Fun With Play-Dough

   Recently, my daughter has been asking the tough questions. What brought this on, I’m not sure. Children grow in leaps and bounds; they’ll wear a size 5 for six months straight, then suddenly they’ll go through size six, seven, and eight all in three months. I guess their brains are the same way. Just this month, we’ve had to answer inquiries about the Holocaust, Menstruation, and the electoral process, to name but a few. Now she’s added the difference in life span between men and women.

This latest curiosity stems from the fact that both my husband and I still have one grandmother, as well as several great-aunts. Isabella is obsessively fascinated by the fact that there are no old men to be found in our families. We have a picture of my grandparents on their wedding day in the dining room; she often points at it and asks about my grandfather. She wants to hear the story about how he shoved a Nazi soldier’s head in the icebox when he came to steal food they didn’t have. She wants to know where he hid, and even though I’ve told her often I don’t know, she keeps asking. She wants to know why the flowers in the back are so scrawny, why the wedding dress was borrowed. She wants to know if he was in love with her (he was) and whether he was happy (not really, it was 1941; nobody was happy in 1941). She stares at his picture with such intensity that I wonder if she’s seeing something I don’t. Perhaps she wants some assurance that, once upon a time, he existed. I can understand that.

“Women live longer than men,” my husband tells her.

“Oh.” She ponders over that for a few seconds, then asks: “So by the time I have children, Uncle Martin will be dead, but aunt Majorie will still be alive?” Martin is my brother; he is 42.

“Your generations are a little off, honey,” my husband tells her. “When you have grandchildren, Uncle Martin will be dead, and Aunt Majorie will still be alive.” The answer satisfies her enough that she drops the issue for a little while. Sometimes that’s all you can hope for. Still, my daughter having more questions than we can answer is, I have to admit, a luxury problem.

Ever since Adam handed his best girl a leaf, there’s been trouble. I imagine it was at that point that the first lover’s quarrel took place; Adam no doubt picked up the wrong leaf. It was probably too small, and not exactly the right shade of green.

“Don’t you know that lime ruins my complexion?” Eve would have said, “I need earth tones, Adam! For god’s sake, why don’t you ever listen?”

And Adam would have thrown up his hands, sighed, and said: “Fine, find your own,” after which Eve would have stomped off to go pout and read her tattered copy of Mars and Venus, all the while practicing in her head what she’s going to say to him next time he shows his ugly face.

I wonder if things would have gone smoother if Eve would have just put her foot down and said: “Leaf? What leaf? I don’t need a leaf. I am not ashamed, and besides, the weather is fine. Put that down; let’s go for a walk.”

What a different world we could have ended up with. Just imagine, if we didn’t have to worry what to wear to job interviews, first dates, our wedding. There would be money left over at the end of the month, there would be no more need for dry cleaning, and everyone would go to the gym. Maybe, without that certain piece of fabric, Clinton wouldn’t have gotten caught; Madonna wouldn’t have been famous, we would have never had to put up with skinny jeans.

It would have certainly made a difference in our house. While my daughter changes in and out of clothes with the speed of a runway model, my son likes to leave it all behind.

I know; it’s great, they are expressing themselves. It’s just, when I want to go run an errand, and I’m faced with a child in a pink tutu with fairy wings and a purple boa on one side, and a completely naked child on the other, I can’t help but think: is it really so bad to leave very young children home alone? 

My son Mendel has slammed his mouth against the bar of the shopping cart. How, I’m not quite sure; I was looking for sandwich baggies and turned my back for a second. My husband, who was right next to him, doesn’t really understand it either. When little kids do something stupid, they usually move fast. We assess the damage; he cut his lip, so there’s lots of blood. His tears mix with the blood, and his face turns into something that would be more at home in a horror movie. Three employees gather around, an icepack is brought in; it’s the most excitement we’ve seen in a while.

The ice is cold and shocks him into silence; finally, we can hear each other and discuss the situation at hand. And that’s when it happens. One of the employees asks:

“Would you like to fill out an incident report?”

What? Me, an incident report? No! And admit that our child got hurt while shopping with both parents? In writing? Never.

Of course, I know exactly why they need to ask: suing is as much a national pastime as watching baseball and eating burgers. I could decide later that the shopping cart was poorly designed, imagine my son to have a concussion, and taken the department store to court. I wonder how often and how successfully they deal with parents just like us. Maybe they would have settled; in one fell swoop I could have sold my self-esteem and rendered any subsequent parenting completely useless. People that sue when their children get hurt in public places forget an important fact: it is almost always the child’s fault, and learning that is an essential part of growing up. When you refuse to sit down in the cart when your parents tell you to, you get hurt. If you touch the iron while it’s hot, you’ll burn your fingers. If you run into traffic, a car hits you. And if it doesn’t, you get spanked. Cause and consequence; they are the backbone of early childhood.

