Only to Discover You

3 Years:

“Which shirt do you want? The Lightning McQueen shirt that looks like three others you own, or this adorable organic cotton shirt with the stegosaurus?”

“Mama, I care about Lightning McQueen more than I care about organic cotton.”

There comes a time for every parent when we each have to admit that our kids aren’t precisely what we expected them to be and aren’t always going to have the same feelings or priorities as us. I thought that I was raising a peace-love-and-tie-dye earth-child who wouldn’t touch meat with a ten-foot pole and who would gladly seek out fair trade whenever it was available. But, as anyone could have predicted, that’s not what happened.

By the time my daughter could talk, she made it clear that she wasn’t going to be the person who I, youthful and naïve, had thought I could sculpt her to become. I hated cars. She loved them. I was anti-Disney and didn’t allow it in our house for years. She somehow figured out the characters and their names anyway. I’m vegetarian and she thinks chicken nuggets are the best thing on Earth. I couldn’t have turned her into someone she wasn’t, even if I had actually kept trying.

That was never driven home quite as much as when I was buying clothes for her and pointed out that she had a choice between a fair-trade, organic cotton shirt with an outline of a stegosaurus, and a much uglier, much baggier red tee that was no doubt made in a sweatshop by an enslaved child not much older than she was. Even when I pointed out what her choices were—and I did let her make choices, even when they weren’t choices I supported—she still let me know that she prioritized her beloved Disney-Pixar characters far more than she prioritized fair wages or environmental sustainability.

It was a little funny at the time, but in the long run, moments like that teach me a lot about parenthood, and I’m grateful for them. I understand now that it’s not my role to mold my children to be as much like me as possible, or to have the same beliefs or viewpoints. It’s my role to guide them to become the best person they can be.


"Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I'd like to see you be or do.  I have no desire to foresee you, only to discover you.  You cannot disappoint me."  
-Kahlil Gibran

Deadlines

3 Years:
“Mama, are lines alive?”
“No. Lines are inanimate. That means not alive.”
“Then how do they die?”
“They don’t.”
“Then how do you have dead lines?”

Since I work from home, my daughter was always very involved in, and interested in, my job. Until she was at least five years old, her understanding of my career was a sort of cargo cult. I made invisible money by sitting at a computer and churning out words called “articles” for invisible forces called “clients.” I had something called “paydays” and bowed to overlords called “deadlines.” She knew, and could talk about, everything having to do with my career. She just didn’t know what any of the words actually meant.

One of the classic signs of autism, especially among highly verbal children, is a tendency to take everything literally and at face value. So, when my daughter heard repeatedly about deadlines, she was certain that I had a collection of lines, and that they were dead. I’m not sure what she imagined when she heard me talk about missing deadlines or meeting deadlines, but I like to think that she thought of them as friends or masters of mine, with whom I had a close but traumatic bond. How that played into her idea that they were dead, I’ll never know.

No matter how many times I tried to explain what a deadline really was, there just wasn’t a way that her three-year-old, literal, autistic brain could sort it out, so she had to settle for just not understanding. I tried to minimize her confusion by not mentioning deadlines around her anymore, but that didn’t keep her from taking other words and phrases hilariously literally!

Because I have kidneys!

3 Years:
“Why did you pee in your pants again?”
“Because of my kidneys!”

One of the biggest frustrations we had with potty-training came from the gulf between what my daughter could understand and what my daughter could do. Way before she was actually able to sit down on a toilet and use it correctly, she would talk about the fine details of how the human body produces and eliminates waste. It was funny and cute on one hand… and maddeningly frustrating on the other.

For several months, between her third birthday and three-and-a-half, every time I demanded an explanation for an avoidable potty accident, she would desperately plead, “Because of my kidneys!” or “Because of my bladder!” or “Because of my colon!”

I couldn't get angry at her, because every time I started to, I would be interrupted with the look of confusion and innocence in her sparkly brown.  I could tell, just looking at her wide-eyed, startled expression, as she struggled to peel wet panties off her bottom, that she was just as confused as I was. She didn’t pee in her pants. It was something that her kidneys and bladder did without asking her, and it was something she just couldn’t quite grasp or control. There was also no way to argue her logic. Why would I punish her for something her body did on its own?

Even after she was potty-trained, the occasional accident would arise and get blamed on the internal organs that filter out waste and then expelled it. As frustrating as it was, it was an excuse I was almost always willing to accept. Years down the road, I can’t say that I have any regrets about more or less accepting this explanation, until she was able to sort out how to use the potty the right way.