But, like the cookies on the airplane, I acquiesced, hoping the new treat might stop William and Vivian from free falling off the side of the 7,500-foot mountain.
We asked them to choose from two flavors: vanilla or vanilla. They chose the latter.
Parenting Tip: Always give your child the illusion of choice. For your ease, make the two choices identical.
Vivian started by inspecting her ice cream cone from every possible angle, no doubt assessing whether or not she could recreate this creation in a complex craft session at home. While looking at the pointy end, she got a lesson in gravity as the single scoop of ice cream fell. I half caught it and plopped it onto her cone before her screams started an avalanche.
William tested Newton’s laws in another way. He decided to eat the cone from the bottom. This was the same boy who bit a giant hole in the middle of his slice of pizza so it resembled a triangular donut.
This time, understatement won as the parenting technique of the moment. “William,” I said, “it’s usually best not to bite the bottom of the cone first.”
Ice cream dripped on the frozen ground, and I restrained him from lapping it up. My Texan friend smiled, once again convinced of her decision not to have children.
Parenting Tip: Stating the obvious to your children is a gentle introduction to the art of sarcasm.
For our wedding, my parents gave us a lump sum of money. Since Chris and I married in Canada in the middle of a move from Bahrain to Thailand, we opted for an IOU, cashable when we returned to North America.
We used the money to purchase a dining room table and chairs. My best memories of my own family occurred around the dinner table. We had many large gatherings and a lot of laughs. After his first dinner with us, Chris remarked, “It’s like eating with Vikings. There’s a lot of food, a lot of wine, and it’s very, very loud.” The only way you were heard at these dinners was if you yelled over the laughter. It was competitive repartee.
A table, then, was a nostalgic gift. To find one I loved, we interviewed furniture makers and chose a Dutch-Canadian family business that made us a beautiful set that cost more than our children. When the furniture makers told us how to care for our table, the Dutch father asked, “How do you plan to use it?”
I told them for every meal. Then I added, “We have twins. They’re toddlers.”
“It’ll see wear and tear then,” one of the brothers said. “But furniture should be used.” I sensed him mourning his art.
I suspected they knew it’d be abused. Possibly by twins who colored at the table.
With the golden slab of maple in its virginal state, William and Vivian focused on trying to stay on their coloring pages. They were using wash-off markers. Until they weren’t.
“That’s not—” I started. “It can’t be . . . you didn’t . . . Move the paper . . . now.”
I saw black marker covering a large section the table.
“Tell me that’s not permanent marker.”
Both kids looked at me, big-eyed faces also full of marker.
“Give me those markers,” I snapped.
They ran crying into the living room.
They were my Sharpies. For work. And they’d become one with my table.
I was angry so I cleaned.
I pulled out my arsenal: Mr. Clean, Fantastic, soap, lemon, baking powder, vinegar. I made a volcano with the last two. All of these methods were Helpful Hints from Hell that accomplished little except proving that Sharpies were permanent.
When there was no hope, I turned to that savior and demon of humankind: Google.
According to the first few search results, I had one last hope: toothpaste. “You really have to scrub,” the comment said, “but it shouldn’t remove the finish.”
I grabbed the Sensodyne, the Colgate, and the Crest. And I scrubbed. For twenty minutes.
And it came off. Unlike the red wine stains on my teeth, which got worse after this incident.
In his book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell discusses the 10,000-hour rule. According to research, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Let’s assume that parents actively mind their children for six hours a day (notice I didn’t include time you stuck them in the wind-up swing in front of that Baby Einstein DVD). That means most parents don’t become experts until their children are at least four years old. By that point, we’ve already messed them up pretty badly. Thank you for illuminating that depressing statistic, Mr. Gladwell.
Another area where I’ve invoked the 10,000-hour rule more successfully is in developing useless talents. One of them is singing “Amazing Grace” off key to various tunes, something I do every time I see monkeys on the back of a motorcycle. Another useless talent I possess is contorting my arms and sticking my head through them. A final one is sneezing like Donald Duck. I’ve clocked my 10,000 hours pretending I’m an asthmatic duck in a sailor suit. I started when I was twelve: there is no better way for a babysitter to disarm a child who is sobbing for her parents who’ve just left for seven hours to get drunk at their best friend’s wedding. I’m pretty sure sneezing like Donald Duck could get me out of a traffic ticket.
Sneezing like Donald Duck ups my cool quotient with children under eight years old. If they’re nine or older, though, sharing this talent becomes the Black Friday of my stock value.
My children frequently begged me to use my useless talent. Now I’m all for children begging their parents; it’s the only way we get to feel like we’re in control. If I refuse to sneeze like Donald Duck, they run around the house like a pair of wingless fowl in flu season.
Parenting Tip: Train your children to beg; it will help you feel more in control than you actually are.
Like any good parent, I used my useless talent as leverage. “Mommy will sneeze like Donald Duck if you pick up your toys,” I said. It was one of the few threats I made that I would carry through with, unlike the “If you don’t pick up your toys, I’m going to put them all in the blender and make you drink them for breakfast.”
