Fun With Play-Dough

You never know what ticks small children off. One minute you’re happily going through your day, the next you are faced with an angry, screaming child who claims it’s all your fault. Girls can get mad over anything, ranging from their clothes (“I didn’t want the white tights, I wanted the off-white tights!”) to being asked to do something unreasonable, like setting the table.

When boys get mad, it usually involves food. Needless to say, Passover hasn’t been easy on my son Mendel. We’re on day number seven, and he’s counting the minutes until tomorrow night, when he can be reunited with his beloved donuts. That’s okay; when you’re not yet four years old, you are allowed to love donuts more than religion.

Mendel’s current enemy is the Matzo. Imagine his glee when we ran out prematurely, went shopping, and found the entire city was without Matzos. Sold out, all over Omaha, except for one last box of chocolate covered egg Matzos, which, of course, we bought. Not that it counts; it’s about as close to the real thing as fruit loops are to a healthy breakfast. Luckily we ran into somebody smart enough to have ordered enough, and were offered a box full of real, handmade Matzos. Mendel was, of course, unimpressed, we could see it on his face: Darn it! Back to square one!

Holidays shouldn’t make you mad; it’s a lesson he will have an easier time learning during Hanukkah, when donuts are plenty and nothing is off limits. However, Passover is more important and longer, so there’s that. At some point in their young lives, children have to transition from viewing a holiday as an obnoxious obligation, to something that they can truly celebrate. How they make that transition, I’m not sure. My daughter did it almost without us noticing; it seemed that one day she woke up and got it. I’d like to take credit, but I’m not sure that’s appropriate; it’s probably her teachers that did most of the work.

Still, it’s not all bad; my son has given up asking for cookies every five minutes and has even started eating again. All it took was three overpriced packets of Lox and unlimited yoghurt tubes. That’s right, he’s lived off fish and yoghurt this week, and he survived. Whether Passover next year will be about more than merely ‘surviving’, we’ll have to wait and see. Regardless, the boy has eleven months and three weeks of pure bliss waiting for him in the bread aisle.

Now that Passover is in full swing, I am slowly coming to the realization that my son Mendel isn’t eating. Sure, if I smear chocolate paste on a matzo, he will lick it off, but that’s not eating, that’s manipulating.

Even foods that he normally likes get the cold shoulder; apparently he is seriously upset that there are no cookies or crackers in the house. For dinner tonight he eats half a dish of applesauce and two bites of chocolate pudding. I don’t even offer him the broccoli; what’s the use? He asks: “Why don’t I get broccoli?”

“Did you want some?” I ask him.

“No.” Then he throws an evil glance at his potatoes, and walks away.

I imagine that eventually he will get hungry, but, as a parent, I know better. Children can go extremely long without eating, especially if they have something to prove. Mendel’s points of protest: “I want cookies” and “Mommy sucks for not giving them to me.”

Our household does rely heavily on food with leavening in it, that much becomes obvious when I look at my fridge; it only has a third of the stuff it normally holds. While I am neurotically happy with such empty shelves, and come up with creative, Passover-friendly meals, my son isn’t having it. He wants his damn bagel and he wants it now. And by the way, where are the crackers? The Oreos? The donuts? And while we’re at it, why are there no cheerios, where is the old stand-by, the peanut butter sandwich?

My daughter Isabella meanwhile is flying through the holidays as if it’s a breeze. She knows what she can and cannot have, and doesn’t ask for forbidden food. She doesn’t complain, and she doesn’t act difficult; why can’t some of it rub off on him?

Of course, it is hard to be three and suddenly be denied your favorite snacks and meals. Besides, all the other holidays are easy; you’re too young to fast, and most holidays add foods instead of taking them away. And why is it that the cruelest of holidays has to be eight days long?

When I look at it like that, I suddenly feel very, very sorry for him. Maybe it’s time to go to the store and buy some of those ridiculously overpriced chocolate-covered matzos after all. If they haven’t been sold out by now to parents of angry Boychiks everywhere.

Now that all the Chametz is gone, and we made it through a five-hour Seder last night, there are new problems on the horizon. I made an exception to my usual frugality when shopping, and bought my children some special, Passover approved, cereal. A friend was nice enough to deliver a second one, which I was grateful for, considering the small size of these boxes. Daughter Isabella has been staring at it all week, only to be told: “You can’t have this until after the Seder. You have to wait.”

Waiting is, of course, one of the nastiest concepts in any six-year-old’s existence; imagine the relief when Sunday morning finally arrived.

Except, it didn’t taste good. In fact, it tasted downright nasty, like milk-soaked cardboard with a side of sand. I convinced her to eat it anyway, by dumping a scoop of sugar on top, but I won’t be able to pull that off a second time. My guess is she’ll be avoiding the stuff as if it’s the eleventh plague.

It forces me to ask myself: why, when we can’t have something, so we insist on imitating it? Do Hindus eat fake cows? If I normally avoid imitation bacon like it’s laced with cyanide, because “fake bacon is still bacon”, then what’s with all the imitation Chametz-that’s-not-really-Chametz? As if we can’t survive eight days by eating yoghurt and vegetables and fruit and fish and all the millions of other things we can still have.