The question is now: will he learn? To answer that, we need to ask another question: did it hurt enough? My guess is no. Also, the icepack was a major pay-off, like getting a present when you least expect it, almost worth the pain. Funny enough, it’s the sight of all the blood that leaves the biggest impression with Mendel. For days after, he talks about it, as if he discovered Mount Everest, the Amazon rain forest, and Tut’s tomb all in one day; blood is cool. Ten times a day he wipes his mouth, checking if there’s more. I’m afraid he has learned nothing at all.

We continue to struggle with the dirty words. “Poop” is the favorite right now; I’ve told my daughter that it’s okay to say it once a month or so, but every five minutes, I can’t handle. I promised that if she doesn’t stop, I’m washing her mouth out with soap. Does anybody know if that is still legal? And is there a kind of soap that’s filthier than all the others? Or are we talking child abuse here?

I think what bothers me the most is not necessarily the language itself (although fart and poop can soon lead to worse) but the fact that I honestly don’t remember being six, and therefore cannot understand why this is so much fun. And trust me on this: she’s enjoying herself immensely. Of course, there’s also the three-year-old brother who eggs her on by laughing loudly at every transgression. He now substitutes Poopy-doo for verbs and nouns at will.

“Did you make a nice drawing for mommy? Oh, you even drew the sun!”

“No. It’s a Poopy-doo.” (That’s a lie; I can recognize a sun when I see one, even when drawn by a three-year-old without the slightest artistic ability)

My Rebbetzin says God does not perform unnecessary miracles; if we can fix things ourselves, there’s no need for Him to split the sea. Since I have not heard any booming voice lately telling my daughter to shape up, I’m going to have to come up with a solution myself.

I try discussing it politely, and ask her if she wants to sound like a trashcan.

“Trashcans don’t talk,” she says.

“I thought that too, but apparently there’s one dressed in pink jammies sitting on my couch right now,” I tell her. If she thinks she can get cute with me, she’s got another thing coming. Meantime, I’m having nightmares that involve being out in public while my children yell naughty words at each and every stranger. Is this a battle I’ve already lost, or is there still hope?

I ask her if she thinks she’s smart; she answers yes, she’s a bright child with a great future.

“When you say those words, you don’t sound smart.”
“Well, I am.”

“They don’t take potty-mouths at Yale, Princeton, or Harvard.”

She is intimidated, I can tell, because her eyes get wide. While the iron is hot, I tell myself, and administer the final blow: “They won’t even take you at NYU.”

Bingo. My daughter has absolutely no idea what I just said; which is why this works so well. Nothing intimidates her more than people talking about things she can’t put into context. It distracts her immediately; it causes her to wonder whether there’s a smallish chance she is not the smartest person in the room. She suspects, from time to time, that I have a bit more education than she does; often she needs to be reminded that finishing Kindergarten isn’t all that impressive. So; Mommy is smart, mommy says don’t say “poop”, problem solved, thank you very much.

See? This parenting thing isn’t all that hard.

My Husband and six-year-old daughter Isabella are out running errands, and I call the cell to make sure he doesn’t forget to pick up certain things.

“What did she want?” Isa asks, and he tells her I need some stuff from the store.

She asks: “Like what?” and she has that tone; the one that says: don’t lie to me. I smell something mysterious.

“It’s a very long story,” he tells her.

“I have time. Tell me.”

“Maxi Pads,” he replies without thinking things through.

“What are Maxi Pads?” Oh, crap.

So he gives her some vague story about how it’s not really blood; it’s actually baby food, and if you don’t have a baby, it comes out, and so on and so forth. Baby food, huh, so that’s what that is. Glad we got that out of the way.  Next, she’ll be asking why I don’t bottle it up and donate it to the food bank. “I didn’t want her to be freaked out,” he says. Of course, I have no right to be critical of him, he was in a pinch, and you have to say something. It’s not as if my explanation about “really big band-aids” was all that satisfying.

In spite of my husbands stellar explanation, she doesn’t drop it; this is much too interesting a topic. Like a terrier she hangs on, and continues to ask questions when she gets home: “Is it like those white thingies with the little strings that I like to pull apart?” she asks. “That’s right,” my husband says, and disappears into his office to buy time.

Why is it that children always ask these types of questions before we’ve had time to come up with a satisfying answer? I suddenly have a lot of sympathy for those parents that invented the stork and the cabbage patch; I’m even considering using those myself. That way, if she spreads any stories around at school, I don’t have to worry they think we’re traumatizing her by disclosing too much too early. They’ll just think we’re too old fashioned; I think I can live with that.