Waiting for Yes

I come downstairs and find Sophia and Kevin curled up in bed together, snuggling.  They both look drowsy, their eyes at half-mast.  I sit at the foot of the bed, where there’s barely enough room for me. 

“What a night!”  I exclaim.  “The Easter Bunny showed up really late.”

“When?” said Sophie, sitting up.

“Not until after midnight.  He kept me up way past my bedtime!”  I whistled. 

“Do I have an Easter Basket?” Where is it?” Sophie was ready to leap out of bed.

“Not so fast.  Here’s the thing.  He hid your Easter Basket.”  I am enjoying myself.  Her anticipatory excitement.  What I know is coming next.  “And he gave me a whole series of clues to help you find it.”

Sophie is out of bed, wide awake now.  Ready for action. 

“I think he left the first clue on the table.”  She races into the dining room, where the fourth clue is waiting.

“No, the kitchen table.”  And she’s off and running to the kitchen.  She’s quiet for a minute, and then exclaims, “The bath!  Its’ in the bath!” 

“Come here, let’s check it.”

Sophie appears in the doorway singing the words to the first clue:

“A tisket, a tasket.  Where is Sophie’s Easter Basket?  Here is what you have to do…go on a hunt and solve each clue:  1.  We love to hear you laugh, the next clue is where you take a _________.” 

“I think you’re right!” I shout.

“Come with me, mom!”  We run upstairs to the bathroom and she plucks the next clue out of the tub.  Together, we race around the house, until we wind up at the pile of wood, next to the fireplace.  Sophie reads the final clue:  “You’ve almost found it!  You’re on fire.  Go into the kitchen and look in the ___________.”

“Parlor?”  Sophie ventures a guess.

“We don’t have a parlor.  Go look in the kitchen and see if you can figure it out.”

“Refrigerator?”

“Refrigerator doesn’t rhyme with fire!”  This is too much fun.  The basket is hidden in exactly the same place my mother hid my basket several decades ago. 

Sophie rotates 360 degrees, scanning every inch of the kitchen.  Her eyes settle on the shuttered doors that hide the our cleansers and cleaners and the…

“Dryer!” Sophie cries out, zips over to the machine and claims her prize.  Her face is lit with joy as she pulls out her basket.

“Kidz Bop!  Just what I wanted!  Choose Your Own Adventure!  Just what I wanted!”  There is a certain thrill that comes with getting someone just what they wanted.  I’m snapping pictures as she bounces up and down.  Like most of her pictures, these will probably be blurry. 

“An egg full of jelly beans!  Can I eat some after breakfast?”

“You can eat some now,” Kevin says.  “It’s Easter.” 

“I’ll have one and save one for after breakfast.”  She’s fearful that she won’t get more. 

“Eat them both and you can have another after breakfast,” because I’m secretly very happy that this is what she considers to be indulgence. 

Kevin reads her the first chapter of her new book, while I make coffee.  When they’re finished, they sit down to a couple of bowls of cheerios.  I’ve set out the hard-boiled eggs and a sheet of stickers for Sophie to decorate them with after she’s done.  A bad idea because she can’t keep her hands off them.  One rolls precariously to the edge of the table.

“Maybe you should wait until after breakfast,” I tell her.

Two seconds later she is fondling an egg again.

“Maybe don’t say ‘maybe’,” Kevin gently suggests, as he pushes the eggs away from Sophie.  He’s right.

“Don’t touch the eggs until we’re done with breakfast,” I tell her.  Sophie harumphs and sulks in her seat, not eating. 

“Maybe when we come back from the JCC, you can have another surprise for me.” 

“I think we’re done with surprises for today,” I tell Sophie. 

She reaches for another egg.

“Soph, I said not to touch them until after breakfast.”

Then she whips her bathrobe belt at me, narrowly missing my coffee. 

“Give that to me right now,” I say sternly, taking the belt from her.  Sophie folds her arms across her chest, her eyebrows set in a “V” on her forehead.  She’s quiet for a minute, and then she begins to wail and runs up to her room.

I sigh a very heavy sigh.

I know that one thing has nothing to do with the other, but why, why after we’ve been having so much fun, does she have to be so naughty?  Why is the joy so ephemeral, so fleeting?  Why is she only interested in the next surprise—not what I’ve done, but what I am about to do?

What is overindulgence versus giving your child meaningful, enjoyable experiences? 

You know you’ve got a problem when your child says…

“Mommy, please can I?  I’m waiting for a yes….”  Sophie is looking up at me, eyebrows cocked, hand on one hip, wearing an expression that is laughable on a five-year-old, but will be completely obnoxious eight years from now. 

What was she asking me for?  I can’t remember now.  Another sweet?  One more book?  Another episode of Word Girl?

