3.5 Years:
“OH MY GOD! A TALKING CUP! A CUP CAN’T
TALK! OH MY GOD, A TALKING FLYING FRY-BOY! A FRY-BOX CAN’T TALK! A FRY-BOX CAN’T
FLY! OH MY GOD, A TALKING MEATBALL! I WANT A MEATBALL LIKE THAT! I WANT A
MEATBALL LIKE THAT!”
I had gone away to work for a few hours, leaving my daughter with a babysitter.
Although we usually had a very strictly enforced screen-time limit (half an
hour a day at 3 years), I had told the sitter that she could have up to two
hours until I came home. When walked back through the door, my daughter didn’t
even look up from the TV—she was far too focused on her new discovery, Aqua
Teen Hunger Force. It’s not exactly what I would have picked out for a three-year-old,
but the overwhelming amount of delight was too charming. I couldn’t avoid
cracking a smile.
A friend of mine pointed out that my daughter’s reaction to Aqua Teen Hunger
Force was essentially the exact same as the reaction you would expect from a
fifteen-year-old stoner. I’ve concluded that stoned teenagers and autistic
toddlers have essentially the exact same neurology.
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
