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.