It doesn’t really matter.  She knows I am loathe to say no.  Oh, I say it plenty, but every time I do, there is a tug within.  An equal and opposite reaction.  It takes great effort not to acquiesce.  She must see this internal struggle I go through, reading the flicker of weakness on my face.  The keenness of her perception is her gift and my curse.

Within me, there is an impulse to give Sophia her heart’s desire.  Not because I feel guilty, or I want to avoid a fight, or I’m looking to buy her love, but because I hold the false belief that it will somehow make her happy.    And it does.  For a minute. 

Of course true happiness has absolutely nothing to do with one more anything.  Any joy derived from that extra sweet, book, or television show is fleeting.  We might get a quick squirt of dopamine, but we all-too-quickly habituate to the novelty of the thing and then we just want more, addicts that we are. 

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t any appreciation, deep down, of the love that lies behind each yes.   And, ironically, each no.  Because even the no’s with their limits and boundaries convey caring.  That, and they make the yesses that much sweeter. 

Where to draw the line between yes and no is perhaps our greatest first world parenting problem.  I struggle with it dozens of times a day. 

After having disappeared upstairs in a snit, leaving me to my musings, Sophie re-emerges, blowing sharp notes out of a recorder.  The cloud has passed and skies are bright again. 

She comes up to me and quite unexpectedly gives me her special series of kisses that starts at my forehead, goes down my nose to my chin and then across my face from cheek to cheek. 

Is it gratitude?  An apology?  Or a little jolt of that undercurrent of love that lies beneath all of our interactions?

I can’t know. 

But I can hope that it’s proof that just as often as she’s waiting for a yes, something inside of her is waiting for a no. 

Yes, Sophia There IS an Easter Bunny

Never have I regretted words like I regret telling Sophia that there is an Easter Bunny.

Maybe it’s because I wanted Kevin’s traditions represented in the household as well as mine. Perhaps I didn’t want Sophie to be denied the pleasures of an Easter Basket that I had as a child. Or maybe I’m just as easily caught up in the sweeping wave of consumerism that accompanies every holiday in this country as much as the next person. But I went to Target and I got the makings of an Easter basket.

Nothing crazy. A felt bucket decorated with Sophie’s power animal, a monkey, wearing a pink dress. I filled it with gardening tools, seeds, and gloves. The only candy it contained was a couple of naturally flavored and colored (Kosher) jelly beans from Trader Joes.

Then, just before sending her off to bed, I said, “When you go to sleep tonight, the Easter Bunny is going to stop by and bring you a basket. It will be here when you wake up.”

Sophie seemed pleased, went to bed without incident, and Kevin and I retired to the attic to watch a movie. Not long into it, I heard screams emanating from below.

I flew down the steps, popped open her bedroom door. Sophie was standing up in her crib, holding herself, sobbing, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom, Mommy!” I scooped her up, hopeful that we would not have an incident like the last time she cried out for me in the middle of the night, when she blazed a trail of urine from her crib to the toilet.

Thankfully, she held it and went to the bathroom, but when I put her back to bed, she protested. “No, Sophia. It’s time to go to sleep,” I whispered, and headed back upstairs.

Not much later, I heard her cry out again, “Mommy, bathroom!” Kevin raised his eyebrows at me. I knew that there was very little chance that she actually had to go. But I was willing to give her one chance before I moved to “planned ignoring” of her pleas.

I walked into her darkened room and warned her, “Sophia, you better squeeze something out into that toilet.” And she managed to, though it did look effortful. When she finished, I warned her: “Okay, Sophia. This was the last time. Now you need to close your eyes, rub your Snakey Pie and go to sleep.”

Less than a half an hour later she called out, “Daddy, daddy, Daddy!” At least she knew not to call for me. Kevin looked at me. She quickly escalated to full-scale bawling. “Just one more book! I need one more book!” came her cries. Kevin said he would go down, say that she was to go to sleep and not call out again. Because this behavior is so rare now, I found myself really rattled by her cries. They hurt, like when she was an infant. I stood on the stairs, listening to him, and then her, begging and sobbing. He closed the door on her and seemed satisfied.

But now I was on hyper alert. I could no longer focus on the film. My ears strained for her cries.
“I have to get the monitor,” I told Kevin,

“You have to?”

“Yes, I’m straining to listen for her. Being able to hear will help me relax.”

“Okay, if that’s what you need to relax, go get it.” He turned off the movie we were watching and channel surfed while I fetched the monitor from the kitchen. I set the monitor to voice activated and re-joined him on the couch.

A few seconds later, the wailing started up again.

