Accismus

Growth

August 16th, 2024

Summer here is wrapping up, and Edith will start preschool in a bit over a week. Since she’s been going to her nanny’s house every day for over a year, this step doesn’t feel as shattering to me as it otherwise might, although it does still feel wildly fast. She is very ready for new challenges and to be around other kids her age all day, so I know she will love it. After extensive searching and endless school visits, I enrolled her in a small school in South Austin that goes up through middle and feels like a perfect fit for her (and for me), a child-led and play focused program where she’ll be in a class of three- to five-year-olds and will spend a lot of each day outside. They’re in cozy old buildings on a ramble of property with gardens and trees, and it doesn’t feel institutional in any way.

For most of the last year, we’ve been working on the skills she’ll need to attend school, the first and most essential being potty-training. I wrote about this some at the start of our journey and she is now about 95% potty-trained. And since I found that most parents block this out after it happens and can’t, when pressed, recall details, I will share how I did it here before it becomes a dim memory —

Basically, I did the three-day “diapers are gone,” just sit naked around the house and pee a lot thing. But we only did two days because I couldn’t take a day off work right then. Edith was fully ready; she knew what was involved in using the potty and that she was supposed to do it. She just saw no reason to do it. And I couldn’t wait for her to get interested, because probably it wouldn’t have happened until she went to school and she couldn’t go to school till she was potty-trained.

So I told her for a week that the diapers would be going away and she’d be using the potty, and we talked about that and I watched her process it. And then on Saturday, the diapers were gone and she was naked in the house all day. And she more or less got the hang of it pretty immediately, except that for a couple of weeks she had a hard time relaxing and letting go in the potty, so her sitting sessions lasted forever. And even after she got comfortable peeing into the void, it was a bit of a process for it to click that she really did have to do it all the time.

Edith’s attitude toward her own potty-training was more or less, “ok, if you say so, I guess.” She did it, but she didn’t really feel empowered by it or dismayed by accidents. And she still doesn’t really care if she has an accident. Shortly after being potty-trained, she was standing on her little stool at the bathroom sink giving her doll a bath in the sink, and she peed copiously all over her shorts and legs and the stool and the floor and the cabinet front, and she looked over at me without stopping what she was doing, and casually observed, “I had an accident, mama. Clean up the floor.” This is typical of how she reacts.

Accidents happen because she holds it till the last minute because she doesn’t like to stop what she’s doing to go to the bathroom (or to eat or to sleep or anything else), and will absolutely refuse to be made to, so sometimes she just flies too close to the sun and doesn’t make it in time. Especially if we’re out somewhere. Because it is absolutely impossible for toddlers to use an adult toilet (Edith can’t relax while perched precariously on one, and I cannot tolerate watching her full-bodied interaction with every possible surface of a public toilet), I keep a little potty in the trunk of our car and we spend a lot of time sitting in the trunk in various parking lots, Edith eating crackers with her pants around her ankles, and me scrolling on my phone, both of us utterly unconcerned with the passing crowds. So if Edith has to pee when we’re out, it means going out to the car in the parking lot, which is a bit of a sell. So I’ve started to enforce a consequence she does care about, which is if she has an accident, we have to stop whatever we’re doing, go home, and have a bath. Basically, I am trying to get across that it’s much less convenient for her to have an accident than to just briefly stop playing and use the potty.

So, that’s the story with pee. With poop, it was another thing. At first, she held it as much as she could until she became very constipated and I was in a bit of agony about it, having heard horror stories of this putting kids off pooping independently for years and years. We had one memorably traumatic evening with a suppository that I won’t forget about for a long time. But she didn’t seem to be bothered by her poop disruptions and they would eventually resolve themselves, although never in the potty. She didn’t have angst about pooping in the potty, she just couldn’t get the mechanics of how to poop into a bucket from a sitting position figured out. It’s so different than squatting and going in a diaper. Eventually, I resorted to bribery — she’d seen an interesting object on the top shelf of my bedroom closet (some puzzles I’d bought that she didn’t need at Christmas) and I told her they were a present for whenever she pooped in the potty.

She was very motivated by this present. Her first attempt to get it was to crap her pants and then run over and sit on the potty. “I’m on the potty, mama, I get the present!” I explained this did not count, and she howled.

Next, she pooped in the tub and asked for the potty. She sat on it, but had already finished in the water, so this, too, did not count — I was very firm.

Finally I was reading in my room one day while Edith was suspiciously entertaining herself, and she sauntered into the room. “I get my present, mama!” she announced. “I put the poop in the potty, I get the present now.”

“What do you mean you put the poop in the potty?” I asked.

“I pooped on the floor,” she said, with visible pride. “And then I picked it up, and I put in the potty! So I get my present.”

Hard to say if there were more screams or more Lysol involved in the ensuing response.

She eventually did poop in the potty and she got her present, but she still doesn’t really prefer to poop in the potty. She still wears overnight diapers and we’re in this routine now where she typically poops in her night diaper either right before going to sleep or right when she wakes up. I am more or less fine with this? I tell her it’s up to her, and sometimes if she thinks of it and the stars align, she does poop in the potty at bedtime instead of her diaper, and she seems calm about it either way, so figure it will work itself out eventually.

Also, I’m in no hurry to teach her to wipe. This is another one of those parenting things no one ever talks about, and it dawns on you all in a rush — at some point, you have to teach an uncoordinated and unconcerned toddler who cannot focus on anything longer than 1.5 seconds to wipe poop off their own butt without getting it all over themselves and every inch of the house. Is it possible to never have to do this? Edith’s attitude toward wiping after pees does not build confidence in this respect. Mostly, she doesn’t. Once when I asked her if she’d wiped, she scoffed at me and said, “I don’t wipe, Mama, I just pull my pants up.”

Another time shortly after an especially drippy pee, she said, “I need a wipe, mama,” looked around for exactly half a second, and not seeing any immediately available toilet paper, she wrapped her leg around my leg and vigorously rubbed her crotch up and down my pants leg, and then sashayed off. It happened so quickly, I didn’t even have time to react; I just stood there with my mouth actually hanging open while my father laughed and laughed.

She cannot do any of this at school. So I worry.

Other than potty-training, we’ve been working a lot on tantrums. This term has fallen out of favor and parents never liked to use it about their own children, but I don’t mind reclaiming it: Edith is spoiled. There was no way she would not be; it’s not her fault and it’s not really ours, either. She is the treasured only child of a late-in-life single mother and she has the dedicated 24/7 attention of three adults with spare time and few other responsibilities. It is not possible, in such circumstances, for a child not to be spoiled. If I do not concede to her demands, somebody else does the second my back is turned before I can stop them.

