Introduction
Recently I was struggling (audibly,
possibly profanely) with a teapot; I cannot pour from it without spilling. My wife said, “Hey, I like that teapot—don’t
go ‘Diaper Genie’ on it.” She was
referring to when, as a new parent, I
lost my temper over our diaper pail and hurled it down the stairs. (To
this day I feel my action was justified.
A “friend” had given us a lightly used Diaper Genie, which—despite having
its original box, so it could be passed off as new—wasn’t compatible with the modern bag/liner cartridge it came
with, so in trying to install the cartridge I was unknowingly attempting the
impossible.)
As maddening as baby-related
accessories can be, parenting itself can be even tougher. Read on for the tale of how I came this close to executing improper parenting
techniques. This was at Target, where I
came into contact with the retail equivalent of an Improvised Explosive Device.
November 8, 2003 - Irksome Little Pony
Today I took Alexa [age 2 at this
point] to Target to get a new Diaper Genie.
(The manufacturer stopped making cartridges for our old one.) I had my wife make a list of other stuff to buy. “DVD entertainment” was not on the list, but
I headed over to the Audio/Video section first thing anyway. I’m getting tired of Alexa’s meager video
library and I must confess, I’ve been so tired lately I’ve been letting her
watch non-child oriented fare, like Bond movies.
Of course, the vast majority of Target’s
inventory of child-oriented videos are crap, like Barney, the cloying purple
dinosaur, and the Teletubbies, those really uncanny, creepy little . . . heck,
I don’t know what to call them. Gnomes, I guess, with TVs built into their
bellies. They give me the willies. Alexa watches them occasionally at day care,
alas, and seems to love them just like the rest of the kids do. That’s probably the creepiest part. I mean, I can see why she likes Wallace and
Gromit; they’re neat-looking, and there’s lots of action. But Teletubbies? These creatures seem barely smarter than cows. They can’t even talk; they’re just like
little pawns.
And don’t get me started on “Baby
Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare,” and “Baby Einstein,” which masquerade as
educational fare but actually feature totally dippy, non-name-brand music with
the camera panning lovingly over still-lifes of bright new toys, like a damn
product catalog. Over my dead body. I’d rather put “Dr. No” in again and explain
to Alexa, “See? The woman is sleeping,”
and hope that my innocent daughter doesn’t yet understand what gunfire is.
In the video aisle somebody had
abandoned a little toy. Alexa, sitting
in the shopping cart seat, legs swinging, immediately became enchanted with
it. I grabbed it, out of idle curiosity,
and discovered it was a Poky Little Pony.
I only have a vague awareness of Poky Little Pony. I’m guessing this toy is an offshoot of a kid’s
book. This one had a fancy mane, made to
seem like human hair, and came with a little choking-hazard toy brush and some
other stuff. The accessories were lashed
firmly to the packaging, so I figured Alexa couldn’t do much damage to Poky or
herself, and I let her play with it while I looked for the video. (I decided to indulge her partly because she
was running a bit ragged; last night was rough, and she was a bit late for her
afternoon nap.)
Alexa struggled in vain to remove
Poky from the package. “Help, Daddy,” she
said. I tried to ignore this, but when
she dug deep and came out with, “Help, Daddy, please,” I was so won over by the
lessons she’d learned—don’t just scream; ask for help; say please—that I
relented and freed Poky. (After all,
some other kid had already ripped open the package and abandoned it in the DVD
section. This was a problem already in
motion.)
Man, what a lame toy. The head didn’t even turn. No small child could be interested in this
toy for more than five minutes. Or am I
underestimating children? I guess a
bright kid could figure out a new, illicit way to have fun with Poky (e.g.,
taunt a less privileged child with it; try to eat its head; tear out its hair;
use it as a spoon; slather it with model airplane cement and torch it). But of course Alexa loved Poky, and instantly
memorized his/her name, turning this name into a mantra as we continued our
shopping.
[I guess I should point out that, as
I discovered years later, the pony isn’t actually named “Poky.” It’s called “My Little Pony” and actually
there are lots of different ones, with names like Blue Bell, Snuzzle, and
Skydancer. My bad. I’d seen a New Yorker cartoon showing
hip-hop revisions of children’s books, one of which featured Jay-Z fronting The Poky Little Posse. I thought “Posse” was replacing “Pony” but
it’s actually making fun of Poky Little
Puppy, apparently some classic children’s book.
So my daughter—oblivious, at this age, of the need to second-guess
me—blithely accepted that the horse’s name was Poky.]
After getting the modern Diaper Genie
and other items, there was just one more thing to do before checking out: return Poky.
