Fun With Play-Dough

It’s five in the afternoon; my daughter Isabella has finished her homework and I tell her to go play with her brother, quietly. I have some work to do, and I’d like them to stop yelling, singing, and throwing things for ten minutes so I can get my stuff done. Alas, my request falls on deaf ears; they have decided they need to play hide and seek right under my nose. This means my daughter hides, while shouting instructions to her brother; he finds her, after which they both scream with laughter.

I am left to wonder, why do my children make so much noise? Is there something wrong with their hearing, or do they just naturally have a higher tolerance for loud and intrusive sounds? And why does this happen when I am at a point in my life where I like things calm and peaceful?

I remember being told to ‘be quiet’ when I was a kid. My parents would interrupt me in the middle of a long, drawn out story about something terribly important that happened to me in school. “For god’s sake, stop!” they’d say, exasperated at my ability to talk, talk, and then talk some more. As a child, I didn’t understand it, but now that I have children of my own, I do.

Then it strikes me: parents regularly complain about the difficulty of talking with their teenagers. Is the fact that we tell our kids to be quiet when they’re younger partially responsible for that? Or do teenagers shut down regardless? I’m starting to think that if I want my children to communicate with me in ten years, we need to lay the groundwork now. So that means, don’t tell them to stop talking just because it’s inconvenient and I’m tired. Also, it doesn’t seem quite fair that we spend all this time teaching them how to talk, only to tell them to stop once they truly master their language.

Of course, there are different kinds of meaning to what our children say when they are very young. “I have a big head”, my son Mendel announced this morning. Okay, sure; he kind of does, in comparison to his scrawny body, so I don’t argue with him.  He looks like a lollipop. “Now I’m going to eat my breakfast,” he says, and “I want to watch Sesame Street.”

At the age of three, he mostly narrates his day by stating the obvious. That’s okay; it improves his vocabulary and nobody can disagree with him, which must be good for his self-esteem. He also tells us when things are funny, in case we miss things; and he has recently taught himself to tattle. This is not necessarily a bad thing; most of his tattling focuses on real or perceived crimes committed by his sister. We can do something about it, or we can ignore; he doesn’t seem to care. He only cares about the act of telling us things we might not otherwise notice.

My daughter’s verbal prowess takes a different approach. She doesn’t just tell; she interprets: “Well, this is what happened; you see, it wasn’t really my fault, well, anyway, I forgot.” The underlying meaning is: I know I did something bad, but I’m not going to tell you except for the fact that I’m innocent; let’s leave it at that. Please don’t ask me any more questions.

Paying attention to what she’s really saying is good practice for when she’s older; the built-in interpretation will always be there, as long as you know what to listen for. It’s all about being aware; about not treating what they’re saying as meaningless background noise. A challenge? Of course! Otherwise, everyone would be doing it.

“I Love Me”, it says in big blue marker on my daughter Isabella’s dresser. The phrase is positioned just so; she can read it when she lies in bed with her head on her pillow. I wonder, does she need to be reminded she’s comfortable in her own skin?

“Why did you write that?” I ask, and the answer is as unsatisfying as it is predictable: “I don’t know.” Ah, the eternal six-year-old’s cop out.

“Well,” I say, “I guess it’s important to like yourself.”

“Why?”

Here we go; try having any kind of meaningful conversation with a first grader, and you are sooner or later confronted with a question that will take years to answer. If said first grader is a girl, you’re in an even bigger quagmire; raising girls is a challenge that deserves a category of it’s own.

Why do girls need to like themselves? It’s a question that can’t be brushed off with a thoughtless ‘when you’re older’-type statement; if we wait until the answer magically comes to us, it’ll be too late.

Raising a girl is a big responsibility, and it comes with the uncanny ability to take everything we hear on the news personally. “What if that was my daughter?” we ask ourselves, when we hear yet another story about child porn, rape, teen pregnancy, and the devastating consequences of eating disorders. It is much easier to worry about our children being victims than it is to ponder their potential for landing in jail; predators are everywhere, even under their own skin.

