Dispatch from the Rat-Infested Parenting Trenches
I WOULD LIKE A CIGRARETTE
Have you ever met a 4-year old?
Have you ever met a 4-year-old with a strong sense of confidence and personality?
Have you ever met a 4-year-old on a 90-degree day who decided not to eat her lunch at forrest school?
Have you ever met a 4-year-old who has Kissinger level negotiation skills and a general lack of morality around popsicle 'requests?
Was it 4-year-olds who funded the smear campaign against angelic 2-year-olds?
Why did no one tell me about what an insane ass kicking awaited me at four??
If you have a 4-year-old with an easy temperament who loves silently doing puzzles or going on nature walks, I want you to stop reading this. I want you to sit in a corner and bang your head against the wall to ‘Golden’ from K-Pop Demon Hunters for the next 30 mins because that’s just a taste of what we’re going through over here.
Listen, it’s gauche and hack to complain about your kids online. And there’s nothing I can tell you that hasn’t been captured by a million memes or hours of women filming themselves weeping in their cars for the Mom Content Economy. I don’t want to contribute to it because the most frustrating part of all this is that my kid is being completely normal!!!!
What isn’t normal is that we’re alone together much the day. In no other time in history would a group of humans send a mother to be isolated in her own cave/hut/yurt/whatever expected to meet the complicated demands and emotional whims of a 4-year old by herself. The kid evolved to be around A GANG, a MOTLEY GANG OF CHILDREN WITH TANGLED HAIR AND RUDDY FACES! AND I EVOLVED TO BE SURROUNDED BY AUNTIES, MOMS, SISTERS, SAPPHIC AUNTS, AND CRONES, PICKING BERRIES IN GRASS SKIRTS WITH OUR TITS DOWN TO OUR KNEES, OUR FACES LINED AND RESPLENDENT IN SUN!!
So I put no blame on my darling daughter or any of the utterly insane little girls out there abusing their mothers for not letting them eat (more) gummy worms at 10pm.
Dance of the Weeping Ballet Moms
I’ve been taking my daughter to the same dance class for about a year, which means I spend Wednesday mornings around the same group of mothers. I wouldn’t consider any of us friends but there have been several mornings where we hold a type of mild solidarity circle when we see a mom trudge in 15 mins late and it’s clear she’s already lost 17 power struggles before she even got the tights on her kid. We’re all very different—from social class to parenting style—but while our daughters leap over stuffies to the Frozen soundtrack, each of them celestial and pot-bellied, we have found a way to quietly confess our losses. And lately we’ve been talking about how we just cry. About the days where we lose our ability to ‘go low and slow’ and we collapse inward. We cry about different things but there’s never really a sense of victimhood, just teary moments of defeat. We talk about the moments when our tricks and routines failed to stop whatever extreme emotion our daughter is seized by; when we have nothing left to offer except our own raw, wordless emotion, which in itself feels like an other defeat.
I wonder what it would be like then to walk over, my bare feet padding the dirt, into a cave and find ten other mothers there. Would we cry as much?
Hey, what’s the problem with Popsicles? Next thing I’m gonna hear is that having moon pies for breakfast isn’t healthy. Twinkies are much better. You’re more serious point as well taken and we live in a society where everybody cares about the unborn child it’s and it’s continued existence and then forgets about it and the mother two minutes after it is born. But you know that already.