I’ve heard a lot of parents say that three is worse than two for tantrums, and I think this is true especially for only children. Basically, Edith has similar tantrums as she had when she was two, only now ratcheted way up in violence and intensity and volume, because she has bigger lungs and stronger arms and legs, a longer memory, and a more developed sense of righteous indignation. It’s actually pretty easy to deescalate her if you have access to a boring room she can’t get out of — a couple minutes of absolutely wilding out in there, followed by an offer of milk and a hug, and she will fairly quickly subside into mildly offended hiccups. But she hasn’t learned to be her own container for her incandescent rage, yet — she needs either me or her nanny to contain it for her. (Her grandparents are hopeless. Grandma immediately gives her whatever she wants and apologizes for not doing it sooner, while telling me that small children really aren’t in the headspace to learn obedience lessons when they are so terribly upset, and Grandpa either hands her over to the nearest alternative caregiver, or, if that’s not possible, hunkers down and grits his teeth through it, like a dog in the rain.)

I can increasingly see her trying to contain it — she will scream into a nearby upholstered piece of furniture, or she will grit her teeth and do this sort of pop-eyed shriek, or she will heave and shake at the effort of holding it in. But so far, the tantrum always eventually explodes upwards past all her ineffectual restraints into a full earth-shaking volcano of fury.

We won’t fix this in a week (although I did buy three emergency books about hitting in a sudden panic, which she has received with a sort of exasperated tolerance). She will simply have to get her hard knocks and learn about her place in the world when she is outside of this house, because she will rule forever inside it. Hopefully she will learn fast and not get thrown out of school in the process.

Finally, we’re working on compliance with basic tasks, and I’d say we’ve made the least progress on this. I used to ride horses, and if you spend any time around domesticated horses, you think a lot about how our relationship with them relies entirely on their not really realizing that they don’t actually have to cooperate with us in any way at all, on anything, and could simply throw us off and trample us whenever they’d like to do so. The same is very much the case with toddlers — Edith doesn’t actually have to do anything I say, ever. We are fast approaching a point where I can’t physically control her and at that point, she can, if she chooses, destroy us both, and the house into the mix. But it turns out that toddlers aren’t wild animals (although they sometimes act like them) and she usually will eventually do what I want her to just out of…socialization and general agreeableness, I guess? I really don’t know why she ever does. She often doesn’t, but whereas I think a lot of parents tend to assume that small children will obey them and then are constantly furious that they don’t, I more am astounded every time Edith does, and so it probably seems to me that she is better behaved than she actually is.

I’m a strong believer in picking my battles, so I don’t make Edith do much — if she doesn’t want to sit down to meals, for example, she doesn’t have to. The food is there and available, the rest of us are sitting there eating it, and she can join us, or graze and dance around, or ignore it altogether as she chooses. If she’s filthy, I will tackle her and wrestler her into the bathtub, but if she’s only mildly dirty, whatever. She can choose her own clothes, and I have no issue with their seasonal appropriateness or color scheme, although I do insist she wear clothes if we’re leaving the house. There are only two points on which I am utterly inflexible: bedtime and tooth brushing.

I’d also really like Edith to start cleaning up after herself. How do you make a child do this? I know people whose two-year-olds regularly do this, and it seems impossible to me. For example, the other night, I said, “Edith, will you help me clean up the playroom?”

“No, mama,” she sang, from somewhere in the kitchen where she was busy about her own affairs. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Well, no one wants to clean up,” I said. “But it has to be done, and since you have made the mess, you should help to clean it up.”

She came around the kitchen island to face me, and she smiled at me indulgently. “No, mama,” she said, in this smugly patient tone of voice. “I won’t do that, I don’t clean up.”

“Well,” I said. “Ok, if you don’t help me clean up, we’ll go right to bed as soon as I have finished, and no more playing. We’ll have night-night right away.”

She stared at me for a second and I didn’t blink.

“Ok,” she said. “I will help you.” And she started cleaning up!

I was utterly shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Just like that? But then I realized something I often realize with Edith, which is that she is far more capable and understands a great deal more than she ever lets on to me.

And then I was annoyed. “How long have you been able to understand and act on anticipated consequences?” I wanted to demand of her, as we both picked up blocks and crayons, and I scowled at her suspiciously.

She has me completely snowed, all the time — I will think she’s nowhere near a developmental stage and will be catering to her endlessly on something or other, and then she’ll suddenly independently execute that task perfectly without thinking about it, and I’ll realize she’s been doing it at the nanny’s for months and I had no idea.

She probably already has her own apartment rented elsewhere that I don’t know anything about.

Part of this is that Edith’s nanny has a baby and Edith hangs out with this baby all day. Edith is meltingly sweet with the baby (most of the time) which delights me. But she also wants to be the baby, who gets the most attention, and so a lot of times at home, she’ll do this really irritating baby roleplay, and this delights me a lot less.

“Edith, put your shoes on,” I’ll say, and Edith, who typically takes great pride at putting on her own shoes, will suddenly collapse onto the floor and say, “I can’t, I’m a baby.”

When I go over to her, she’ll wag a bare foot up at me and sigh, “put the baby’s shoe on, Mama. No, not that shoe, the baby likes the purple shoes. The purple shoes, Mama.”

So I’m ready for her to be around older children and become competitive in the other direction. And bit by bit, we are managing the socialization process: poop goes in the potty; rage goes in the bedroom; we don’t throw books at Grandma; sometimes the answer will be no; we share our doll with the baby, but we are not, ourselves, a baby. Etc. It’s slow-going, but it goes on.
Thoughts On Leadership

June 21st, 2024

I haven’t written here in some time because I accepted a temporary assignment at work that sort of ate my whole life. Being in this role has been humbling because it’s given me a chance to see the outcomes of work I set in motion several years ago, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not I’m actually a good leader.

I think about this also in watching Edith, because we are so similar in these really uncanny ways, and every day, I come more and more to the conclusion that personalities are inherited and pretty much fixed from birth, and that we can’t really change them that much. We can change them for awhile, but personal change isn’t permanent. It’s like maintaining significant weight loss — you can do it as long as you’re exercising rigid and total control over the conditions that enabled it, but the second you relax, you just go back to your usual self. And in times when you don’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to focus single-mindedly on continually exerting that artificial personality change, your personality will go back to its normal shape.

This might sound fatalistic, but I think there’s grace in it. It lets us off the hook both in how we treat ourselves and in how we treat other people. Of course, there’s no excuse for treating other people badly, and this is something that all members of society do have to constantly work on not doing; it’s less about personality and more about behavior. You should avoid hurting other people the same way you avoid shitting on the floor. It’s a daily practice, and it doesn’t come naturally to anyone. But past that, if we can all just accept that the less likable aspects of our personalities are similar to ugly moles or weird noses, it becomes a lot easier to get along with people. You don’t feel like you have to make them clear some sort of bar first.

My mother, Edith, and I are all naturally extremely bossy. And in the exact same way. And there’s a sort of frenetic anxiety behind this bossiness that is unpleasant for us and yet impossible to change — the best way I can describe it is that for us, watching someone do something (or even just think something) wrong is like how most people probably feel when they’re watching a toddler run out into traffic. It feels urgent that we intervene. They need us to intervene, it’s essential that we do. If they continue in being wrong without our immediate and direct intervention, something horribly destructive (and unnecessarily so!) will happen.

