I
sat hunched on the carpet in my daughter’s bedroom floor, the berber making
little dents in the back of my thigh as I worked.
“No
parent would’ve created this toy,” I hissed under my breath. The ‘toy’ in question was a Strawberry
Shortcake puzzle book. A puzzle book
doesn’t sound all that awful, you say.
Why would that anger you? Sounds
lovely, in fact, a marriage of book and puzzle, two extremely wholesome
toys. The problem is that if a child is
actually left alone with the puzzle book all the puzzles seem to get upended
out onto the floor, leaving you a very large pile of unmatched pieces.
I
soon figured out that all the pieces for one puzzle were one color on the back,
causing me to perform the counterintuitive task of flipping the pieces over
onto their front so I could match them using their backsides. Emma danced into the room while I was
performing this laborious task,
‘I
should make her do this,’ I think. Then
I think of the process of breathing down her wee little neck while I watch her
three year old dexterity attempt to flip pieces about, mismatch them, and sit
on my hands allowing her to have a ‘learning experience,’ and decide that I
will persevere in assembling these all myself.
I look up at her sweet innocent face,
“Emma
if you dump all these pieces out again, I will take this away from you,” I say,
looking directly into her round unsuspecting blue eyes.
“I
won’t,” she shakes her head, eyes growing even rounder. I finish a puzzle and flip the page, as it’s
turning upside down all the pieces fall out.
A slow dawn of realization spreads across my understanding,
‘I
just threatened to punish my kid for something that was probably a complete
accident….’ I push down the guilt and decide that maybe I will just make the
toy disappear silently in the night rather than commit a witnessed act of toy
homicide. No harm done, no one has to
know what happened and nobody has to clean this up again.
‘No
parent would have made this,’ the thought rode the Ferris wheel in my head
again. How could you understand that a
simple toy like this would cause a simple mountain of irritation for a parent
until you’ve been a parent and had to clean up countless messes like this. When you’ve left the child alone for ‘naptime’
and found the room ripped asunder in ways that you could not have conceived of
day after day. Messes that could have
only been wrought by the hands of a bored three year old. The nanny’s will write me and give wise
suggestions, but I tell you that you don’t know what it’s like to be a parent
until you’ve been a parent. There is no
way to walk a mile in these shoes until you have them on your feet. There’s no way to explain that until you have
a child, and then you realize how smug and judgmental you were.
I
have a friend who lost her sister unexpectedly.
I have no idea what that feels like, I have never had a sister and I
have never lost someone close to me unexpectedly. When it happened I didn’t know what to say to
her. So I told her. And then I told her I was sorry and I was
sure it hurt terribly, and I guessed that eventually it wouldn’t consume
her.
Why
can’t we do that more often? Just admit
that we don’t know what it feels like to be someone else? Why don’t accept that we can’t know? And that just maybe, just maybe, we won’t do
it better than that person. When we see a
mom with a screaming toddler just don’t say, ‘I won’t let my kid do that.’ Or, ‘I wouldn’t react that way.’ Or, ‘I know what that feels like.’ Maybe it’s time to say, ‘I don’t know and I’m
sorry.’ Or, ‘I have no idea what that
person is going through.’
And
maybe it’s time to stop producing puzzle books.
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