I think I’ll stick with Donald Duck’s Center for Disease Control sound bite.
YOU DON’T NEED CLOTHES TO BE A DANCER
The best advice I ever got about parenting came from my older brother. “Don’t be in a hurry to toilet train your kids.”
This advice has come to underscore one of my theories of childrearing: If you wait long enough, your children will just do it themselves. It worked for breastfeeding; Vivian and William weaned themselves. Years later, I’d learn that it worked for tying shoes, riding bikes, and braiding hair.
Parenting Tip: Lazy parenting creates kids who are self-starters.
My brother’s advice worked for toilet training. By the age of three, William and Vivian just started to use the toilet themselves. No potty, no charts, no placing Cheerios or food coloring in the toilet bowl on purpose. Just a lazy mom who couldn’t be arsed.
Getting rid of their pacifiers required a bit more ingenuity. Vivian and William had been sleeping with these plugs since they were tiny, and they’d developed the habits of longterm smokers, dangling their pacifiers out of their mouths like they were lit cigarettes, waving them around for emphasis when they were speaking, and frantically looking for another fix before bedtime. Since my ignore-and-they’ll-figure-it-out approach was not working, I applied another one of my parenting strategies, which was also not in any books: I lied.
Parenting Tip: Lying is an invaluable strategy for parents. Start practicing as soon as you’re pregnant.
It was autumn. Chris had volunteered to take over the gardening. He was cleaning up our flower beds by pulling all our perennials, which he thought were undercover weeds.
I, meanwhile, went to William and Vivian and told the most heart-wrenching fib I could create.
“I think it’s time to get rid of your dummies,” I said. We’d used the British euphemism for pacifiers since we’d lived in Thailand.
William and Vivian’s eyes grew big and they searched their pockets for their
addiction.
“There are other babies in the world who need dummies,” I said, employing my best Sally-Struthers-help-underprivileged-children voice. “I think we should send them to Santa Claus.” Four unblinking eyes stared at me. “Santa will deliver the dummies to other babies at Christmas.”
Both Vivian and William looked down and nodded.
“For babies?” Will said.
I nodded.
“They won’t cry,” Vivian said.
I nodded again.
Those two little urchins went on a mass dummy sweep, searching for pacifiers that had been lost since dinosaurs walked the earth, which was the last time I’d vacuumed their room. William and Vivian found many amid dust bunnies and long forgotten library books. I grabbed a large envelope and addressed it to Santa. We deposited the dummies in it, and I threw it in the garbage when they weren’t looking. The score: Made-Up Parenting 1; Parenting Books 0.
With their pacifiers in a landfill, we survived the night and the winter and spring. It was time to stir things up again, this time with a car trip.
William and Vivian became good car travelers early on, mostly because they were easily hypnotized by the hang-from-the-rafters DVD player in our minivan. Occasionally, though, guilt would set in and we’d stop the Dora the Explorer marathon. After we ignored them for long enough, Vivian and William would invent their own games. Sometimes it was I Spy; sometimes it was a game that had the same amount of logic as the parents of toddler beauty contestants competing on Jeopardy.
We were driving through Saskatchewan, which is like North Dakota, but with fewer people and straighter roads. The directions for driving across the Prairie Provinces are this: Drive in a straight line until you want to slit your wrists; you’re 10 percent there. Every few hundred miles, there were signs along the highway that said, “Watch for pedestrians.” I once asked Chris if there was a prize if we saw one.
We were in one of these long stretches when I noticed something was going on behind me. I craned my already spasm-ing neck. Vivian and William were wriggling and contorting themselves behind their blankets. I watched this for the length of three wheat fields until I figured it out.
“They’re playing hide and seek,” I said. “In their car seats.” Brilliant.
Maybe this was proof our children didn’t qualify for early admission to Mensa. More likely it was proof that our DNA wouldn’t fetch much at the cloning auction.
If you want to figure out which phrases you repeat over and over, have children. Then put them with you in a minivan for fifteen hours where you have to listen to them. According to my two little research blobs, I say “actually” and “God help me” all the time.
The various monologues I’d performed in front of William and Vivian all went something like this:
“Actually, if you could just clean up your toys.” And when they didn’t: “God help me.”
“Actually, if you could stop biting your brother in the arm . . .” And when she didn’t: “God help me.”
“Actually, if you could just open that bottle of wine for me . . .” followed by “God help me.”
It worked.
And my kids parroted it back to me.
Unfortunately, they also repeated what Chris said. We were driving Mile 462 on our cross-prairie, masochistic trip. Our twins were absorbed in the episode of Dora the Explorer where Dora couldn’t find the object right in front of her so she yelled. We enjoyed a five-minute conversation, a full two minutes more than we talked the previous week.
Chris started telling me about what happened the previous day. “When I was driving the kids to the library yesterday morning, an A-hole passed me in a playground zone.”
My mind sped up, wondering if Chris chose to “educate” this driver, his euphemism for giving the wrongdoer the finger and laying on the horn.
