UnchartedParent.com

I try to teach my children that the world can be a beautiful place, that most people deserve respect and that their father and I made a wise, careful choice in determining where we would live and raise our family.

So imagine my dismay when I opened my morning newspaper several days ago and was confronted with a letter from a local resident that led me in turn to write the following letter to the editor:

Re “Indoctrination,” (Monitor letter, June 21): ______ of Pembroke wrote about the alleged “continuing agenda of the worldwide Jewish plan of cultural engineering.”

Every time we witness a monumental sign of progress in breaking down long-held stereotypes, prejudices and barriers – such as the recent primary contest where the two front-runners for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. presidency were a woman and an African-American – someone like ________ steps up to show us just how far we still have to go. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism: We don’t need any of it. ______ reminds all of us who believe in equality that we still have a lot of work to do. 

                         (Printed in the Concord Monitor, June 24, 2008; please note that I have redacted the original letter-writer’s name because I don’t want to give this individual any wider recognition than he has already attained)

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this stuff, but I have to say that the original letter nearly made me spit my morning coffee onto my paper.  This kind of thinking should have been put to rest long, long ago, but it is still with us, and my little corner of the country is not immune.

It’s not what I need with my morning coffee, and it’s not what I want my children to learn.  As parents, we should all do our part to ensure that viewpoints like these go the way of the dinosaurs when it is our children’s turn to run the world.

I recognize the signs.

His name escapes her mouth at every opportunity.  She smiles and flirts in his presence.  Her day is brighter when he is there; disappointment clouds her face when he is absent.  I know that her heart actually beats faster whenever she talks about him.

Is it true love?

Who cares?  She’s three years old, for God’s sake!

“Emmie” is deep in the throes of not the first, but the second serious crush of her life.  (The object of the first crush, a tall, dark and handsome six-year-old, seems to be weathering her fickleness well.  All signs indicate he never had a clue and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did.)  This time the boy is blond and freckled, with an impish smile and a fun-loving spirit.  He was in “Jack’s” kindergarten class and Emmie always asked her big brother, “Was P____ there today?” 

The end of kindergarten would be cause for despair but for the fact that P____’s little brother just happens to be in Emmie’s daycare class.  Moreover, Jack has asked for some playdates with P____ this summer, so Emmie knows she is likely to have multiple chances to come into contact with the object of her affections.

As her mother and an adult, I ought to be able to dismiss this preschool crush with a shrug and a laugh.  But here’s my problem: Emmie at three seems to possess greater innate instincts and skills with the opposite sex than, well, I may ever have had.  She plays with the older boys on the playground, tells them what to do and issues her orders so sweetly that they obey.  She joins in their games but without them even realizing it, she soon has them playing the games she wants to play.  She smiles at them, laughs at their jokes and bats her eyelashes.  She’s amazing.

And she’s three.

Emmie’s father and I have long joked that when she is a teenager, we’re going to need to place bars across her bedroom window to prevent her from sneaking out to join her six boyfriends, all of whom will be waiting for her.  Most of the time when we say this, we are joking.

So go ahead, P_____, revel in Emmie’s feminine attentions for now.  You never can tell with girls, you know: you’re not her first, and I don’t think you’ll be her last.

And my husband and I will begin looking into installing those bars any day now.  

Uncharted Parent is swimming in a sea of end-of-school-year picnics, birthday parties, kids who have outgrown their summer clothes, first-grade “move-up” events and that dangerous, empty abyss that lies between school and summer camps wherein children require constant and increasingly inventive entertainment.  Thus, I’ll be back next week (June 24) with a new blog entry—if my computer is still speaking to me by then. 

It seems ironic to be writing about hell freezing over in the midst of near record-breaking heat, but I can’t think of any other explanation for the events of the last two days.

Sunday morning, three-year-old “Emmie” said, “I want to wear underwear.”

Yeah, sure, okay.  Here’s your underwear, and I’ll have the extra underwear and shorts standing by for when you pee in the first set.  We’d been through this approach-avoidance dance many times before.

“I want to pee and poop in the potty today.” 

Yeah, sure, whatever.  You always say that.  And it’s always followed five minutes later by, “I don’t want to pee/poop in the potty today.”

But then an unprecedented event happened.  Emmie peed and pooped in the potty, and, save for one tiny, unintentional accident, achieved underwear success all day!