It’s not fun to go through the world like this, because most people are wrong and stupid most of the time, so if you feel it’s your personal mission to save them from this, you will be endlessly working. And of course, we feel this way regardless of how objectively right we ourselves are. We always think we are right. In my case, I am right probably about 99.9% of the time. My mother, on the other hand, is almost never right (this is a joke, Mom, don’t come yell at me). But our conviction is unwavering either way.

I don’t want Edith to have this personality type, but I don’t think it’s possible for her to avoid it. I corrected this tendency in myself for about seven years, in order to get along with people. It took a lot of continual effort to suppress it, and once I spent some substantial time alone, I found it had come right back. So now I don’t bother to work on it too hard — the people who love me have decided to find it charming (sometimes I know they have to work really hard at this), and they are the only people whose opinions I really care about.

Because I have this personality, people tend to put me in charge a lot, but I’m not sure if I’m a good leader. I’m a good emergency leader — if everything is falling apart and on fire and overwhelming, and you need someone to come in and bark at everyone and move things around and clean them up and make decisions and restore order, I am a great person for that. I have no self doubt and I don’t get overwhelmed and I’m not shy about directing other people. People really appreciate me in such situations, because this sort of direction is what everyone really needs in those circumstances.

But once things calm down and are running decently again, I don’t think I’m that great at leading. I get impatient and bored, I’m always looking around for a crisis. I can be an effective and supportive mentor if I slow down and focus on it. I have helped a lot of people grow in their roles, and that feels great to know, even if I don’t really see that I’m doing it at the time. But it’s almost by accident — I’m not a great listener and my inability to tolerate watching other people make mistakes is directly antithetical to what the best coaches and mentors need to do. And this ultimately is the biggest problem with my leadership: I don’t have the necessary restraint to foster true autonomy in those I lead.

And part of this is because I don’t really know how to teach. I do a lot of things effectively that other people would really like to know how to do. But knowing how to do something doesn’t mean you know how to teach someone else how to do it. I have no idea. For most of the things that I do especially well (say for example, productivity and time management), my answer for how other people can do it is something like “have mental health issues, a personality problem, and a history of about 20 years of figuring out how to do this out of the sheer desperation of you doing this being the only way you can get your basic survival needs met, or have any relationships with other people, or both.” And that’s not really something you can set a quarterly goal around.

So now I have a three-year-old and she’s in the stage where she’s meant to be learning to do more for herself. She’s capable of it, and I’m ready for her to be less dependent. But the work of helping a toddler learn to be autonomous involves sitting back and allowing them to create a lot of mess while they learn. It involves things that should take five seconds taking upwards of twenty minutes. It involves allowing your toddler to mess simple things up in such a way that it will take a lot more work on your part to fix them than it would for you to have just done it for them in the first place. It involves broken glass and spilled liquids and piss on the floors. It involves allowing an ear-splitting tantrum to go on for a long time while the toddler learns to tolerate not being able to easily do something they want to do, when you could stop the tantrum immediately by just doing that thing for them. Like many aspects of parenting, it’s tedious, unpleasant, and exhausting.

And I haven’t really been doing it. In part, I’ve been really busy with work and not able to focus on much else, but I just had a four-day weekend with Edith and I realized that there are a lot of things she should be doing by now and could be doing by now that she isn’t doing, because I haven’t had the patience to let her. She could be dressing herself and picking up her toys and getting her own milk. And more to the point, I should be looking for opportunities for things she could be doing, and intentionally helping her learn to do them — not because I actually need her to do them, but because learning to do them is what she needs right now.

But I’m sort of doing the opposite: for example, at night, she often wants to put her own toothpaste on her brush and brush her own teeth. But this takes a long time and is the last hurdle before full night-night, and by that time in the day, I’m so exhausted I can hardly function. So I often let her make one swipe at her teeth before I say, “okgoodjob!” and then wrestle with her until I’m able to give her teeth a sturdy and efficient brushing taking approximately 2.5 seconds.

Last night, I was loading the dishwasher and I thought that Edith should bring me her dirty plate from the table.

“Can you please bring me your plate?” I asked her. She considered it, and then brought me several apricots.

“Would you like an apricot, Mama?” she asked, lining them up by the sink.

“No, I would like your dirty plate. Can you please bring it to me?”

“An apricot for Mama,” she sang.

“Edith, can you bring me your plate, please?”

“Agatha doesn’t like apricots,” she said. “Agatha says ‘bllllauuuuugggghhhhh’.”

“Can you please bring me your dirty plate, from the table there?”

“But Mama likes apricots. Here you go, Mama.”

“I do like apricots, thank you. But I don’t want one right now. Can you please bring me your plate? It’s right there, on the table.”

Normally, I would have gotten the plate myself. It was half a step from me and the last thing I had to load. But last night, I stood there, and I kept asking her to bring me the plate for a long time. It did not seem like it was going to happen. But then, all of a sudden, she just…went over and got it and brought it to me.

“Thank you!” I said, and then because I’ve read the recent books on parenting, I added: “I really like how you went and got your plate when I asked you to get your plate. That was really helpful of you. It helps me to clean up the kitchen.”

That was of course a lie; it had not helped at all! It had taken a very long time and a lot of repetition on my part. But now, Edith preened at the praise. The kitchen was clean. And I felt like a good leader.
Toy Vocalist, Mystery Solved

June 18th, 2024

One of my most popular posts is one I wrote in the braindead days of trying to nurse a newborn about the mysterious vocalist of the Fisher-Price Kick & Play Piano Gym. Many parents, it turns out, have googled this while slowly being driven insane, and a slow citizen investigation has taken place in the comments.

First, I thought it was Deb Lyons. Lyons was kind enough to confirm that I was wrong. A reader had a similar hunch about Lindsay Sheppard but was quickly disabused of that notion. Jamie Hert was a good lead, but he only wrote the lyrics; he did not sing them.

Finally, nearly three years after I first asked the question, this mysterious comment popped up. The comment offered no proof, but I went on a little dig and found some samples on a voice talent website that sounded a lot like the Kick & Play breathy style.

And then finally, about a month after that comment, confirmation: the singer is Sunn St. Claire. I don’t know how much she made on this gig, but if it is a fair payment structure, she has since been able to retire in comfort.
Freeze

January 17th, 2024

This past Sunday was our annual cold day in Texas. Edith and I went to music class as usual, and it was total anarchy. Toddlers, like horses, get especially frisky in the cold weather; parents here aren’t aware of this because it doesn’t get cold here, so we were all unprepared. I’ve seen this group of kids every Sunday for nearly two years, and this was unlike any previous time.

