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.

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.

Today is the last day I can get anything done; no more “I’ll do this later”, it has to be now.  Never a great way to start the day; I like to do things on my own schedule. Yesterday we took the couch apart and found a toy that my son Mendel ‘borrowed’ from his friend Jack four months ago, and then immediately lost. At least Jack will have a nice Passover surprise. He can ask the four questions wearing his favorite rubber ducky beak.

So what’s left? Walking around like a chicken with my head cut off, that’s what. My son is assisting me with that by taking a crayon and drawing on his table, the wall, and around the fireplace. That’s okay; crayon isn’t Chametz, and I refuse to be too distracted by it. I’m sure there’s a magic eraser somewhere in the house.

Just as I am walking back and forth, trying to get the last details sorted out, I find this on my email:

“The biblical slavery of Egypt represents bondage to your own self.

Every day, every moment, must be an exodus from the self.

If you’re not leaving Egypt, you’re already back there”.

Sounds great. I could certainly use an “exodus from the self”, believe me. Although I have the feeling they don’t exactly mean it like that.  Still, there are many ways to explain the concept of “self”, who’s to say how we give our life meaning beyond the immediate on any given day?

I think one good lesson, during this Passover, might be to focus on how my children are responding to all this. The Passover story is a difficult one, full of hidden trapdoors and dark passageways.  To three-year-old Mendel, it is still a holiday mostly defined by the frog hand puppet he received at his pre-school. It’s not a holiday unless you have special toys. For the past few days, I have been painstakingly explaining the concept of Chametz to him. Sometimes, it seems he almost gets it, but it’s hard during the halfway stage. Most of the house is done, but there’s a few last things left; we can still eat Chametz until tomorrow night, but not in the areas where I already cleaned. Try to explain that to a three-year-old; he listens to me intently, then he says: “I want crackers.”

Okay, fine, but not in the living room. Naturally, that’s exactly where he wants to eat them; no surprise there. I say “no” as firmly as I dare (we don’t want to make this whole deal too punitive) and he agrees to sit in the kitchen with his crackers. But not for long, two minutes later, he gets up and walks into the living room. I send him back to the kitchen where he subsequently dumps them on the floor. Fine, I still need to clean the floor anyway. He wants new crackers, and I give in; we need to get rid of them anyway. Again, he tries to carry them into the living room, again, I send him back to the kitchen. Now he’s tired of it, and leaves them on the counter. “I’ll have juice instead,” he says, and I sigh with relief. Juice, he can drink in the living room. Then he says: “I want cereal.”

I know it’s not nice to ignore your own child, but sometimes they leave you no choice.

Happy Passover, everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Xiy5aK3AU&feature=related