyland and Disney World."

Katie is a day-care child. To her generation of children, day care is as familiar a destination as Disneyland, if not nearly as magical. During the fall, winter and spring, Katie goes to day care before and after school each day. Because of Mona's presence, Katie has had a brief reprieve. Says she: "I used to go to day care all summer. I didn't look forward to summer then."

When the Davises' work schedules and Mona's after-school activities made it impossible for anyone to be home when Katie's school day was done, her parents put her in full-time day care. "Some children Katie's age go home with a key, unlock the door and wait for their parents to come home," says Bruce. "With Katie at day care, there is clarity about where she is going to be after school. I don't feel great about Katie being in day care, but I do feel safe."

Until Katie was three, her mother stayed home with her. But both parents knew that the longer Mary remained away from her nursing career, the tougher re-entry would be. Her salary pays for Jason's and Mona's private-school tuitions and will help with impending college costs. "A lot of women give up a career and they can never get back," says Bruce. So Mary resumed work, part time at first, and Bruce rearranged his workday to fit better into his daughter's schedule.

Katie thinks about how things might be when she has children of her own. "I'll probably do it the way my mom did. If I'm already working and married and everything when I have a kid, I will ask my bosses to save my place for two or three years, if they can do that," says Katie. But she also has a plan in mind if she does not have a job. "Then I'll probably stay out of work for a few years, stay home with the kid and then get a job and maybe get a baby-sitter."

At times during the school year, Katie spends ten hours away from home each day. After rising at 7 a.m. and downing a breakfast of Lucky Charms, she buckles herself into the front seat of her mother's Volkswagen Jetta for the two-minute ride around a sharp bend and up a steep hill to the red brick Montlake Elementary School. She stays for an hour in a kindergarten classroom where the Community Day School sets up shop each day before and after school. At 9 a.m. she joins her third-grade classmates at Montlake. When the school day finishes, Katie circles back to day care, where she stays until 6 p.m.

Katie clearly does not like day care. "A lot of times it gets really boring just going there," she says. "It's the same setting and usually the same things to do. I wish every day they would have a different setting, one day have a jungle look and the next day have a different look because it really gets boring." At day care, there are no Disney tapes to push into the VCR, as there are at home, no video games to play. She cannot invite friends over to her house, nor can she go to theirs. Worst of all, she cannot disappear by herself into her bedroom and play with her toys or work on her next book. "I would love if I could just stay in the attic," she says. "There's a little room in my mom and dad's closet. There's this little door to get in. It is really fun in there. They have all these old literature books and poetry books and drawing books. It is like a big library, and I could just sit there and read all day."

Sometimes when she's feeling unhappy at day care, Katie starts to imagine that the other children do not like her. She suffers from attacks of what she calls "aloneness," a feeling she rarely has when she is at home alone. At day care, Katie's mood alternates between detached boredom and rapt anticipation. One moment she is like an engine revving up, fast and eager. Then she lapses to a slow idle. Whatever internal rhythm Katie is moving to, it is set against a steady background beat of group activity swirling around her.

Staff members at Montlake Community Day School try to come up with new ways to entertain and stimulate their charges, about 20 kids who range in age from five to eleven. Every day there are fresh art projects, and occasionally there are puppet-show premieres. The children construct large forts out of masking tape and tightly rolled newspapers. There are sing-alongs and story sharings at snack time.

No matter how creative the entertainment, however, the children find it hard to keep going, going, going as they head into the final stretch late each afternoon. "For ten hours a day, these kids have to interact with about 20 or 30 kids," says Katie Humes, who takes care of the children at day care. "Imagine if we adults had to constantly be trying to get along with that many people. And then some parents come expecting to take their kid to gymnastics or some other lesson. And they wonder why the child is crying. It can all be too much."

Toward the end of the day, the slightest twist on the doorknob is enough to get a sea of tired eyes to look up. As parents arrive to pick up their kids, Katie quickly looks up to see if it is her mom or dad. Most kids have a pretty good feeling for what time their parents normally appear, so when a parent is late, a child becomes anxious.

Katie is looking forward to this summer's break from day care. But she already misses her classmates, and in a way she misses her school too. For inside Montlake something exciting is happening. Over the past three years, LaVaun Dennett, Montlake's principal, reorganized the school schedule so that the average class size could be reduced from 28 to 20 without adding a single faculty member. More time is now spent on reading and math, which kids do according to ability, not grade. Katie's skills in these subjects are far beyond the third-grade level, so she takes those classes with older children.