Edith always runs laps back and forth in music class, but this time, every kid there was doing so. At one point, a ring of four bigger kids (including mine) started running a tight circle around a mom over and over again, screaming. The mom looked trapped. Then one of those kids looked around wickedly and shoved another square in the back. There were kids sliding along the perimeters of the circle in their sock feet, colliding with waddling babies. Two boys who are always the best of friends got into some sort of argument that involved screaming, crying, Stern Dad Face, and a coerced apology. Somewhere I heard a baby head smack the floor so hard it echoed.

Edith brought Agatha, and usually this is a non-event unless Agatha gets left unattended in the middle of the instrument pile, but today two different babies drew a bead on her from all the way across the circle and kept coming for her over and over. Their moms would run behind them, say “no, no, that’s not your stuffie” and carry them back across the circle, and then they’d immediately begin their slow determined march across the circle toward her again like the entity in It Follows.

And then Ms. Sarah brought out the sticks. Of all the days to introduce sticks! The kids know the chant, and they did the chant. “We always, always sit with sticks, we always sit with sticks.” But this time, they did not sit with sticks! There were sticks glancing off walls and sticks hitting the windows and sticks in eyes.

At home, we are using all this winter indoor time to work on potty training. Edith is spending a lot of time sitting on the potty and reading a book. She loves the potty and often asks to use it. She only rarely and incidentally pees in the potty, but she talks about peeing in the potty all the time. She will frequently pee in her diaper and then as if this has reminded her, ask to use the potty just after. I don’t know if I’m doing anything right with potty-training, but I do know my kid, and I know that Edith has to think this is her idea, or she will never do it. So I am spending a lot of time delivering random monologues about the benefits of using the potty, as if I am just thinking about the subject in a general way and certainly not attempting to instruct or convince.

“You know,” I’ll observe as we play with the kitties. “Kitties don’t wear diapers, and neither do I. And the nice thing about not wearing a diaper is that when I have to pee, I just go to the potty and then I go back to playing and I don’t have to get my diaper changed.”

Or as I get ready in the morning and Edith lies in my bed watching Molang on my phone, I’ll say, “Here is my underwear. I wear underwear because I use the potty, so I don’t wear diapers. I find it convenient.”

The other day, I asked Edith if her friend at her nanny’s house wears diapers or uses the potty, and she said diapers, and then I asked her if the other little boy who goes there wears diapers or uses the potty and she said diapers, and I said, “oh that’s very interesting, they both wear diapers and so do you, but you are also learning to use the potty, hmm.” And she looked very thoughtful for a couple of minutes, and then she asked to use the potty and that was the first time she actually peed in it. So I guess she has inherited my competitive spirit.

Last night, she asked to use the potty and then she asked to put pants on and also to have her dinner, and this was confusing direction for me and took a bit to sort out, but after awhile, we established that she wanted to put on her pants but then push them down around her ankles, and then she wanted to alternate between: eating pasta in her chair with her pants down; sitting on the potty next to the kitchen table and reading her book with her pants down; and crawling around under the kitchen table with her pants down laughing hysterically. She did these things for forty minutes and no urination was involved at all (she peed in the shower after), so I don’t know if this really counts as potty-training, but it’s what we’re doing a whole lot of these days, so I hope it’s somehow leading toward it?

So much of parenthood is just watching a tiny flailing creature with no coordination and no sense of cause-and-effect try to master incredibly complex skills like communicate using the English language, put a t-shirt on over their heads, or shit in a bowl. And it seems impossible. It doesn’t just seem impossible to imagine that they will ever figure this out, but it seems impossible that anyone has ever figured this out. How did the human race ever start doing any of this? It seems like a miracle we even walk upright. But then, they do. They do all these things, they just…start talking. Like it’s nothing. Edith talks in two languages. And they suddenly can use a spoon, they can open doors and pour without spilling, they start their own bath, and they’ve memorized all their books. They learn to read your facial expressions, and they start handing you your car keys and reminding you to bring your coffee. And then, I’m told, they eventually drive off and get an apartment and a complicated sex life.

And so I know one of these days, Edith will just magically be in complete control of when and where she pees, and I just have to have faith and patience.

But also, she turns three in March and I have her on preschool waiting lists and so she really has to figure it out by then.

Meanwhile, I’ve been on a bit of a journey in how I respond to tantrums. You might or might not be aware of the current trends in childhood discipline. I myself am an A student, so when I got pregnant, I read all the pregnancy books, and when I had a baby, I read all the baby books, and now that I have a toddler, I read all the toddler books, and subscribe to all the toddler Substacks, and listen to all the toddler podcasts. And currently the leading advice amongst the sort of parenting people who I listen to is that timeouts were a mistake and you should not use them anymore. Instead, you use “time away.”

What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a timeout is a punishment, and time away is a reset. A timeout teaches your child that if they express anger or sadness or frustration, that is bad and unacceptable and they will be isolated and abandoned. Time away teaches them that it’s ok to get angry or frustrated and to have big feelings, but there are appropriate places and ways to have them, and sometimes we all just need a minute to gather ourselves. The big difference is that a timeout usually involves the kid being left somewhere until they are ready to behave, and time away means the caretaker takes them somewhere quiet and then sits with them until they are ready to rejoin society.

If you are, say, my parents’ age (which means if you are my parents because like ten people read this blog), your eyes have rolled into the back of your head and are now stuck there. But I bought this, it made sense to me, and it’s the same approach all the preschools I toured use now, and I see it everywhere, and so I thought, ok, that’s what I’ll do.

So every time Edith throws a massive tantrum, I take her into her bedroom and I shut the doors and then I sit with her on her bed and I validate her feelings, but also tell her we won’t be going back out until she is ready to stop screaming. And eventually she wants to go back out and so I say, “are you done screaming?” And she will say yes and then we’ll go back out.

The problem with this is that what Edith mostly wants is to be alone with me and to have my dedicated attention and focus. And almost all the time, when she is throwing a tantrum, she is throwing it because I have done something that she did not specifically instruct me to do, like standing up abruptly, or walking in a different direction than the one she’d decided I should walk in. So taking her into her room and sitting with her there is a concession to the tantrum. And she very clearly does not consider it a consequence; her attitude every time this happens is basically, “finally, you see reason. Now, we’re going to play a game with these bunnies. You take this one, and please try to keep up this time so we have no more unpleasantness.”

Also, it sucks for me. I really don’t like screaming or just loud noises generally; I have a big physical response — my heart starts hammering, my shoulders go up around my ears, and I feel cornered. This is a me problem, but it’s something that’s been really hard with raising a small child. I have to do a lot of work to stay calm and steady while there’s ear-splitting screaming going on. So a solution to this that involves me staying with the screaming, going into a small closed room with the screaming, and continuing to experience the screaming in a more focused one-on-one way makes me utterly miserable and very anxious. Which ends up making me dread spending time with my own daughter.

