It takes parenting a small child to appreciate just how upside-down and inside-out it can turn you.
You find yourself saying, and doing, the craziest things – all for the sake of a little peace and quiet that you are most unlikely to get.
For example, when my boys were little, I wanted to start them off right, with good work habits that would last a lifetime. So when my first-born came home after his first day of kindergarten, I had a work station all ready for him, complete with paper, ruler, and plastic cup full of crayons.
After a healthy snack of cheese and crackers, I said, “Here’s the deal. You don’t get to go outside and play until your homework is finished.” A kindergartener has very little homework, of course, but at least the precedent had been set.
But a scant three years later, his little brother started school, and this was a different child entirely.
He wanted to “do homework,” just like his brother – but I knew he needed a break before sitting at a desk again. “No homework for you,” I had to tell him, sternly, “until you’ve been outside to play.”
“Do you hear yourself?” my husband asked, home one day from work. “How is it good parenting to be so inconsistent?”
“You know what else is good parenting?” I said, turning to him with gritted teeth. “Not getting yourself strangled – I mean, cheerfully supporting the mother in whatever wacky thing she has been driven to say.”
John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, understood this. He said. “Before I married, I had three theories about raising children, and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.”
I have a framed picture of a toddler in mid-tantrum – outraged because his father and I committed the utter atrocity of making him put on a coat before going outside to look at the stars, one snowy New Year’s Eve.
He had absolutely refused to let us help him with it, so he had gotten it on backwards, with the hood standing up in front of his furious, tear-streaked little face. The only thing more outrageous than wearing a coat, apparently, was wearing it correctly.
A few years later, this child fell in love with the McDonald’s toy version of Inspector Gadget. I had to break every rule of healthy eating and seek out McDonald’s establishments near and far, to collect enough pieces to assemble one complete Inspector. We were almost finished when my husband called, breathless, from work. “They’re discontinuing the Inspector Gadgets!” he exclaimed. “There’s only one week left to get the final piece, and not every franchise even has them.”
This was disastrous, because the one piece we had yet to collect was the head.
My children didn’t seem to care; they were happy staying in pajamas in front of the TV. But I knew that they would care, and bitterly, the second it was too late to correct the problem.
So I jammed them into outerwear and loaded them into the car. As we zoomed up Glen Cove Road to the nearest McDonald’s I knew of, I explained to my dumbfounded offspring, “No! We are NOT staying home for a healthy meal! We are going to McDonald’s, because Inspector Gadget needs a head!”
I don’t honestly know if they ever cared. It didn’t matter. We weren’t going to have an Inspector Gadget meltdown – not on my watch!
When you’re dealing with family logic, it can look a little topsy-turvy …but that doesn’t make it any the less valid. Take what the advent of Digital Video Recording did to me. Each of us passionately followed a different show. But the children insisted on keeping the machine fully loaded with episodes of Mythbusters and Spongebob Squarepants. They had the DVR at full capacity at all times – which meant that somebody’s show had to be erased for anyone else’s to be recorded. Doing so, of course, resulted in full-throated denunciations:
“You erased my program! I hate you!”
“There are 87 more episodes, how can you possibly miss one?”
“That was the most special one! I never got to watch it!”
Years of training in debate avail you naught. Instead, you find yourself yelling back at the little hellions:
“Okay, listen up! Nobody gets to do a lick of homework until you have each watched at least one television show!”
Walk a mile in my shoes before you judge me; that’s all I ask.
