How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (17 page)

When we moved a few months ago, the husband insisted that the child be allowed input into redecorating her room. As a result, her bedroom now has pink walls, pink sheets, and a pink light fixture. It looks like someone ground up a bunch of flamingos into a paste and flung it on her walls.

Today she asked me if she looks cute when she's sleeping. My immediate, unedited response, “No. You're hideous.” It didn't hurt her feelings—on the contrary, she simply chose not to believe me. So, on a positive note, her self-esteem is rock solid. On the other hand: GROSS.

F
OUR
Y
EARS
A
ND
C
HANGE

On Halloween it really seemed as though we were making progress. Though she'd asked to be Cinderella for her preschool Halloween party (ugh), she also expressed a desire to go trick-or-treating as Spider-Man (yay!). This was a decided win, though in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have shouted, “HELL, YEAH!!!!”

I made my way to the mall, where I found a top-notch Spider-Man costume, the last one at the store. Another mother tried to wrest it from my hands, but I wasn't about
to give it up. She even made her son ask me for it (seriously, lady, how desperate can you be, shoving your crying kid at me?), but I think the experience will serve him well—he should learn that life is filled with disappointment.

When I awoke on Halloween morning, the kid was already dressed in a homemade Cinderella outfit she'd cobbled together (blue towel, dishwashing gloves, tinfoil crown, and “magic toilet paper wand”). Unnerved, I held out the Spider-Man outfit, but she shook her head and said she'd “changed her mind.” I bit my tongue and let her wear the damn princess outfit to preschool. It was later, when she got home from school and refused to change into her Spider-Man costume for the evening's festivities, that I may have lost my cool. I won't divulge exactly what went down, except to say that strong words were spoken, tears were released, and a twenty-minute time-out was given (to me; by me).

All of which is to explain how I found myself, the following morning, filled with a form of regret that can be purged only by driving to the mall and purchasing a fully licensed Cinderella costume, complete with a real fake wand and Lucite slippers. Yes, it was a hard pill to swallow, but at least the gown is blue. The look on the kid's face when I gave it to her—that did help the pill go down. And the 25 percent off post-Halloween discount—that paid for the pill.

C
ONCLUSION

Despite my attempts to mold the girl in my Manly Lady image, it seems that it is not to be. She's proven herself to
be a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess, a fact that baffles me, as all I've ever wanted is for her to be her own woman (unless that woman is a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess). So rather than impose my will on her—as righteous and correct as I still believe it to be—I have chosen to stand down and abandon OFTP, and instead will look upon this as a “learning experience”: she may be my daughter—but in the end, she's her own person.

We all have dreams for our kids, until the day we discover that their dreams are not ours to have. And though you may pray that your daughter becomes a judo–black belt, multilingual engineering student at Yale, she just may end up the second-highest-paid stripper at “Cheeks' Bar and Grill.” And I guess, as long as she's happy, there's nothing wrong with that.
^{*
†
‡}

*
I.e., Gender-wise; species-wise we were pretty clear on what to expect.

*
A phrase I like to use when talking about people whose opposing beliefs are both (a) different from mine and (b) 100 percent wrong.

*
I still can't explain why he used the terminology of
Hustler
magazine, but I'm just going to stick with the assumption that he thought we were cool enough to handle it.

*
Fact: I am known in some circles as a Manly Lady.

*
Please see Appendix A.

*
Look, I've heard about all those studies linking physical attractiveness to professional success, and if she can sail through life on her looks, then I guess that bodes well for my husband and me and the quality of retirement home that she'll eventually stick us into. But for the sake of her humanity, I'd still rather she were a little more nerdy/awkward/homely/ dorky. Not just because all of those words have described me at one time or another (also now), but because I've heard it straight from the mouths of “babes” (i.e., the grown-lady kind) that their striking good looks often make life more—not less—difficult (i.e., problems with female friendships, men feeling intimidated by them, the world not taking them seriously). This being so, two rhetorical questions: (1) Is it too much to hope that my child could learn to get along in life solely on her personality, intelligence, and pluck? And (2) would I be going too far in considering physically disfiguring her? Just wondering.

*
As long as she's your kid.

†
( Just kidding.)

‡
(No, I'm not)

ten

MY BODIES, MYSELF

S
he woke up screaming “STEEZIN DA QUOZIT! STEEZIN DA QUOZIT!” After a few minutes of rocking and snot wrangling, I was able to get to the root of it. She'd had a nightmare about Steve. The guy from
Blues Clues
. She thought he was hiding in her closet.

This brought me great joy.

Now, it's true that I have always been attracted to “Steve”—the host of this mind-numbing Nickelodeon show—to the point that (a) I did place an eBay bid on, and after a hair-raising bidding war did win, the entire series of
Blues Clues
on DVD, and then (b) summarily discarded the single disc containing the episodes hosted by Steve's replacement, “Joe,” whose round face and lack of charisma make me want to punch something.

But the pleasure I felt after my three-year-old's first night terror had nothing to do with Steve, my not-so-secret future second husband.

It was all about her and me.

Until that moment I'd had no sense that she shared any of my genetic material, despite the fact that she was conceived inside my body and did, indeed, shoot out of my loins like a cannonball.

Back when she was growing in my belly, I'd imagine the little girl she'd become. In my wildest fantasies she was somewhere between
Little Miss Sunshine
and that kid from
Welcome to the Dollhouse:
a chubby, nerdy, socially awkward little dork. Sometimes I'd toss in a little deformity, like a clubfoot, a lazy eye, or a third nipple growing out of her face. She would be my Beautiful Little Underdog™.

Instead, I gave birth to a Disney princess who looks like we stole her from a pair of privileged and well-adjusted Swedish downhill skiers.

I am on the short side with a laugh like a pellet gun and a head full of frizzy hair that looks like something a cat threw up. And while I find my husband attractive, he frequently describes his appearance as that of a thumb. Our daughter, on the other hand, is gorgeous and girlish, with almond-shaped blue eyes, silky blonde hair, and long, willowy legs that come up to my Adam's apple. If I hadn't witnessed with my own two eyes the sight of her punching her way out of my vagina like some character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, I wouldn't have believed she was ours . . . or, more specifically,
mine
.

But that night, after seeing her in the throes of boogeyman terror, I began to see that perhaps she is a bit more like me than I thought.

My first boogeyman's name was Norman, and he hid under my bed. I can't take credit for inventing him—he was not so loosely based on a friend of the family, a mild-mannered tax attorney with long, slender hands. It may sound silly, but trust me: when you're four years old, the specter of a grown man preparing tax returns under your bed while you sleep is terrifying.