A few months ago, Katie and Mona wrote a rap song about Montlake after the school board considered closing it down for budgetary reasons:

Montlake School is the neatest around

And if they tried to close it down,

Tell it like this, Tell it like that,

Montlake's the best and that's a fact.

We're all good friends. We like each other,

Just like we're sister and brother.

If you're looking for a place that's great,

Why don't you try Room Eight.

Room Eight is where Mrs. Liz Holmes presides over a class of 20 third- graders, including Katie. At 9:20 one winter morning, Katie was at her desk reading The Babysitters' Club by Ann M. Martin, when Mrs. Holmes said, "Give me five!" She employs this playground greeting as her way of getting the kids' attention. Katie placed a bookmark where she stopped reading, folded her hands squarely on her desk and focused her eyes on her teacher.

This morning Mrs. Holmes wanted to talk about an argument she had seen during recess. "Now if some of you feel you are spending time with kids who break school rules, you will learn bad things," she said. "It might look macho. It might look chic, but we know better . . . You have choices to make. So grab for happiness. You're smart. Be wise. I love you and worry about you all the time. I want you to make good choices."

In Katie's classroom there are children who return each afternoon to homes shattered by broken marriages, drugs, alcohol and sometimes violence, including child abuse. "These kids live in stark reality," says Mrs. Holmes. "For most of them school is a sanctuary." The boy who sits beside Katie was addicted to methadone at birth. About half of Montlake's students come from single-parent families. About a third of the children qualify for free hot lunches, meaning that the family's income falls below the poverty level. Nearly half the students are black, bused in from neighborhoods far away under a voluntary desegregation plan. Where they live, Katie is unlikely ever to visit.

Katie knows how fortunate she is. "My family always goes on some great trip, and it really makes me happy," she says. "But a lot of the kids just stay home, sitting on the steps in the hot sun, moaning and groaning and not having anything to do. It would be nice if the people who run the airlines would at least let them travel for free."

Officer Alex Thole wears a silver badge identifying him as a drug/alcohol officer of the Seattle police department. He is at Montlake to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program. "We've got kids in the third grade using alcohol and marijuana," says Thole. Other children are confused because parents or relatives abuse drugs or alcohol. And the kids do not know how to respond. One girl whose parents smoke marijuana wrote a note to Thole telling him she did not know what to do. He helped her bring up the subject with them.

Katie has learned a lot from watching her step-siblings survive adolescence. A few years ago, Jason was involved with what Mary calls the "wrong crowd" of teenagers who were abusing drugs and alcohol. One member of that group is still a crack addict. For a time his crowd dressed in black and talked constantly about death. "We thought we had lost him," says Mary. Then Jason moved from a huge public school to a smaller, private one. He was in the school musical, recently won a Rotary Club award for Service Above Self in the community and spends a lot of time with Katie and the family.

Jason's difficulties taught Katie that to "Just Say No" is not always easy. "A lot of kids say, 'Well, when I grow up and anybody comes and offers drugs to me, I am not going to take them,' " Katie says. "But when the time happens, you really get freaked out. They say, 'Come on, man. Take some.' You don't know what is happening, so you do. Most people say they won't, but they do."

Can Katie think of a way not to accept? "If I had a bunch of people with me, like some older kids, then it would be pretty easy to say no," she responds. "But if I was alone, then I probably wouldn't think about what is going to happen to me when I get older. I would just say yes or no. And I would say whatever comes out. It's like that's what happens. That's really scary."

Until recently Katie never went to sleep without her father taking her on a voyage of fantasy. Katie recites the stories as though she heard them last night. "Once there was a girl named Princess Leah, and her cousin Princess Katie came to a party she was having for her birthday. They hd just finished playing pin the tail on the shooting star when out of the sky came a space dragon, and it came down and took Princess Katie up with Princess Leah to the star castle, and they were captured."

Now her father gives Katie a back rub before she goes to sleep. This is no ordinary back rub. It is an imaginary exploration of people, places and things. As he draws with his fingers on her back, she guesses what the image is. He begins with rubs and pats, flips and blips. These are names Katie and Bruce invented. Then it is on to frizzlies and scritches, bumpillies and square-illies, name-illies and picture-illies, initiallies and real, which is the real back rub. When Bruce does a picture-illie, for example, his finger draws an object on her back. "Then I imagine it all in my head," says Katie. It can be as simple as a waterfall.

Then Katie rolls over in the bed her father built in her room under angled ceilings on the top floor of their cozy brick, gingerbread-looking house. Her Barbie dolls are stored safely in their pink footlocker. Her snuggly stuffed animals are placed carefully around her. On the floor next to her bed is a pile of books awaiting the dawn of another gloriously unprogrammed, day-care- free summer morning.