So I was struggling with this, and then I read this article. And I feel really dumb to admit this, but I was suddenly like, of course. Of course. Yelling in frustration is not the same thing as berating and verbally abusing your child, and timeouts for tantrums are not the same thing as shaming your child for authentic expressions of negative emotions. There is no way that Edith is going to get the message from me or from the world at large that it’s not acceptable for her to express anger, sadness, spite, murderous rage, or anything else she happens to be feeling from one minute to the next, or that she will be abandoned by her loved ones if she does so. This child has an entire phalanx of adults who spend their waking lives indulging and engaging with every passing emotion she happens to experience. If she lightly sighs in disappointment at least two people will immediately appear to investigate whatever has met with her disapproval. She could full out spit in my face every day from now until I drop dead, and I’m still going to follow her around everywhere and laugh at all her jokes and try to smell her hair. I do not have to worry about raising a repressed doormat; I have to worry about raising someone who expects that her friends will want to listen to her poetry.

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before. But you have a kid and you’re tired and it’s hard and you worry all the time about fucking it up in some deep way, and I don’t know, you’re just really primed to listen to parenting advice from parenting experts, even (or maybe especially) if it runs counter to what feels intuitive. I want to be told what to do! I don’t want to mess this up! But I’m finally starting to get my brain back a little, and I’m remembering that back before I had a kid, I was skeptical.

So, the other morning when we went into the kitchen and Edith demanded toast and then threw a shrieking fit because I went to make the toast a bit more abruptly than she had intended, and then continued screaming because I didn’t get her milk out promptly enough, and then screamed because I sat in a different chair than the one she expected me to sit in, and then threw her toast on the floor in a rage, I picked her up and I hauled her into her room and I deposited her on her bed and I closed the door behind me and I went back into the kitchen and I ate the rest of Edith’s toast standing over the sink and I guzzled half a mug of coffee and I took several deep and fortifying breaths.

And then I went back to her room and opened the door. Edith was lying face-down on the floor screaming at the top of her lungs, but when I opened the door, she stopped screaming and she craned her face sideways and peered up at me.

“Are you done?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m done,” she said, and she got up and we went back into the kitchen and had a pleasant breakfast and a very pleasant morning.
Christmas

January 10th, 2024

Christmas already feels like a million years ago, and it also seemed to last for a million years while it was happening. I guess parenting a two-year-old is exhausting for anyone, but I wonder if there’s something about my personality that makes having a week off work with my kid feel like an epic test of endurance and grit. Before I had a child, I probably spent 95% of my non-working life in a reclining position being passively entertained in some way, and that went on for like a good 15 years or so. Going from that to spending 95% of my time racing several strollers of varying sizes up and down a hallway, going on outings, and/or chasing down, tackling, and wrestling a screaming 30-lb toddler in and out of diapers, pants, jackets, shoes, socks, and carseats all day while she fights me with all her tiny might is a major lifestyle change.

One of Edith’s favorite games is “jump around,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Another is “let’s dance.” Another is “let’s race.” My three favorite games are “lie on face,” “lie on back,” and “sit in hot shower while listening to podcast.” We are not compatible!

But I delivered with the Christmas magic. And it was really fun! This was the first year Edith was old enough to really be into what was going on, and she loved all of it. She loved the lights and wanted to take a nightwalk every night after dinner (with Agatha in the doll stroller). She loved the tree. She loved the nativity set (which has since been improved with about 50 additional animals). She loved the music. She loved having relatives staying with us and all the activity that involved. One of the family members along was my cousin’s five-year-old daughter and Edith loved having another kid to play with every day.

I had always assumed Edith was an extrovert, given…well, everything about Edith. But it was interesting to watch her for the first time with unlimited socializing opportunities. She actually needed pretty frequent breaks to recharge. She likes to play and run around and talk to everyone, but then after awhile of that, she’d either go off on her own or steadily ignore everyone while she played some focused game. Once I couldn’t find her anywhere and I was starting to panic when I discovered her sitting quietly in an unused room by herself in the dark, having gone in and shut the door behind herself. So maybe we’re not entirely dissimilar after all.

Did we all get sick? Oh, of course! Everyone was sick before, during, and after, and all with a variety of different things. We were sitting around the kitchen island one morning fixing breakfast when Edith (perched in my lap) abruptly projectile vomited all over everything (including the just unwrapped but as yet tasted loaf of some sort of bread a kind neighbor had just delivered, which meant I had to be vague in my thank-you note since we didn’t ever learn exactly what it was). We all looked at her in shocked silence for a beat, and then she gave us an encore. We’re all still sick now. I’ve stopped even trying to draw boundaries between illnesses; they just overlap and bleed into each other like waves upon the shore.

Edith liked all her presents, but her favorite toy by far was this plastic kitten playset. She is really into “kitties” and she is obsessed with this thing. Edith’s not much of a toy kid generally. She likes to act out her life with her stuffed animals, and she likes physical activity, and she likes to color and paint. But she doesn’t really play with her toys much. But she will crouch over this thing for HOURS, making the kitties talk to each other and putting them through routines. “Play kitties, mama,” is a phrase that has begun to haunt me — I often hear it drifting softly from the other side of the house and then if there are grandparents around, I maybe become a little bit hard to find for awhile.

The week after Christmas, the relatives left and I found myself confronted with a vast and yawning chasm of time and a kid with raised expectations. We went to the really cool playground to the South, and the really cool playground to the North. We went to the children’s museum. We went to the zoo. We ran out of ideas. We went to Target. We could not believe there were still three more days before work started again. We played with water beads in the backyard and we regretted it. We googled how the fuck do you get rid of 4000 fully engorged water beads, and then we hid the water beads behind a wheelbarrow in the side yard. We went to the local playground, and then back to the local playground, and then back to the local playground again, because the local playground is perfectly fine and every goddamned day is not going to be an adventure. We began to feel we were trapped in a groundhog’s day of wake up, breakfast tantrum, get dressed tantrum, playground, leaving playground tantrum, naptime tantrum, play kitties, let’s race, [dead zone], dinner tantrum, shower tantrum, play kitties, let’s color, bedtime tantrum, sleep.

And then it was all over! Everyone else came back to work stressed and sad, but I danced into my office and stretched luxuriously and booted up my computer and drank deeply of my coffee and basked in the cozy silence.

And then I missed Edith.
Number Two

December 7th, 2023

Warning that this is a more personal post than the sort of thing I usually write.

Everyone who had babies at the same time I did is currently pregnant with their second now. I had been receiving each new piece of information along these lines with a wave of sadness without really clocking it consciously (because I am so busy), but then something happened that really brought it to the forefront — I was delighted to see that a writer I like a lot and have a sort of parasocial relationship with had resurfaced after being dark online for a few years when she had her first baby around the same time I had Edith. And she mentioned that she’s now expecting her second daughter, and reading that, I burst into tears.

“How interesting,” I thought, observing myself from a remove like I do, because I have absolutely no time to experience my own emotions. “I guess I’m really fucking sad about not having another kid.”