“So, I yelled out the window at him,” he explained. “Then he sped past me.”
God help me, I thought.
“But one block later,” Chris continued, “Vivian asks me, ‘Daddy, what does bucking slow down mean?’”
“You didn’t say that in front of them, did you?” I asked.
“No, I yelled it,” he said. “But I didn’t think they heard it because I had Marilyn Manson cranked on the stereo.”
At that point I realized why our kids didn’t listen to us: Chris had ruined their hearing.
God help me.
Actually.
Parenting tip: Having a father who is actively involved in childrearing will ensure kids learn street skills, like cursing.
Learning words like bucking is not the only advantage of having a dad who’s actively involved with childrearing. They learned plenty, a fact I realized after our minivan clocked 832 miles and pulled into my parents’ farmyard in Manitoba. My mom took the kids, and my dad got me a cold beer. It was good to be home.
We sat outside, enjoying the company of the nine billion mosquitoes even after slathering on DDT. “No one we know has contracted West Nile Virus this year,” my mom said. The year the twins were born, my aunt and cousin had both been deathly ill with it. But that was distant history. So we let the kids run around.
I loved watching Vivian and William play on the farm. Their imagination went beyond suburban indoor games, where their only pursuits seemed to be “wrestling until someone bled” and “hop-on-mom until she puked.” I wasn’t sure who taught them either of these games, but it affirmed the Lord of the Flies theory of children: If you leave them be for too long, they will kill. Or at least devolve.
So we left them. It didn’t hurt that my mom had brought some of my vintage Fisher Price people out to occupy the twins.
I had just finished telling Chris how I used to know how to open a beer bottle with a seat belt. He had just finished asking some suburban question, like, “Why didn’t you just twist the cap off?” My parents sat proudly.
I heard barking, pretty convincing barking. This was not Fluffy the Dog, but Killer. We stopped our conversation. We heard this: “Good, Doggie. Good. Now sit.”
We turned our attention to my kids. William sat obediently in front of Vivian, panting.
“Now fetch.” Vivian flung a Fisher Price person, the angry, pissed-off boy in a cap. William crawled after it, retrieved it in his mouth, and deposited it in front of his master.
“Good, Doggie.”
William barked.
“You know,” I said, “human beings aren’t supposed to bark or play fetch.” I liked to ruin their fun whenever I got a chance.
Both kids looked at me with puppy dog eyes.
“OK, whatever,” I added.
Parenting tip: Be the rain on your children’s parade. This will help them to develop realistic outlooks on life.
I took a sip of my beer. The adult conversation progressed to the price of wheat.
That’s when I heard it. Screaming. Not the fake kind. The someone-dropped-a-knife-on-me kind. I ran.
William held his arm.
Vivian hid in a shrub, crying.
“What happened?”
Will’s screams subsided to sobs. “Vivian . . . bit . . . me.”
“Vivian!” I said. “Did you bite him?”
She looked out from under the branches and nodded.
“Why?”
“We were playing doggie. Dogs bite.”
I processed this for a minute. “But you were the owner.”
When they weren’t being dogs, William and Vivian loved to dance. A few times a week, we waltzed around the kitchen, jived in the entry, or crazy danced in the living room.
Vivian wished that we’d sign her up for dance classes. I knew there were a zillion benefits to dance, from coordination to confidence, but I couldn’t deal with it. It was outside my comfort realm. We didn’t dance on the farm.
I also didn’t do hair. And I didn’t do buns, unless there was a tasty sausage or burger in them. I didn’t want to spend my free time watching YouTube videos to figure out how to do a hairstyle she ha
d to wear. I also didn’t do makeup on kids. Plus, we knew what her gene pool contained: ballet wasn’t in the picture, though speed skating was.
One afternoon, Vivian was trying on clothes from the ancient dress-up trunk in my parents’ basement. She had just finished an impromptu dance recital at the farm. She started begging me to buy her special dance clothes: the tutu, the tights, the Lycra. I refused. She begged.
“Vivian,” I explained, “you don’t need clothes to be a dancer.”
Vivian said something, but I missed it because Chris dropped the knife he was using to slice cheese for the burgers my dad was barbecuing.
Excellent. I have a double major in English and Women’s Studies. I rant on the problem of sexualizing young girls, including bare midriffs, words on bums, and high heels. And now, I’d just told my daughter she could be a nude dancer.
Mommy needed a time out.
THE SAPY FILES, PART 3 (OR WHY MY SON’S FUTURE
THERAPISTS SHOULD ADORE HIM)
Dear William,
During the past year, you’ve mastered using manners to get what you want. You’d wander over, raise both of your hands like a referee signaling touchdown, and say, “May I please have some pick-me-up?”
“Yes,” I’d say, putting aside whatever I was doing, “you may have some pick-me-up.”
This phrase has become part of our family lore, one of those stories that I hope we’ll always tell and that I hope you’ll always love to hear.
Last week, we were at a dinner party with our friends, enjoying conversations with them and their worldly teen daughters.
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