I realize that ‘like yourself’ really means ‘respect yourself’, and that my biggest hope for my daughter is that she internalizes that respect. Getting there is a balancing act; I don’t believe in building our children up to the point of no return. No child is the absolute smartest, coolest, or most perfect; everybody makes mistakes and you can’t be good at everything.  She doesn’t need to be the best first grader; she just needs to be the best Isabella. If only there was a blueprint for that, but the nasty little secret is: there isn’t.

At some point we have to let go and hope for the best, which is potentially the most unsatisfying parenting advice anybody can fathom.

When I started college, there was a girl in my year who had everything going for her. Her parents were rich; she was smart and good-looking and had had –up to that point- a well-rounded education. She had plenty of friends, and no apparent worries; yet, before the end of our second year, she was hooked on heroin and homeless. Why? I don’t know. Something made her restless, something awoke a need to push her limits to where she lost herself completely.  I’m sure her parents wondered what, if anything, they did wrong.

It is possible that they messed up somewhere along the line, it is equally possible they didn’t have a hand in the final outcome; I don’t know. It makes me grateful that for now, all I have to worry about are the incidental six-year-old dramas.  Hitting her brother over the head with a well-aimed blow, and not listening when I tell her to finish her dinner, are as yet worst-case scenarios. The knowledge that things won’t always be this easy can be pushed to the periphery of my consciousness for a few more years. Maybe by then, I’ll have the answer; if I do, I’ll make sure to advertise it. In the meantime, I’ll make sure to, for once, not yell at her for writing on the furniture. 

We are sitting on the couch, my son Mendel half on my lap, my daughter Isabella next to him. I am reading a book, they just had their bath; they are calm and tired. This is the part of the day I like best, when everything slows down, nobody is screaming and we all exhale simultaneously.

Then Isabella starts to tickle Mendel’s foot; first he giggles, then he decides he’s had enough and tells her to stop. She doesn’t, so he tells her again. When she still doesn’t stop, I tell her four more times, and, you guessed it, she still doesn’t stop. She looks at me defiantly, I feel myself getting mad; Mendel raises his right arm and prepares to strike.

I manage to grab his arm just in time, close the book, and ask my daughter: “Do you want to go to bed right now?”

She shakes her head, no, of course not.

“Then knock it off! Stop messing with your brother.”

This falls on deaf ears. After all, ‘messing with the brother’ is fun, because it makes him produce these loud piercing screams. Like you’re pushing a button, and the sirens go off. It’s definitely in the top ten of fun things to do around the house.

The list of fun things also includes rearranging the furniture and then complaining that it’s too hard to put back. Pulling all your clothes off the hangers and then telling your mother that you can’t fix it because the bar is too high and you can’t reach. Squeezing out the toothpaste, stealing a lip pencil because it draws so nicely on the vanity, and forgetting all kinds of things, like putting your plate in the sink, or finishing your dinner.

Nothing makes Isabella as mad as being told to clean up her own mess. Utterly unreasonable, she thinks, and besides, isn’t that what mothers are for?

The other day, I sat her down to ask her why she made such messes, but she just stared at me without answering.

“Mommy and Daddy worked very, very hard to buy this house. How much money do you think it cost us to buy a house?”

I could tell she was actually giving this some thought because she scrunched up her nose and looked at the ceiling.

“Maybe as much as a hundred dollars?”

She pronounced the amount as if it was the most outrageous number she could think of.

Time for operation Shock and Awe, I thought, and I told her the actual price we paid for the house. “And this is what you did with it,” I said, as I pointed at the peeled wallpaper and the door to the bathroom that has red scribbles all over it, as well as the line “I love my mom”.  As if sucking up could help her out of this one.

My daughter has been messy since she could walk, and lately, things are getting worse. This worries me, because she has a brother who is only three and only too willing to follow in her example. He’s already drawn all over my (white!) kitchen cabinets, and guess what: if you don’t notice it right away, even the magic eraser doesn’t help you. Yet, however I yell, scream, and barter, they don’t listen when I say: “Please don’t touch the black sharpie, please don’t give your Barbie a bath in the toilet, and please don’t attempt to wash your hair with tooth paste.”