I was an only child, and I always told myself that I would never have just one kid, that if I had kids, I would have ideally a pack of them. I wanted to create a massive, roiling family, the sort I was always jealous of as a child. The kind of family where no one was ever alone for a second and there were always a million things going on. But I couldn’t make it happen, and in the end, I created an even smaller family than the one I grew up with. (To be fair to myself, this isn’t really true; while Edith doesn’t have a dad, this was a big reason I combined households with my parents. She lives with three adults, so technically I expanded things by one. But it feels true when I’m feeling badly about myself.)

On one level, this feels like a failure. I feel like a failure about a lot of things in my personal life and I also carry around a lot of shame about it all, but this one even moreso because I did have the ability to start having children sooner, and if I had done so, I could have at least had two. I am realizing that this one goes beyond shame and regret into something more akin to deep grief. When I sit in Edith’s music class surrounded by slightly younger pregnant women, when I get videos of Edith being so sweet and enchanted by the newborn at her nanny’s house, when I get the monthly autobill for the one remaining viable embryo that I just can’t quite accept that I’m not going to use, I experience a deep and profound sadness that echoes back to how it felt in the days before I conceived when I thought maybe I wasn’t going to be able to at all.

On the other hand, I’m so enchanted by Edith that when I imagine having a second child, I feel a projected resentment at that child for dividing my attention from Edith and for just basically horning in on our perfect love, which I know is a silly feeling that would vanish immediately were I actually to have a second child, but that since I can’t is a little reassuring to focus on.

Edith is enough. I am so grateful and really so awed to have gotten to bring her into the world and to get to spend the rest of my life with her that wanting anything else feels unutterably selfish. But I did want to give her a sibling, and I know that she will feel the loss of one, if only when she wants someone to talk shit about me to who really gets how it is to have me as a mother. I wanted her to have at least one other person with a shared history and common story, to help her feel rooted and connected and more intentional in this random and disconnected and isolating world.

I know there are more only children now than there were when I was a kid (although possibly not in suburban Texas) and I know that this sense of connection and belonging can be created through building deep friendships and community with non-blood relatives. But I doubt my ability to do that for her. I’m hopeful she will quite naturally do it for herself, and I can support it. I’m hopeful the donor was an extrovert.

The funny thing is that all of my actual close friends had babies when they were around the same age as I did, and are also “one and done” so I don’t know why I feel like I’m surrounded by earth mothers issuing forth broods, other than that we always focus most on what we can’t have. I also know women who were unable to have children at all despite wanting them, so it feels selfish and ungrateful to write about my sadness over only having one.

But it’s something I’m thinking about a lot lately and I wanted to write about it here for some reason. If you’ve read this far, I’ll bring things back around to the usual tone here by reporting that Edith returned to normal poops this weekend and there was much rejoicing all across the land. I never thought I’d be so excited to handle a warm pile of shit — I wanted to parade through the streets holding the full diaper outstretched before me.

“Look!” I would say. “Behold what my daughter has done!”
Still Poopin’

November 29th, 2023

Edith’s stool sample results took a long time coming back because it was over the holiday week when everyone was at home picking over a bird carcass and not thinking about genocide, but they finally came back positive for c diff.

If you’re fortunate enough not to be familiar with c diff, basically it’s a bacterial infection that can result from antibiotic use that results in endlessly pooping extremely foul-smelling diarrhea. By the time we got the results, Edith had been up three times a night, and needing her diaper changed every 20 minutes during the day, and I was out of my mind with exhaustion. The treatment for c diff is, ironically, more and different antibiotics (which also cause diarrhea) and when I gave Edith a dose of these on Friday evening, she immediately projectile vomited everywhere. I waited awhile, and then tried again, and did not achieve any different results.

The next morning, her pediatrician’s office advised that I should take her to the children’s hospital ER downtown, so we all loaded in the car and went up there. C diff is very contagious in hospital settings and nurses basically treat it like MRSA, so we were ushered into our own room very quickly. We then spent six hours there. Edith shat through her pants immediately and I had not thought to bring a spare, so she spent the whole day Winnie-the-Pooh’ing it. She passed the time confined to this tiny cell in climbing all over the expensive medical equipment, getting as up close and personal as possible with the grimy corners, and periodically staring slack-jawed at the TV. She was so excited at the novelty of being….trapped in this tiny room that she would not nap, even though that was the only thing we could reasonably and easily do in there. The room had a sliding glass door with a curtain over it that gave onto the busy ER hallway, and Edith spent a lot of time wrapped up in that curtain, pantsless, banging her doll on the glass door and howling like that scene from the Graduate, so we got a lot of attention from passers-by.

Turns out, there’s no alternate treatment for c diff, so after all that, we were discharged in the evening with the prescription of “try mixing it with juice.”

And annoying as that was, the more annoying thing is that mixing it with juice actually worked. I thought it wouldn’t work, because at three in the morning after not sleeping for several nights, I saw a lady say on Reddit that it didn’t work for her kid; otherwise I would surely have tried it myself and spared us a Saturday in medical jail.

I now have to give Edith this medication every six hours around the clock for ten days, which means that we both have to wake up at 1:30 a.m. for a dose. She is still pooping quite a lot, but not overnight, so the medication does seem to be doing something constructive.

I’m currently on about a two-week delay for catching everything Edith has, so I have “shitting my pants” calendared for next Monday, December 4th. I will report back!
Poop, Rash, Cough, Repeat

November 20th, 2023

I’m sure it’s tiresome to read about my household’s ongoing parade of illnesses, but not nearly as tiresome as it is to live it. We’re currently playing host to every virus that blows through central Texas, we’ve got the welcome mat out and a crockpot full of chili on, and we’re just waving them all in.

After the epic virus-that-wasn’t-COVID capped off by ear infections, Edith and I got another little virus that lasted a couple days and left us with a hacking cough. Then, three days after THAT virus, she ran a low fever for two nights, after which she broke out in a spotty rash. Additionally, her two week bout of diarrhea which I had figured would be over once she’d finished her antibiotics instead got steadily worse. That brought us up to this past weekend when I took Edith to Saturday clinic hours and learned that:

(a) she still has a raging ear infection because the first round of antibiotics did not work;

(b) she has hand-foot-and-mouth disease; and

(c) the diarrhea is an unrelated mystery necessitating a stool sample (results currently pending).

Per the last point, this woman handed me a baggie with seven — seven! — little jars I was to fill with poop. She said that lining Edith’s diaper with plastic wrap might make collection easier. And then she said, and this is a direct quote: “I am really sorry. This is a truly impressive list of diagnoses.”

I always knew my kid would be exceptional, but I am ready for her to coast at average for awhile.

None of this seems to be getting Edith down. She had a lovely weekend with lots of dedicated attention from me, and her symptoms don’t seem to be bothering her too badly, which I’m happy about.