Of course, they’ll eat the cereal eventually, after I melt some chocolate over it. My children will learn two important lessons: First, when you can’t have the real thing, don’t bother with the replacement, and second, everything tastes good when covered in chocolate.

I’m going to my friend’s house tonight,” my daughter Isabella announces to a complete stranger at the playground. “She’s extra Jewish; they walk on Shabbos!”

The other child looks at Isabella as if she’s just sprouted tentacles all over her body.

My daughter barely notices; she doesn’t come into contact with non-Jewish kids very much and encounters like this are few and far between. Does the other child think she’s weird? It’s impossible to tell, and either way, my daughter wouldn’t care. Doubt about whether she should act a certain way is nowhere to be found at this age; she is who she is.

I wonder at what age the insecurity sneaks its way in, because I know at some point she will start questioning herself. Is my hair the right color? Am I wearing the right clothes? Do I say the right things, feel the right things, or believe the right things? I can only hope that, when the big questions start to come, she will focus less on the exterior, and more on what really matters. After all, worrying about your hairdo is a very effective way to ignore your inner life.

And what kind of inner life do I want her to have? What can I teach her now to prepare her for later, and will any of it stick? How do you introduce values and belief systems at an age when kids are still mostly concerned about what dress Barbie should wear, and whether mommy and daddy will remember to buy the right cereal?

Luckily, there’s help: she’s in school, and many, many things happen in school that are the perfect jumping point for learning life’s lessons. Put a group of six-year-olds in a room together, day after day, and watch what happens; it’s like a combination between Washington politics and professional cage fighting.

Every day when I pick Isa up, I ask the question: “How was school today?” The answer is always the same: “Good”. This tells me nothing; it’s the statement that follows it that explains what kind of “good” she is talking about.

As in, “Good. I went to the office because I refused to do my work this morning.”

Or: “Good. We went to the Museum and I had fun.”

Or: “Good. I had to stay in for recess because I kicked so-and-so.”

You get the idea. So, does she really believe her day is always good, no matter what happened? Or does she use the word without thinking about it? I tell her that kicking another child doesn’t exactly sound “good”, in fact, it sounds downright ugly, but it falls on deaf ears. My daughter chooses to accentuate the positive; she practices the sort of historical relativism that only children can get away with. I ask her if she thinks that kicking other children is acceptable behavior. She gives me that look that says: I cannot believe you just asked me that. Are you insane?

“Then why do you do it?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know why she kicked, she just knows she did. Isn’t that enough? So I deliver a speech about violence, and how it doesn’t solve anything; maybe some of it will stay with her. That’s really all we can hope for at this point. Plus, this other child will sooner or later return the favor, I know she will; then my daughter will have a different kind of “good” day.

My son brings home a small plastic cup, filled with fake grass and a little baby with a blanket. “What on earth is that?” My daughter asks, pointing at this strange thing, sitting on the kitchen counter.

“It’s Moses in a basket,” I tell her. “He made it at Pre-school.”

“Why does it have Easter grass?” She asks, and I tell her it’s for height. “Otherwise Moses would be too far at the bottom, and no one would find him. He wouldn’t be rescued, and then where would we be?”

“Like if the room was the cup, and I was Moses?” she asks, and throws herself flat on the floor.

This is, perhaps, the weirdest impersonation of Moses ever, but I nod, and say: “exactly.”

The answer satisfies her and there are no more questions about Moses that day.

My son, in the meantime, shows absolutely zero interest in his artwork. He hardly ever does, and yet, he brings the coolest stuff home from school. Once it’s home, he leaves it lying around and never looks at it again; it’s apparently the act of making that excites him, not the final product. My daughter is the opposite; no scrap of paper that bears her signature may ever be thrown away; it’s art, and it’s forever.

Our house bears the markings of this “forever”, and rarely am I able to throw anything she’s made away. In addition to being a hoarder of her own work, her level of production is astonishing. To make twenty drawings in under ten minutes is nothing. Needless to say, this habit kills trees as well as my enthusiasm for displaying her stuff.  I only have so many walls; in order to put up anything new, the old has to go. It’s the law. She doesn’t like that, but isn’t open to other options (like sending it all to family members far away). The consequence: Boxes of artwork in the basement, which is undoubtedly a fire hazard, and her work proudly displayed in every single room of the house.

To be honest, some of the things she makes are cool. She recently produced an Elizabeth Murray-inspired relief painting that is absolutely gorgeous.

I recently found an old photograph of the apartment where I lived when I was in college. There are nice reproductions on the wall; there’s not a single toy in sight. Those were the days.

Still, some day my children will be grown and I will look at all their projects with different eyes. I imagine myself 30 years from now, unwrapping the Passover dishes, and finding that little Moses puppet, still lying snuggly in its Easter grass. It’s enough to make me just a little bit sad in advance.