I vainly hoped Alexa would be excited enough by the new synthetic
fireproof blanket I’d put in our cart that she’d forget about the stupid toy,
but instead she—adorably—put it to bed on the blanket. Man. I
can’t think of a more volatile situation than bringing a toddler to the Toys
section of Target. I was tempted to
abandon my daughter in some boring aisle, like linens, and then return Poky on
my own. You know, surgical—get in, make
the drop, get out. But this is America, which
means if I left Alexa alone for even a second, she would either be abducted, or—worse—somebody
would find her, turn her in to the authorities, and I’d end up doing time for
abandoning her.
I cursed myself silently for allowing
things to escalate like this. My wife would
have never snatched up Poky in the first place.
Heck, she probably wouldn’t have been in the video aisle to begin with—she’d
be getting the things on the actual list.
But I’m a softie. Besides, I’d
deluded myself that Alexa would quickly exhaust her joy over Poky, and we as a
family would enjoy all the benefits of having actually bought it, with none of
the expense, clutter, or model-airplane-cement infernos. On some subconscious level, I must have
convinced myself that if Alexa and I made enough of these shrewd moves, over
time, we’d eventually rule the galaxy as father and daughter—Alexa drawing from
all the novel stimulation she’d had as a kid, and me drawing from the vast
financial empire I’d built up from all the money I didn’t waste. But instead, I found myself rolling Alexa
toward what I feared would be my Waterloo.
I was tempted to employ trickery to
save the situation. But I hate to
manipulate a child. After all, it’s not
really fair, given my vast advantage of life experience, to take advantage of
young naivety. Besides, there are so
many ways such trickery can fail.
For one, what if your manipulation
doesn’t come off? That can be humbling. I’ve tried many times to outsmart the cat—to
trick her into coming over by pretending I have food, for example—and she’s
looked at me with a feline expression that says, “Exactly how stupid do you
think I am?” Or there was the time I
tried to outsmart my niece Lonneke, when she was Alexa’s age. Lonneke had discovered the TV remote control
and was annoying me with it, changing the volume and the channel, etc., so I
took the batteries out. She came after
the batteries and I freely gave them to her, figuring that she’d never figure
out how to reinstall them in the remote anyway.
I figured wrong.
Another problem with manipulation is
that it can give the manipulator, if he’s successful, a touch of contempt for
the manipulated. For example, many times
I’ve pretended to throw a stick for a dog, who stupidly runs out to catch it,
and then looks all over the sky for it, then starts sniffing all over the
ground for it, while I’m standing there still holding the stick, shaking my
head. After the tenth fake throw in a
row, as the dog is still gamely running for a phantom stick, I’m completely
disgusted with the entire canine kingdom.
I’d hate to draw subconscious conclusions about my own child based on my ability to easily deceive her.
Third, there’s a guilt problem: taking advantage of the trust of your own
child, and abusing that trust for short-term gain, could easily gnaw on a guy,
at least a softie like myself.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, if
you underestimate your kid, a lame attempt at subterfuge could insult her
intelligence. Sure, I might trick the
kid when she’s too young to know any better, but that doesn’t mean she won’t
remember what happened and put it all together later. Then she’ll realize what a dick I was, and be
suspicious of the more sophisticated deceptions I might be employing later on.
So I stopped the stroller at the end
of the Toys aisle (though I pointed it away from the goods). I asked Alexa to hold the video, and then asked
her to hold the fireproof blanket. Little
kids are always so eager to help out,
especially when it means holding things.
(I guess the novelty of effectively employing one’s newly prehensile
hands takes awhile to wear off.) Then, Alexa’s
hands being full, I took Poky.
This was the key moment where I forever
defined who and what I would be as a parent.
To take Poky without Alexa noticing would be manipulation. But by distracting her somewhat, I theorized, I could mitigate her sense of loss, and do
so without trickery by announcing what I was doing. “Here, I’ll take Poky,” I said, loud and
clear. And of course she immediately
began yelling in protest. While Alexa
yelled, I spun around, located Poky’s clones, reunited “our” Poky with them, and
took a moment to satisfy my curiosity about the price ($4.99) before returning to
the cart. Within a minute or so Alexa had
basically calmed down. Sure, the loss
wasn’t forgotten; for several hours she kept asking where Poky went, but never
did throw the tantrum I’d so dreaded.
I have concluded that Alexa is not (yet)
a spoiled rotten brat, but she’s not (yet) a beaten-down, joyless automaton
either. Heck, maybe I actually played
the whole thing perfectly. She derived
90% of the joy and mental stimulation the toy is capable of providing (the other
10% being the use of the hairbrush, which I’d flat refused to remove from the
packaging). I’d survived a battlefield
test of my parenting tactics and ideals.
Alexa, for her part, had a not-so-painful lesson in the sad fact that
you can’t always get what you want. And
if Target runs out of non-tampered-with Pokies, I’m sure some harried parent
will shell out $4.99 for the one with the slightly damaged box.
No comments:
Post a Comment