Not Appropriate for Children
A teacher from Leila’s preschool days must have taught her to ask her grown-ups at the dinner table, “Tell me about your day,” and then to respond with the story of her own, from teeth brushing to book reading. A favorite of Leila’s is Frog and Toad, from whom she and her dad have developed the habit of writing to-do lists and crossing tasks off as they accomplish them. (Sell wine. Fix car. Go to the Park. Eat ice cream. Go to the Park Again…) Tonight is my turn to read to her and by habit she will reject the first two stories I suggest, so I try to place the books I want to read in that third slot. It’s not that we don’t let her choose. It’s that the choice symbolizes the last step before bed, which she tries to put off as long as she can until we step in. Her choices are usually Curious George, Animal Mechanics, A Bunny in the Ballet, Naughty Mabel, and all are good stories. It’s just that sometimes I want a little variety, and maybe a human protagonist.
My favorite is a little-known book by Karen Hesse called, Come On, Rain! about some kids begging their mothers to let them put on their bathing suits and run out into a desert-quenching rain, and it rarely tricks its way into that third slot. Grasping at straws, I even try some reverse psychology, calling the book “too grown -up” in an attempt to goad her into wanting a big-girl story, and I have to laugh when it backfires with her yelling, “Then it’s not appropriate for children!”
I decide to ignore her. The story is filled with poetry and I doomed it the minute I let her see me rhapsodizing over its phrasing. The girls’ legs “like two brown string beans sprout…from their shorts,” and they feel the rain as it “freckles our feet, glazes our toes… “) I pause tonight to admire the “moisty green air,” knowing my daughter will put her fingers in her ears. Just to see how testy she’ll get, I ask her, “So, what’s your favorite word in the book.”
“The,” she says.
It’s been a summer of No’s, of obstinate behavior, and of lashing out. Mostly this happens when one of the items on that to-do list doesn’t come true, but this first summer after a full year of school, I think it’s also due to the lack of routine that comes with too many empty days contrasted with the thrill of a mixed-age camp.
At a birthday party where we reconnect with parents from PreK, Leila slips several times on the bubble-soap slicked surface of the restaurant floor, and comes to me both crying for and flailing against my help. I turn red when she whacks me hard on the arm for some comfort I’ve offered and whines, “Stop, Mommy, stop!”
“She’s been difficult this past month,” I admit to the mothers sitting at my table, as I watch my daughter skate off and stand once again in front of the clown who is blowing up skinny balloons, rejecting his offer to make her something for a third time, even though she really wants a butterfly sword like the other girls have. Clowns are scary. The party is an elaborate affair. In addition to the clown who doubles as cotton-candy maker, there is a princess assistant, a Muppet, a deafening DJ, and a buffet and bar for 40 people. If this is the scale of a celebration for a five-year-old—and in public school no less—I wonder what’s next, and think back to the tiny pizza party we held for her with a few classmates and her cousin at a pottery place. The kids here are so hopped up on sugar they’re bouncing off the walls, and only the odd presence of a sheet of phyllo dough between the spongy layers of birthday cake keeps them from devouring that on top of the Piñata candy and the ice cream.
“Oh please, don’t apologize,” says Juliette’s mother. “There was a time when I was afraid to take her out by myself. She would fly into these rages and just explode.”
“Ginger used to grab my hand really tight and squeeze until you thought it would fall off,” Sharon says, her languid older daughter, Ruby, hanging on her arm like a projection of the calmer future.
I am flooded with relief until both of them say, “But that was when she was three.”
Google "snotty five-year-old" and you will find lots of advice on the defiant stage that apparently happens in kindergarten. I had no idea it was a thing.
A few more examples. She accidentally kicks me in the face while climbing into the back seat of the car. I complain and she tells me, “Well, you should watch out.” Have I said something like that to her? I hope I would have just apologized. When the apology does come, it feels hollow and she wails that we never believe her when she says she’s sorry. She may be right, since her sorries are often strategic plays to regain a loss. (Like TV, which is the first privilege we deny.) There’s been a lot of hating us, never talking to us again, never talking, just nevers, and then ten minutes later, out the door on the way somewhere it’s like it never happened and she’s skipping and holding my hand: wild mood swings that make you question whether there’s alcohol in vanilla extract or if sugar really can change your personality. And where does this doubt that we love her come from? “You hate me!” She screams. It feels as backward as it does when she says to me, in anger, “Well then, I’m not going to be your mommy anymore.” Aren't they supposed to be teenagers by the time they tell you, “I wish I had different parents”?
In Fairway, where we grab dinner before food-shopping, Leila asks for coconut water, which she’s tried before and disliked. I remind her of this and predict that she won’t like it again, but she insists she will this time. She tries a single mouthful at dinner, shows me she’s tried it, and then over the next 24 hours forces herself to finish it until she can finally show me, "See, it’s all gone.” When did we start competing over who’s right? And she’s calling me “Amy” again in between “Mama," which makes sense since yesterday she told me she feels like a baby and a big kid at the same time.
Tahmeena, Leila’s best friend’s mother, reports similar troubles, similar shame. Maybe it’s an only child thing, which brings the blame back to me. Tahmeena is one of eight siblings, but doesn’t seem to carry the guilt I have at not reproducing a whole brood; she’s one and done. Separated from her husband, she likes it that way. I think about how different our childhoods were every time she tells me more about what it was like growing up in Tajikistan. She loves Brooklyn and would never move back to her home town, but it irks her that we have to bring the girls to the urine-drenched public bathrooms in the park, “when a dog can just go right in the dirt. They would arrest me, probably, for letting Gabrielle pee here…”
I tell Tahmeena I’ve been reminding Leila to be nice to me when she shoots past my five feet in height (her father sings “Short people got no reason to live” whenever I ask for help reaching something on a high shelf). Fara misses the cultural reference but tells me that Muslim men are taught to think of their mothers and sisters first and wives last. The wives seem to be treated almost as slaves, in her telling of it, and while she does not want to perpetuate that tradition, she says, “I need to teach Gabbi to take care of me when I’m old.”