Pigs flew!  Lightening descended from the sky!  (Okay, the pigs were actually sleeping at a farm we visited, and the lightening was heat-based, but it was close enough.)

Now, I know you think this is no big deal.  After all, as I was frequently told by others, “She’s not going to go to high school in diapers.”  But I wasn’t so sure.  This is the kid who not even a week ago proclaimed her absolute antipathy for all things potty-related and insisted she wanted nothing to do with it until she was four.  (Yes, she’d actually set that timetable for herself.)

Sunday night, my husband said, “She’s potty-trained now.”  Enraged, I chastised him for jinxing this one good day we’d had of Emmie doing the very thing we’d been longing for.  “Come on,” he responded.  “This is how you always said it would happen.  One day, she would just decide on her own, and that would be it: she’d be potty-trained.  She just needed to believe it was her decision.”

I was afraid to agree with him, but I knew he was right.  This is the same child, after all, who cried every night at bedtime in her crib for two years until one day she announced she was done with that—and she was.  She’s the same little girl who one evening last week refused to consume a plateful of her favorite foods for dinner because she felt she wasn’t getting enough attention at the table; she’d rather go hungry than find herself in a situation she can’t control.

So she decided, we cheered and praised and plied her with rewards (yes, it was her decision, but a little positive reinforcement couldn’t hurt) and, so far, it seems like my husband was right: the intractable Emmie is potty-trained. 

And it’s a whole lot cooler right now deep beneath the surface of the Earth!

All young children are scientists.  “Mommy, why is the grass green?”  “Mommy, why do we eat food?”  They are mathematicians: “How many bites of zucchini is ‘enough’?”  They are fashion experts: “I have to wear the orange-and-red striped dress every day.”  They possess a sense of justice to be envied by appointees to the Supreme Court: “You said she could play with it for five minutes and then it would be my turn; it’s been seven minutes, and she still has it, and that is NOT fair.”

Sometimes, however, their probing questions become more esoteric.  Take three-year-old “Emmie’s” question to me a couple of days ago.  We were watching her big brother’s T-ball practice, and my daughter heard one of the coaches yell a command to someone who also happened to be named Emmie. 

My Emmie whipped around and looked at me with a furrowed brow.  She pointed to the six-year-old girl who had responded to the coach.  “She is ‘Emmie’?”

“Yes, her name is Emmie, too,” I replied.

Emmie stared at the girl, then back at me, then back at the girl.  She pointed again.  “She is me?”

Yikes, how do you explain that one?

On a completely different and more concrete topic; in other words, that little science experiment I wrote about in my last post: when you realize very early in the course of an experiment that the only possible outcome is failure, there’s really no reason to delay cutting it short.  I’m not an early morning person.  Never will be.  I always knew this about myself, but now I’ve been reminded.  I will just have to find a plan C, another way to get my writing in this summer.  Because, as it turns out, when I am that dysfunctional, neither my real-life family nor my fictional characters want to have anything to do with me.

This blog post will be short, sweet and probably incoherent.  Why?  Because I’m very, very tired.

Last week, I took a look at my schedule for the month of June.  When I put together end-of-school celebrations, days with no planned activities for the kids, camp planning and a couple of day trips, I was shocked to discover that my next shot at a good block of writing would not come until the end of June.

For someone who has been experiencing withdrawal symptoms each week when “Emmie’s” three days at daycare—a.k.a. my only opportunity to find big chunks of productive, pajama-clad writing time—come to an end, the realization that I might not get to spend any quality time with my novel characters almost brought on a case of the D.T.’s.  I could not face this much time without returning to them.  Something would have to change.

So, after decades as an incurable night owl (I generally find it impossible to fall asleep before midnight), I’ve decided to convert myself to a morning person.  Writing before the kids wake up, it seems, is the only option.

It’s been three days now.  Three days of being in bed by ten, up by five. 

Tell me something, those of you who do this voluntarily (and I know you’re out there): why?

I’m dizzy, I’m grumpy and my writing has been, well, not much better than it would be if I did it while my kids poked plastic snakes into my side (which I have also tried).  I’m semi-functional at best.

So we’ll see how long this experiment lasts.  My husband claims it takes six weeks to turn a behavior into a habit, but I’m not sure I’ll make it that long.  And I don’t know if six weeks can undo more than thirty years of behavior.

In the meantime, bear with me.  If these posts begin to look like I’m writing in some long-dead foreign language, you’ll know why.  It’s because I’m asleep.