The exception was Saturday night, when she was so uncomfortable I had to share a bed with her and so I know first-hand that she was unable to sleep at all. When I sleep with Edith and Edith cannot sleep, she really takes it out on me. And she does this in a way that I don’t think is typical of most toddlers. It’s really…mean and aggressive. So for example, when I fall asleep and she can’t sleep, she gets up on all fours for leverage, in a table-top position, and then she pile-drives the top of her head into my torso as hard as she possibly can. Other times, she’ll spin herself around and kick me directly in the face, very hard and more than once, until I manage to get my wits about me enough to physically suppress her. Nights like this involve my drifting off repeatedly only to be woken by a hail of blows, followed by frantic wrestling and defensive maneuvers.

Edith’s fury seems to come from her indignation that I should be able to think about anything other than her pain and discomfort when she is in pain or uncomfortable. Because it is so clearly my job to make her feel better, when I do not manage to do that, she feels I am neglecting my duties, and this enrages her. How can I go to sleep when she cannot sleep? How can I fix food or wander off or drift into thought when she is itching or hungry or bored? How can I go work in my office all day when she has not dismissed me?

It’s exhausting to be on the receiving end of this sort of focus, but I do remember feeling this way about my own mother. Just outraged that she could be content or focused on something other than me when I was feeling terrible, whether she could do anything about it or not. How could she think of anything else! (I remember feeling this way because it was last week.)

I’m still convinced everything bad that happens to me is my mother’s fault somehow. Once you get food from someone’s actual body, you just sort of get the message that they exist entirely to make things easier for you. Edith doesn’t have a dad, but I think dads escape this. My own father has been and continues to be very present in my life, but I can’t recall ever feeling like he was on the hook for any problem or difficulty I was undergoing. It’s as if my tiny newborn eyes focused on his face and immediately concluded, “well, nothing can reasonably be expected of this man.” It’s a double-standard to be sure, but probably an inevitable one.

Meanwhile, while moms are frequently chided not to let their own self-care slip, it is stupid and impractical advice. You cannot possibly take care of yourself with a small child. You just have to put yourself on ice for a few years and hope you’re starting from a solid enough spot to still be salvageable at the end of it. For example, this morning, I am supposed to (per the medical advice of a handful of providers) make a fresh smoothie, consume it in my ergonomically set up office where I am to use my S.A.D. light, take frequent movement breaks, exercise mid-day, and have a lunch with protein.

Instead, Edith is here with our nanny because she (Edith) is contagious and she (also Edith) now throws giant meltdown temper tantrums if she catches sight of me during the day, so this morning, I scurried into the guest room which has an en suite bathroom so I don’t have to go out. In a panic, I grabbed a bag of leftover Halloween candy on my way, which hopefully will hold me till end of day, and now I am holed up in here, hunched over on the guest room bed in dim lighting, eating fistfuls of cheap chocolate and drinking from the bathroom tap, typing in my lap, and trying not to make too much noise.

I’m in the Mom oubliette.
Boo

November 8th, 2023

I had intended to post about Edith’s adorable third Halloween, which I was very excited about. She was to go as a cat, but in the end, the entire family stayed home dressed as victims of a hellacious virus — boo! We were so sick we didn’t even stick a candy bowl out on the porch, and I’m not sure if it speaks to the kindness or lack of initiative of this neighborhood’s children that our house wasn’t egged.

I had to take the entire week off work. Initially, we thought it was COVID (due to a false positive home test), but turned out to be just some random virus that knocked our entire house on its ass, gave Edith soaring fevers for over 72 hours, and resulted in all three of us having raging ear infections. If we ALSO get COVID and/or the flu after this, I’m going to have to be committed.

I chose to have Edith on my own, so I would not complain about not having a partner even if I ever wished I did. But I honestly never wish that I did. Even when things are really hard, I don’t feel the need for a partner, or as if having one would make things better. Until last week, which was the first time since having Edith that I wished I had a partner, so she could be someone else’s problem for awhile while I slept. Solo parenting a sick kid while also sick yourself is a nightmare, and there are untold number of single moms out here raising five kids with disabilities (theirs and the kids’), job and housing insecurity, no insurance, and all sorts of other shit. I honestly do not see how it’s possible and I also do not see how I am the same species as these women. Women often say that becoming a mother makes them realize their own strength and resilience and that they can do things they never thought they could do. Maybe it’s because I’m an old mom, but for me, it’s been the opposite. A mere skim of my local Facebook mom pages is enough to bring home to me what an absolute hothouse flower I am. I cannot handle any level of exertion or adversity at all. One small child with a normal virus in a life perfectly set up to support me through a week of unexpected illness financially and otherwise is enough to reduce me to a puddle on the floor.

Parents are always talking about how hard parenting is, and personally I think many parents do overstate it a bit (humans have a tendency to focus on the bad stuff). Before I was a parent, I struggled to really understand what parents were talking about regarding the shift in their lifestyle (and they always said you couldn’t possibly understand it until you had experienced it). I often think about how I would explain it to a non-parent now, and the closest thing I can think that gets at it is when you take your first job out of college and realize there aren’t any summers anymore.

Before I was an adult I had an intellectual understanding that the rhythm of the school year was not universal — that once you were an adult, there was not a clear “end” to each year, followed by a lengthy period where you got to go back to your real life before entering into another year. But I didn’t get it at a visceral level until I was sitting in a cubicle during my first June as an employed person and it dawned on me that for the rest of my life (or at least until I was very old), I would be in one long unbroken year that never ended during which I performed service to someone else and visited my own life in between.

Parenting is this, but moreso. You know before you have a kid that there won’t be weekends off from it and the entire rhythm of the week that is what life feels like to you has shifted. Now it is a continual week. There won’t be breaks or vacations from being a parent, and you won’t be sleeping in again for many years.

But all that doesn’t really sink in until later. For the first couple years of a kid’s life you’re in these brief intense states: newborns are up every two hours, but only for the first three or so months. Your baby will start sleeping through the night anywhere from three months to nine months or so. Etc. There’s always an improvement and a step back toward normalcy just over the horizon.

But Edith and I have now settled into comfortable routines and she’s able to play by herself for longer and longer periods of time, she goes to the nanny’s full-time during the work week, and there aren’t really any major shifts in lifestyle that I know of between now and like about six? Except that I hope she will reduce the screaming tantrums before then. So I now have time to really reflect upon the fact that I haven’t slept in or had a relaxing weekend or really done anything alone or on a whim in well over two years now, and that I won’t be doing that for many years to come. I’m not complaining about this; it just feels very real now, the unbroken consistency and predictability of it. I do think that having a dog is similar in that when you adopt a dog, you will be getting up every single morning without pause to let that dog out for the rest of the dog’s life. (The difference being that you typically don’t then spend the rest of every day 100% focused on the dog.)

On Friday night, I went to the ER for the ear infection and I didn’t get released until after midnight, and as I was driving home, I realized that I had not been out at night alone since before Edith was born. I felt suddenly like a completely different but very familiar person. I felt like my old self in a way that I didn’t even realize I didn’t feel anymore; like I’d taken an old well-worn coat out of storage and put it on. Just for a ten minute drive though an unfamiliar town I don’t really remember exactly how I ended up living in.

