Perhaps That Would Be Too Dramatic.

In all the hullaballoo of the past months, I forgot to show you Simone’s Back to School photos, and you’ve no doubt been bitterly, brokenly disappointed by this omission, so here:

What is shocking about these pictures, taken a measly two months ago, is how different she already looks from them. She has gotten very tall all of the sudden, without any corresponding rise in girth, and is a spindly, bony little thing—she will be four in February, and weighs a whopping 29 pounds.

Simone was in the toddler group last year, but this year has started honest-to-goodness Preschool (there are two classes at her level, the Billy Goats and the Bunnies—given my well-documented love of goats, you can imagine my glee at finding my child placed in the former group). Three has been easily my favorite age thus far, and my daughter has become this talkative, singing, dancing, pretending wonder. We build elaborate block walls with windows in them and then lie flat to talk through the hole, a la Pyramus and Thisbe (okay, it is “a la Pyramus and Thisbe” to me. To Simone it is “a la two people talking through a hole”). We read (favorite book: the Halloween volume of Mercy Watson) and sing (favorite album: Revolver) and draw (mostly fish, snails, and indecipherable letters). We play catch and have dance parties and eat endless elaborate imaginary treats.

She has also become…willful. Not to our extended families, teachers, or strangers, understand—they all believe my daughter to be a sweet and docile child, affectionate, eager to entertain, and amenable to suggestion. And actually she is all of these things, often, but when she finds herself alone in the company of tiresome old Mom and/or Dad, she just as often decides to give her charm and sanity a rest. It’s like her Good China. You know, for company.
This is my oblique way of alluding to the fact that there have been at least two instances in the past two months that ended with me weeping in the bathroom and wondering whether I was, maybe, a terrible mother. In one, Simone had a total meltdown during a public group activity, and instead of giving up on the activity and calmly removing her from the situation (or handling it in some other reasoned fashion), I hissed into her ear to stop crying or I would give her a timeout, and on the way home basically shamed her by saying that she had made me Sad (I meant that I wasn’t angry! It just…didn’t come out as I’d intended). Another evening she was already in a timeout—because she’d refused to stop kicking me—and mid-timeout kept getting down from the chair. I kept putting her back, trying to be calm and firm, but I was so frustrated and upset that the last time I put her back I PLOPPED her onto the chair harder than I’d meant to. It didn’t hurt, but I was appalled by how angry I’d felt—toward a three-year-old.

I’ve been a fairly confident parent, and have generally made my decisions based mostly upon what feels right—and there was nearly always an answer that felt right. When I’m disappointed in myself as a mother, it’s usually because I’m failing to cleave to what I know is best. Dealing with disobedience has been an entirely different beast. My attempts at discipline have often left me feeling helpless and clueless, as if everything I am saying and doing is wrong in one way or another, and yet the right thing remains unclear. This how I came to spend part of an afternoon in a local bookstore, kneeling on the floor and scanning the shelves for something titled Possibly Without My Daughter, If She Doesn’t Stop Doing That or maybe The Will to Power: Taming Your Uberkinder. (I ended up with Positive Discipline, which I’ve just started but like so far.)

I did already own one parenting book—Louise Bates Ames’ Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy. I’d bought it around Simone’s 3rd birthday, after seeing it on Amazon and remembering that Julie had recommended the series. I finally read it a bit over a month ago, and for the most part, it was excellent. A bit representative of the tone of the whole is this: “Your child cannot fight with you about his eating if you absolutely refuse to be drawn into his arguments. If he can be made to appreciate that the whole matter is of only minimal interest to you, you will do best.” That second line delights me, and it’s good advice, too.

At the end of the book is a section of parent letters, in which various mothers write the authors with questions. The book was published in 1980, so I would like to point out that the three-year-olds discussed, be they friends or enemies, were my contemporaries. And their mothers were beset with difficulty:

“Dear Doctors,
In another month our daughter Janice will be Three, and she is going to be left-handed, I’m afraid. […] Should I make a real effort to change her, or is it too late, anyway? Is there any basis to the belief that left-handers see things backward, for instance, see the number 10 as 01, and that if you change them they are doomed to a mental crack-up?”

“Dear Doctors,
My Three-and-a-half-year-old son Donald is giving me a lot of anxiety. The thing which bothers me so much is that he is constantly pulling on his penis and acting very foolishly. […] Sometimes he talks about it, saying things like, ‘I don’t want to have this. I want to be a good man.’ When he says this, I tell him it would be funny for a boy not to have one.”

“Dear Doctors,
My problem is that I can’t stand my Three-year-old daughter. She drives me crazy. Always talking. Always moving around. Always wanting something.”

[The beginning of the authors’ response to this last is wonderfully dry:
“Ideally in high school (we judge that you may not be too far past high school age) you should have had at least a beginning course in child behavior. This would have helped you realize what young children are like.”]

The day I read the book, Julie and I had quite an enjoyable Twitter conversation about the parent queries (see this post, where she mentions the advice regarding security blankets), most of it centered around my very favorite query of all, which I shall reproduce for you here in its entirety—as a gift.

“BOY AFRAID OF TOY CLOWN

Dear Doctors,
I have a problem of fear in a usually fearless boy who is just Three. When he was about a year old, we gave him a clown that rolls back and forth, with a very realistic face and eyes that roll. At first he seemed a little afraid of it, but soon he seemed happy enough. In fact, for a time he liked it so much that he carried it around.
A few evenings ago we saw a TV program about a circus. There was some violence in the picture. A knife thrower was trying to kill some other man, and although he wasn’t dressed as a clown, there were clowns in the play.
I don’t know if that caused it, but the next evening our son said, ‘The clown is going to hurt me.’ His daddy told him no, that the clown was just like any other dolly. This morning the first thing he said was something about the clown.
I thought about burning the clown before his eyes, but perhaps that would be too dramatic. We are going to leave soon for a vacation with his grandma. Would it be best to take the clown along or to leave it at home?”

I don’t know what’s better, the shock of getting to the “I thought about burning the clown before his eyes” part, or later, when the authors respond to say that burning the clown would indeed be too dramatic, because “It might lead to a fear of fires as well as a fear of clowns.”

I reread this letter as needed, and remind myself that at least I have yet to set a clown ablaze in front of my young charge. (I am saving the next book, on four-year-olds, for a special occasion.)