Baby Frog

20 months: "Pease, mama, pease read tadpole book. Pease, mama. Tadpole, tadpole book! Bay-bee frog! Pease, mama!"

 

I found this tucked away among the first real conversations I had with my daughter, along with a note about when she had said it: “I’ve read this book twenty-two times already today and I’m going to go insane if I read it again. And I guess I have to.”

There was no mention in the note, of course, of the fact that I was not, in fact, being forced at gun point to read the preschool-targeted science book  The Tale of a Tadpole. I think that I somehow spent the first three years of my daughter’s life honestly believing that I had no free will of my own, and that my life had to be folded with precision to meet the every whim of a book-obsessed tot.

The fact is—and there’s nothing that can quite prepare you for it—that when you become a parent, you get wrapped around the sticky little finger of your pint-sized master and have absolutely no hope of resisting those commands. The crazy food cravings caused by a pea-sized embryo, the screams of a colicky newborn, the demands of a toddler, the foot-stomping of a teen, the “send more money” emails of a college kid… No matter how much we tell ourselves that we’ll be firm parents and won’t fold to their every whim, we find ourselves as slaves to those cute little dimples.

It happens to the best of us. And it happened to me, perhaps, more than most. The main problem was that my daughter’s commands came from her own breed of “spoiled.” She never had tantrums for toys or candy. She had tantrums for books and story-time and snuggles, and (as I thought to myself at the time) I would have been one sore excuse for a mother if I rejected my toddler’s interest in bay-bee frog just because I wanted a moment of peace and quiet to restore my sanity.

In parenting, you’ll often hear reference to the metaphor of the oxygen mask on the airplane. Before a flight takes off, flight attendants often remind flyers of the protocol: if something happens on the flight, parents need to put oxygen masks on themselves before putting them on their kids. After all, no mom can help a struggling child if she, herself, is unable to breathe. We need to address our own needs if we’re even going to begin to take care of the needs of our children.

Perhaps, on the Day of the Tadpole Book, I was unintentionally engaging in one of the worst mistakes of parenting possible. I was prioritizing my daughter’s needs and wants far above my own need for just a moment to breathe and think about something besides Dr. Seuss and Cheerios. And perhaps, because I was so unreasonably committed to making her happy at all times, I was actually hurting far more than I was helping. No child can be happy and healthy with a mom who is pulling out her hair with frustration and anxiety.

At some point, I learned to say “No.” I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t know how it happened. I do know that it was a turning point in my evolution as a parent and gave me the resolve I needed to address my own needs from time to time. At some point, I figured out that my happiness was more important to my daughter’s wellbeing than a twenty-third reading of Tale of a Tadpole.

You live and you learn, and then you put the tadpole book back on the shelf.