Edith at the moment is at the changeling age; she is one of two Ediths usually on alternating days: Fun Edith or Angry Edith. I can tell within about five minutes of wake-up which Edith I’m going to get, and my whole goal is to get Fun Edith on the weekends. I do really identify on a soul level with the angry frustration of toddlers at this age; it’s awful having no control over anything and being told what to do all the time. I viscerally remember how this felt throughout my entire childhood. For as early as I can remember I just wanted to be 18 so I could be in full legal control of myself, and as much as people tell you that being an adult sucks and you’ll wish you were a kid again for the rest of your life, this has not been true in my case. I love being an adult, I love being in complete control of every aspect of my life, and I would 100% rather be miserable on my own steam than in a stress-free paradise that is controlled by someone else. I think Edith is probably going to be like me in this respect.

But sympathizing with her frustration is one thing; refraining from yeeting her out a nearby window when she’s on hour four of screaming bloody murder because I gave her the orange she just asked for, but she decided in the two seconds it took for me to hand it to her that she didn’t want it anymore, is quite another.

One thing that will always calm her (and in keeping with the sick ward theme we have going on around here) is unfettered access to Band-Aids. Edith is obsessed with Band-Aids, all her animals and dolls are covered in them, and she usually has at least three on herself at all times. She knows Band-Aids are for boo-boos and being a daredevil, she is constantly covered in boo-boos, so she is forever coming up to me and pointing at a bruise or a scrape and saying “boo-boo, Mama, need a Band-Aid.” The other night she was jumping on her bed, and she suddenly took a header off the end of it, smashed into the diaper stand, and disappeared in the crack between the two with a loud thunk. “Are you alright?” I said.

“I’m ok!” she replied, from the floor. “Need a Band-Aid!”

I’m starting to think she’s ramping up her injuries just to get more Band-Aids.

Not long ago, my father came for a week and in the mornings, he sometimes still had a Breathe-Rite strip on his nose when he came out. Edith would stare at it, fascinated. Since then, I find all the animals and dolls have Band-Aids across the bridges of their noses.

Pictured are Lucy, Jojo, Agatha, and Bee-bee all breathing clearly. Unlike the rest of us, currently.
Cars

October 4th, 2023

This week, I went back to work. I can’t say the first morning back was the smoothest, and ultimately, it was Jojo’s fault.

Edith isn’t really a toys kid; rather, she likes to play extremely repetitive games in various areas of our house and its surroundings. As I’ve already described, she has an entourage of stuffed animals and dolls who follow her around at all times. There are anywhere from 2 to 15 of them and she carries them around by the armload. She gets furious if (a) she cannot manage to carry the entire bundle of animals she wants at any particular time, and (b) if any adult tries to help her carry whichever ones she’s dropping. We have several strollers of varying sizes in our long front hall and she spends a lot of time loading the various animals into them and pushing them up and down.

Whenever we go anywhere, I say, “you may bring in one animal” and she will pick from whoever’s currently in the car. Usually Agatha gets the nod, but then she tries to bargain. “Just Agatha, and one little duck,” she’ll say, very reasonably, as if we both agree, hustling down from her carseat with them. Usually she prevails.

She loves to fling the animals all around the house and into the walls and over tables. She likes to hide in a cardboard box with them and pop out to my feigned screams of shock (which get more and more strained as the game goes on). She likes to read to them, and she likes to fling them down the slide, and she likes to take them around in the back yard in a little toy shopping cart.

She also likes to place one of them on its back on the bathroom counter and then stand on a stool wearing my bluelight glasses, and grooming it with every unguent and hygiene implement within reach. So her animals are usually matted with varying sorts of fragrant soaps and lotions, in addition to being covered in dirt, small pebbles, food, pool water, etc. They reek, but then, she also likes to bathe them in the sinks and tubs.

I think part of her love for them is that she can’t stand to be told what to do (wonder where she got that from) and she can use her animals as a way to sort of transfer commands, so that she can spare her own pride as she follows them. For example, if I say “let’s go Edith, we need to put your socks on and get in the car” she will turn around and say, in an authoritative way, “Daisy, need to put your socks on!” Then she will wag Daisy at me and ask, with a bit of weary impatience, “little sock for Daisy?” as if both Daisy and I are just impossible and she can do nothing with us. I frequently must put diapers on 15 assorted animals before she will tolerate me changing hers. She won’t eat anything I try to serve her, but she always dines with an animal under each arm and they are made to sample everything (“little cup for Jojo?”).

Relatedly, Edith loves to color, but she has a unique way of coloring: she doesn’t so much color as much as order me to color. We spend hours at this. She’ll say “let’s color, mama!” and we’ll get out the crayons and a coloring book. And then she’ll point at what she wants colored and say, “mama, color the ball. Orange.” And so I’ll color the ball orange. And then she’ll say, “mama, color the duck, mama. The duck.” And so I’ll color the duck. And then I’ll say, “why don’t you color, Edith?” And she’ll say, “No, I don’t like it. Color this girl, mama. Do the face.”

Finally, she likes to drive the car. And lately, this has become a game we have to play every single time we come home from anywhere. Edith refuses to get out and come in the house, but instead, she climbs nimbly into the front seat with an animal and spends up to 40 minutes “driving.” I get so bored by this (and it’s so damned hot in the car) that usually I go sit outside somewhere at a short distance and just wait for her to be done. On Saturday evening, we got home and Edith and Jojo were driving and Edith kicked me out of the car and insisted I close all the doors. So I left one of them cracked just a tiny bit so that I could hear her without her realizing it was open.

And then I forgot that it was cracked and left it like that all night.

On Sunday morning, we went out to go to music class and I realized the car door was open, but, oh joy! The battery wasn’t dead somehow! However, various alarming service messages popped up as we were driving. The tires were low, the engine needed immediate maintenance, etc. I was pretty sure these messages were related to the battery draining all night, but I wasn’t positive, so that night, my Mom and I moved the car seat to her Civic so that our nanny could take Edith in that car the next day and Mom could take mine in to get it looked at.

While we were installing the car seat and for about 40 minutes afterward, Edith and Jojo “drove” in the Civic.

On Monday morning, first day back to work, I woke up to Edith having overflowed her night diaper. I wrestled her sheets off the bed, and then our nanny arrived. I explained about the car switch while Edith had a giant meltdown because our nanny tried to help her with one of the ten animals she was trying to carry out the front door. We all went out to the Civic, Edith screaming her head off, and I realized that the battery was dead. Because (it turned out) someone turned the flashers on and we didn’t notice and they were on all night.

So now we had two dead batteries (well, 1.5) due entirely to a two-year-old wanting her monkey to get in driving practice every night. And I just think this really illustrates the extent to which I allow my toddler’s whims to run my household.