So, my son has inherited my tendency to want everything in the world, all the time. Mostly, like me, he wants to do everything more than to have everything (if you were conjuring up a mental image of my flip phone and jeans from 2005, which I found on somebody's stoop and have been wearing ever since).
However, because he is two, Mac is unplagued by questions of whether or not he "deserves" the thing he wants. While I learned to bury the things I want and feel until they erupt, necrotic and disfiguring, out of my personality, he's unambivalently RIDE SUBWAY TRAIN! MOMMY LAY DOWN! All the time, he is like this. The only reliable way to stem the constant flood of demands is to ensure that he has what he wants every second, the way patients in the recovery room must be constantly monitored to prevent sentinel events.
I have a hard time parenting this recalcitrance effectively. The hittery and kickery and refusal to pick up or say Please, I can handle: the kid may be thirty pounds of sheer will, but I weigh nearly four times that in my socks, and if you care to trace that "contrary streak" to its source, well, it's not his daddy's backyard you'll find yourself stumbling into. Not only does mommy not play with Please and Thank You and picking up -- once challenged, she is entirely willing to devote twenty minutes of her finite existence to the cause of getting her way. Oh, you expected that your battle tactic of "lying on floors in public places" would shame mommy into giving in? Kid, I've lodged complaints with the concierge at the Greyhound terminal. I challenge line-cutters at the Family Dollar. With regularity, son. Have a seat.
But Mac's singleminded insistence that This Must Happen -- where "this" is anything from putting the house keys in each mommy's pocket right now, to Magic Marker Body Art, to watering the houseplants himself, to Train Tracks, then Lego Town, then the noisy, violent destruction of both Trains and Lego Town, then repeat -- is harder for me to shut down. As obnoxious as we find tenacious people when we're at cross-purposes with them, the reality is that very few things -- good or bad -- get done by backers-down. I want my kid to be intrepid and insistent, both because I find those qualities personally entertaining and because they are necessary if one wants to be the master of one's fate.
So I get a lot of judgy face from, well, everyone -- the hipsters who genuinely don't understand that two year olds act differently than twenty-two year olds, and that the parents of those two year olds also must commute on the subway and purchase groceries, and the legit parents and grandparents who schooled their kids at the university of Because I Said So.
Basically, if it's not overtly rude or potentially dangerous, I'm inclined to let Mac try it: they're your (weird, blue) legs, kiddo. Don't want to wear a hat? My head's warm. Life can't continue unless you're pushing the grocery basket? Who the eff cares? Let grocery shopping take fifty minutes! What, I had big plans for my Tuesday night? If moms can be plotted on a continuum of yuppie stereotypes, with "Montessori school" at one end and "aggressive and regular beatings" at the one, I'm way closer to the former than my snarkery about Occupy Wall Street and the Affordable Care Act would suggest.
I know that to the untrained eye, it appears that I simply cannot control my frolicking, hard-going, dogged pursuer of all the things, always. In reality, though, as shameful as you may find it -- you for whom Just Saying No to: 1. mysterious liquids, 2. walking around, not through, street puddles, and 3. putting things into other things is not only easy, but natural -- I genuinely enjoy that my child is doing these things. I often find my own encounters with the Real World bringing me to the edge of histrionics; to me, both the initial efforts to remake the world according to his vision for it, and the series of meltdowns as the world resists these efforts, are entirely unremarkable, un-stress-worthy elements of an enterprise in which stressors abound (have you checked out what's going on with the Common Core in NYC schools? Nothing good, I can assure you, and it's clear I should enjoy my child while I can since evidently I will need to export him to China and/or Finland in order for him to learn to add fractions together.)
I figure that if I just scare my kid into not irritating me with tantrums and whining, he'll fail to learn the more lasting lesson that these tactics are futile. I will one day be gone, and then dead. When that happens, I want Mac to continue to not mewl and whinge, buoyed by the knowledge that 1. not just mommy, but the entire world, stands indifferent in the face of his drama, and 2. he can get what he wants if he learns to want reasonable things and to pursue those things in a reasonable way. I don't want him to stop making messes and pursuing his passions, be they legos and subways or water or whatever other damn thing brings him joy, because others find them inconvenient. Instead, I want him to put those things in a context of a world inhabited by other people with other agendas, and to come to terms with this reality without using his teeth.
It seems that lesson may a require a few review sessions to master, and that both of us will incur a few scars -- mostly psychological, mostly -- along the way. I don't mind. I'm not willing to circumvent that learning process with No in order to reassure myself that I have my child Under Control, or that he Respects Me, when LOLNO, he respects nothing. He is two years old. He knows only fear and joy, and the world seems much more heavy-handed in doling out the first than the second, so I honestly do not believe I need to live and die on the hill of Mommy Said No. Believe me, considering that the kid's other passions have ranged from 1. Biting Everyone! to 2. Ripping Glasses off Faces to 3. What's in My Diaper: a Guided Journey, there's no shortage of No around our house.
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