“Do we have to listen to that?” Kevin asked, irritated. He didn’t see the point in it, if we weren’t going to respond. It was interrupting his ability to focus, his ability to relax. I felt torn. I knew what I was feeling was irrational, but I needed to know when she calmed down and feel asleep. I needed to know when I could stop listening. I turned down the monitor. Her muffled cries continued to distract us.

Then, suddenly, there was a slight rattling sound and it got quiet.

“See? She finally exhausted herself and went to sleep.” Kevin said, rubbing my shoulders. I had a brief flash—perhaps I should check on her? But the part of me that was relieved that she had stopped crying, that I could finally chill out and enjoy the rest of the evening with my husband overrode the impulse.

An hour later, we descended the stairs. The second floor looked like a crime scene. Sophia’s door was open, a chair was positioned under the light switch and the light turned on. We walked in. Sophia was no where to be seen. Her crib tent was unzipped and the crib was empty. “Sophia?” I called?

No answer.

I was vaguely worried. Though all of the evidence pointed to the fact that she had escaped, the Lindberg case popped into my head: the missing child, no one heard a thing, the ladder up to the room. “SOPHIA?” I called, louder this time.

Still no answer.

Kevin and I padded down the stairs to the living room. And there she was, sitting on the couch, sucking her thumb and rubbing Snakey Pie, not doing anything. When she spotted us she announced, “I’m waiting for the Easter Bunny.”

A pox on the Easter Bunny! Perhaps this is why Jews don’t worship idols.

“Sophia,” I began the series of lies parents tell their children that the seminal lie of the Easter Bunny begets, “he doesn’t come if you’re awake.”

“I am going to stay up ALL NIGHT!” three year old Sophie announced.

“Well, we’re going to bed,” I told her.

“I will stay right here. Daddy you can sleep there,” she said, indicating the easy chair in the corner. “And Mommy, you can sleep in your chair,” she added, pointing to the overstuffed chair-and-a-half.

“No, Sophia. We are all going to sleep, IN our beds.”

“No No NO!” It was about this time I considered telling her there was no Easter Bunny. It was all a hoax. Kevin read my expression and mouthed, “Don’t you dare.”

Rats.

Kevin started to reason with her, in his calm, psychologist way. But I could see she was beyond the point of reason. “This is going to end right now,” I announced. “You’re going to bed,” and I picked her up in the way that always manages to wrench my back and carried her upstairs.

I put her in the crib, zipped up the tent, said goodnight, and shut the door.

But now that she had figured out how to get out, there was no keeping her in. Thirty seconds later, she appeared on the stairwell. “I think we need to put her in the bed. There’s no point to keeping her in the crib now. She’ll only hurt herself trying to escape.”

“NO! I can’t handle the bed. I CAN’T HANDLE THE BED!!!” Sophia objected. Amid her protests, Kevin dragged the mattress out of her crib, plopped it in her toddler bed and flipped the crib over on its side, rendering it unusable.

What ensued, is typically referred to as "jack-in-the-box syndrome":

He put her in.
She came out.
I put her in.
She came out.
He put her in.
She came out.
I put her in, pulled a chair up to the door and waited. I stood stock still in my chair for 15 minutes. When I no longer heard her, I got up.
She came out.

Tomorrow night we are having braised Easter Bunny for dinner.

I told Kevin to go ahead to sleep. There was no point in all three of us being up all night. At least the next day was Sunday and I only had to be minimally functional.

I went into my room and got ready for bed. Sophia ran back and forth between her room and the bathroom. Repeatedly “trying to go.” She had no idea what to do with this freedom, how to conduct herself in a wall-less bed. It was a skill deficit she was going to have to work through. Upon her third trip back to her room, I walked in and announced.

“Okay, Soph. I’m going to bed now. I don’t want to hear you come out of this room again.” I locked the gate at the top of the staircase, so she couldn’t accidentally tumble down during one of her midnight runs. I took an extra helping of sleep medication. I popped ear plugs in my ears, and I went to sleep.

My eyes popped open at 6:30 am, to find Sophia breathing into my face. “I woke up!” she announced. This came as something of a relief, since it meant she must have gotten some sleep. “I looked out the window and it’s light outside so it’s time to get up.”

Curse the vernal equinox. Spring is conspiring against me.

She climbed into bed with me and we read together, just like old times. Then, we sat in my picture window and gazed outside, playing I Spy. When it finally seemed late enough to wake up Kevin, we headed downstairs.

There, on the kitchen table, was the Easter Basket. “OH! The Easter Bunny came!” Sophie shouted as she ran toward it and emptied its contents, exclaiming over each thing. I brewed the coffee and fixed Matzo Brei as she played with her new gardening tools, raking our Welcome mat, which had become a garden plot.

Outside our picture window, a feral rabbit made its way across our yard. In my mind’s eye, I silently gave him the finger.