Your three year old son asks you for the sixth time today if you can go get him the googly-eye glasses now, right now? You stall him for the sixth time, telling him that it’s impossible to go to the googly-eye glasses store at the moment because the Charlie and Lola video is due back at the library today, and you’ve got to go to the library to give the video back to “the man,” who is waiting for it. He looks at you skeptically, and then asks when will you be getting him the googly-eye glasses, if not today? You tell him you’re not sure. Your stomach churns nervously, anticipating a noisy meltdown. You try to distract him. You remind him that there are many, many videos that he can borrow from the man at the library, once you’ve given the Charlie and Lola video back to him. He thinks about it for a moment and then announces that he wants bring home some Baby Einstein videos. You smile and nod and say, “Okay, Sweetie,” knowing you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. Your son got to hankering after the googly-eye glasses when he saw some kid wearing them in a Baby Einstein video. Every time he sees a Baby Einstein video, in fact, there are about ten new toys he wants to add to his Wish List.
The Wish List was a total fuck up on your part to begin with. Your mom friend in the play group meant well when she suggested the Wish List at the park district pool that morning, when your boy kept pestering her to let him play with her waterproof disposable camera, and she said, in her teacher-like way, “I know, has your mom started a Wish List for you? Maybe you should put this on your Wish List.” She meant well, but then you went right home and got the pen and notepad out and actually started a real god damned list. And when you saw your mom friend a week later at the drop in play center, and told her that you now had a Wish List about a mile long and you were wondering how she managed her little girl’s Wish List, she gasped and exclaimed that no, there should never be an actual list, an actual piece of paper; the Wish List was only to be a nebulous, talked about thing that acknowledged yet appeased your son’s cravings. So then you told her that this was kind of a crucial piece of information to leave out, that there wasn’t supposed to be an actual list, and she apologized and tried to make you feel better by telling you that a paper-based Wish List was probably a really great reading and writing awareness exercise for a three year old. Which is all well and good, but now the whole thing is a royal pain in the ass and you’re the one left holding the bag, or more accurately, the List.
You’ve discovered they’re a bunch of master tricksters, these three-soon-to-be-four-year-olds. They’re so damned talkative, and they throw around such big words, that you start to think you can actually have a real conversation with them. So you try and tell them things, like how toys cost money, and it’s just not possible to buy every toy in the world. But they just look at you like you’re stupid, and tell you that if toys cost money then you just need to bring your wallet with you to the toy store. There. Problem solved. So then you try and appeal to the Philosopher in them and suggest that maybe it’s better not to have every toy in the world, anyway, because they could never actually play with all of them, or they might get bored with all of them, and they wouldn’t be excited about playing with anything anymore. You pose to them that maybe the penguins-going-up-the-steps-and-sliding-down-the-slide game that they love to play with whenever they go to their little friend’s house wouldn’t feel so fun and special if they had it to play with every day in their own house. But they don’t get that line of reasoning at all. They just yawn and ask you for some more juice.
The Wish List was a total fuck up on your part to begin with. Your mom friend in the play group meant well when she suggested the Wish List at the park district pool that morning, when your boy kept pestering her to let him play with her waterproof disposable camera, and she said, in her teacher-like way, “I know, has your mom started a Wish List for you? Maybe you should put this on your Wish List.” She meant well, but then you went right home and got the pen and notepad out and actually started a real god damned list. And when you saw your mom friend a week later at the drop in play center, and told her that you now had a Wish List about a mile long and you were wondering how she managed her little girl’s Wish List, she gasped and exclaimed that no, there should never be an actual list, an actual piece of paper; the Wish List was only to be a nebulous, talked about thing that acknowledged yet appeased your son’s cravings. So then you told her that this was kind of a crucial piece of information to leave out, that there wasn’t supposed to be an actual list, and she apologized and tried to make you feel better by telling you that a paper-based Wish List was probably a really great reading and writing awareness exercise for a three year old. Which is all well and good, but now the whole thing is a royal pain in the ass and you’re the one left holding the bag, or more accurately, the List.
