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You go into this parenting gig with
such high expectations. My baby,
you think, will cure cancer, solve the Mid-East peace conundrum and
adopt every infant in Malawi before Madonna can get her hands on it.
A year into your kid’s life, you really just hope it’ll stop sticking
peas up its nostrils. Still, deep down, you can see your kid doing
something really important. Curing cancer may not be in the cards, but
maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for at least one Malawian baby.
Then you have a second kid. You realize just how full of crap you are
about a lot of things, like how you know how all babies work just
because you figured out your first one and like how you think raising
two is only twice the work of raising one.
Additionally, you realize that having grand expectations are a quick
route to Disappointmentville. Expectations must be kept low; therefore,
my current vision for the future is that I will be spending a lot of
time in the ER with kid number two. While we’re there, I expect kid
number one will be hanging on my legs and whining about how we just
don’t love her.
Let me admit that at this point, we haven’t been to the ER yet. It’s a
matter of time, though.
Just the other day I was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. From the
living room came a THUD.
This is not unusual. One of the cats weighs well over 20 pounds. When
he jumps off of the furniture, it sounds like a bowling ball hit the
floor. I did what I usually do when there are THUDs. I ignored it.
Five seconds later – THUD. Then ten seconds after that – THUD. Then
screaming, followed by a second human voice whining “Moooo- oooom!”
And so I whisked myself into the living room, where I found the Boy,
bleeding from a cut lip and wiggling to his feet. On the couch was a
small stepstool. Near as I could figure out, the Boy was climbing onto
the couch, then onto the stool, then flinging himself off the back of
the couch. THUD.
So
I did what any mom does -- stop the blood with a dish towel and pull the child onto my
lap to check for further wounds and to ensure
that blood didn’t get on the upholstery.
Just as the Boy stopped crying, the following words whined out: “You
only love him!”
This is the Diva’s new favorite phrase. It is slowly driving us all
around the bend. Even the cats are starting to get a little twitchy
about it.
When she first started this, I did what a good parent would do, which
was engage the jealous, neglected child in a dialogue. “Sweetie,” I’d
say. “Who do you love better – me or Daddy?” And when she’d say, “I
love you both.” I’d say, “And that’s how we feel about you and your
brother.” You could hear Dr. Phil smiling at such a cozy domestic
scene.
But her game has changed, which has become one of my other
expectations, frankly. The game will change right about the time you
start to figure out the rules. Now when you ask her which parent she
loves best, she always picks the one who isn’t in the room. Or, if
we’re both around, she’ll reply: “no one loves me!”
Which isn’t the case, of course, but after hearing this nearly
continuously for two weeks, I’m honestly starting to not like her a
little bit.
It’s getting to my husband, too. He does the day care drop off each
morning. The Boy is chucked into his room first, then the Diva gets her
story in her classroom. One morning, Scott accidentally knocked the Boy
over, simply because he’s become an expert at camping out in your blind
spot.
As Scott was comforting the Boy, the Diva whined, “you love him best.”
It took an act of incredible will-power, he reports, to not offer to
knock her over as well, if only to prove the depth of his affection.
Perhaps the Diva wouldn’t be flogging us with this phrase so much if
the Boy weren’t so very good at getting attention via physical injury. Ever since our “baby” hit the 18 month mark, he’s made a study of
flinging, pitching, tossing and/or leaping off of a variety of objects,
almost as if he’s testing that gravity works everywhere. I’m always
amazed at how babies transform into proto-children once they hit that
magical mark. Gone are the days of near-constant tending; replaced by
hours of independent acts of derring-do and moments of heart-stopping
terror.
Hence my reduced expectations. My kids probably won’t cure cancer or
war. Orphans will remain in their native lands. But I feel certain we
will make it to the ER numerous times and we will have hours and hours
of accusations about how we don’t love the other, non-bleeding kid.
It’s a target I know we can hit.
About the Author:
Adrienne Martini has been a theatre technician, apprentice
massage therapist, bookstore bookkeeper and pizza joint waitress. Eventually,
someone started paying her for her words and an editorial mercenary was
born. She has written theatre reviews and features for the Austin
Chronicle, blurbs about tofurkey and bottled water for Cooking Light and
a piece about knitting summer camp for Interweave Knits. She is
a former editor for Knoxville, Tennessee's Metro Pulse and
recently picked up an AAN award for feature writing. In July 2006, her first
book Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood will be
published. During the day, she fields freelance gigs and crams
knowledge into the heads of college students in Upstate New York. At all
hours, she is mom to Maddy and Cory, and wife to Scott.