They happily ignore me, and I’m left to wonder whether those home improvements that everybody else is so enthusiastic about will ever come my way. I also wonder, if they don’t listen to me now, what will life be like in ten years? Should I worry about them not listening to me when I talk about scary things like unprotected sex, and driving drunk?

Maybe I should take a page out of my daughter’s book and ignore myself. Better focus on the small things for now, like that really strange stain that magically appeared on the bathroom floor. What is that, anyway?

Remember when your children were newborns? You held them in your arms and stared at them adoringly; you made a solid promise to love and cherish them forever, nothing bad would ever happen to them, you were going to be the best parent you could be. Maybe you even cried a little. All was well in the world.

Now look at you, as you’re standing at the bottom of the stairs, yelling at your six-year-old to come down here right now or you’ll regret it!!!

The six-year-old in questions has just announced: You are the worst parent ever! I don’t like you anymore! She is right, you are indeed the worst parent ever, because you have refused to play that stupid Barbie movie for the third time today; for the simple reason that it’s half an hour past bedtime. This was very unreasonable of you, and you should be ashamed. In her eyes it is as unforgivable as a catholic priest cavorting with a hooker. What on earth were you thinking? You, believing for some time now that parenting is just too much of a freaking minefield, decide it’s not worth it and walk away, leaving her traumatized and alone in her room, crying her beautiful eyes out.

What happened? Your warm and cozy home wasn’t supposed to turn into a bloody battlefield, at least not until your child entered the teenage years. Unfortunately, here it is: the dirty secret nobody has told you about; the Bad six-year-old has arrived, and she’s going to stay for a while.

I came home from some much needed girl friend time the other day. When I walked into the house, my three-year-old happily exclaimed: Mommy! He was obviously happy to see me, and we had a nice little conversation. It went something like this:

“Hi-mommy-hi-mommy-hi-mommy”

“Hi Baby! Did you miss me?”

“…”

“Can you give me a hug?”

“No.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I don’t like you.”

“What?”

“I don’t like you.”

This is my good child. My other child, who is also sometimes a good child, was waiting for me in the living room. While I was gone, she had written me a letter. I find it helps our relationship tremendously if I leave for a few hours now and then; there are many things my husband does not know how to do, and for five minutes afterwards, my daughter appreciates all I do for her.  Five minutes isn’t much, but when you have a six-year-old, you take what you can get, and you’re grateful for it.

The letter said:

“Dear Mom,

Today is March 1^st, and if you want I will stop being naughty. All you have to do is tell me. And I love you.

-Love, Isabella.”

Of course, this is hardly a binding contract, and I doubt we’ll make it for 24 hours before we have our next run-in. I will give her a dress she doesn’t want to wear, or I will suggest a ponytail when she wants braids, or I will tell her to finish her salad when she’s clearly in the mood for ice cream. Parenting is tricky that way, and you’re constantly being tested. You have to prove that you still love your child when she’s throwing a temper tantrum. You still have to love her when she’s kicking her brother just for the fun of it, or when she –for the zillionth time- gets a hold of your make up and wipes it all over the bathroom mirror. And, most importantly, you still have to love her when she starts talking back.

Don’t laugh at that last one until you’ve experienced it. A First Grader who talks back is a freaking force of nature.

It’s true, toddlers love the word “No”, and they will throw a hissy when you try to wrestle them in that striped sweater for the annual family picture. However, they are still small, and can be physically overpowered. It may take some time, and they may be crying in that picture, but they’ll be doing it while wearing the damn sweater. The six-year-old, on the other hand, is a loaded gun. All I can say is, seek cover.

And try not to make too many decisions for them; let them do stupid things.

As long as they don’t hurt themselves or anybody else, let it go. Wearing ballet shoes when there’s three feet of snow, refusing to eat anything for three days straight, and not keeping track of their toys until their favorite Barbie cannot be found anywhere, are things that punish themselves eventually.  You won’t even have to do anything; it’s that easy.