You’ve discovered they’re a bunch of master tricksters, these three-soon-to-be-four-year-olds. They’re so damned talkative, and they throw around such big words, that you start to think you can actually have a real conversation with them. So you try and tell them things, like how toys cost money, and it’s just not possible to buy every toy in the world. But they just look at you like you’re stupid, and tell you that if toys cost money then you just need to bring your wallet with you to the toy store. There. Problem solved. So then you try and appeal to the Philosopher in them and suggest that maybe it’s better not to have every toy in the world, anyway, because they could never actually play with all of them, or they might get bored with all of them, and they wouldn’t be excited about playing with anything anymore. You pose to them that maybe the penguins-going-up-the-steps-and-sliding-down-the-slide game that they love to play with whenever they go to their little friend’s house wouldn’t feel so fun and special if they had it to play with every day in their own house. But they don’t get that line of reasoning at all. They just yawn and ask you for some more juice.
You’ve briefly turned over in your mind the idea that you could make your son work for his Wish List. You could create some arrangement whereby he puts away his toys every night for a week, for example, and at the end of the week he could get one small item from the List. But, who are you kidding, you’ve never been such a highly functioning parent, and you have no desire to start being one yet. You just got through potty training, for crying out loud. Well, you’ve almost just got through potty training, because he still asks for a diaper when he needs to take a crap. But, hey, he actually goes into the john and craps in his diaper in the john with the door closed, and for right now, that’s good enough for you. No, you just need to be a parental couch potato for a little while. After potty training, you’ve earned it.
So you start to simplify things. You start to throw your weight around. You tell him no when he asks for new toys. You bamboozle him for a minute, when he asks you why, and for once you don’t try to explain it to him. You just say because. He’s not getting the toy because. He looks completely stumped for about 20 seconds. Then the noisy meltdown begins. And now, depending upon the day, on your mood, on how much sleep you got the night before, anything can happen. You could let him have the 12 daily meltdowns, if you’re nerves can take it; he eventually gets over them. Or you could give him a Dum-Dum sucker, which you’ve started to keep a small stock of at the bottom of your purse, and that’ll quiet him down for a good hour or two. Or you might try to bribe him with armloads of preschool videos, borrowed from the man at the library. It all depends on the day. On your day, on his day.
You’re trying to keep it all in perspective. You’re hoping it’s a phase he’ll grow out of. You’ll just try again to appeal to the Philosopher in him in another year or two. Or maybe, when he’s five, you’ll have the energy and focus to make him do chores for money, and he can start saving up to buy his own toys. You shudder and cringe at the notion that this present state of affairs could go on for another year or two, but you lived through eight years of George Bush. You made it. You tell yourself all you can do is take it a day at a time, and hope for the best. Wipe the slate clean every morning and begin again. You hope that when you do get ultra frustrated from time to time you won’t do any lasting damage. You hope the kid’ll find himself a good therapist when he grows up.
You don’t think you have any left over childhood trauma over toys and Wish Lists. About the only thing you can remember really, really wanting was a bike, which you got for one of your birthdays – your eighth, or ninth, you can’t remember which. You remember having a pretty specific picture in your mind about what you wanted: a pink bike with fringe hanging down from the hand grips, and a little white woven basket to go over the handlebars, and a bell, and a white glitter banana seat, and multi-colored spoke covers that sounded like chimes when the wheels spun. You remember your parents got you a dark green bike with a black banana seat, and no basket. But they did get you a packet of spoke covers, you remember, and you were happy about that, even though it took fucking forever to get them on the spokes and for some reason they didn’t seem to have quite as cool a chiming sound as the other kids’ bikes did. And now, thirty plus years later, the Philosopher in you actually recognizes that the damn spoke covers were the real birthday gift; that your overworked, overtired, overwhelmed parents actually went the extra mile to find a packet of god forsaken multi-colored spoke covers at the Zayre, or the Venture, or whatever the hell discount store they bought the bike from.
So see, you tell yourself, maybe if you go to that stupid Magical Mystery Tour gag gift store out on Dempster, the place where your smug thirty-three year old ass bought that roll of toilet paper that said “OVER THE HILL” for your forty-year-old brother in law that one time, maybe if you take your now forty-four year old ass out to that stupid store, the only store you can think of that might have googly-eye glasses for sale, and get your now unappreciative son the googly-eye glasses for his birthday, maybe thirty years from now your son will remember the googly-eye glasses, and how you had to go to that awful store to get them for him, and maybe he’ll raise a glass at his birthday dinner, and toast his mother, and all the wonderful things she did for him.
Then you laugh, and tell yourself to take off those fucking googly-eye glasses you insist on seeing the world through, and you go to take your little boy to the library, and you vow to finally check out that How To Take Back Your Life When Your Three Year Old Has Stolen it Out From Under Your Nose book you’ve been meaning to get all year long.
