Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The Very Temporary Toddler Reality

Right this moment, i am able to put my fingers on a keyboard and type sentences because my 26 month old son is only requiring me to intermittently make wadges of play dough turn magically into marbles between my palms.
We are now stoutly in the times of the toddler, and so my days are the least my own they have been since we first brought the baby home from the hospital.
At any given moment he is climbing, hiding, running, hopping, smashing, thieving, masticating, harassing, exploring, touching, and generally using every other verb that exists.
There is no stasis, no time to recover, only time enough to use my adult logic to guess at what he's headed for next.
At the library we cannot make it through storytime without at meltdown that ends with me bundling up his thirty three pounds in my arms and marching out of the room as he squalls and flails.
On walks, he picks up pebbles and chunks of asphalt and tucks them happily into his pockets for me to retrieve later and throw out my front door lest he get the idea to swallow them at some point.
His favorite words are buddy, mama, and no.
He likes reading books but not nearly as much as he likes watching Trollhunters (the cartoon on netflix), he loves peeling bananas but only eats them about half as much.
He hugs everybody, but sometimes hits, and he roars with utter abandon.

He is wonderful.
I love him harder and more ferociously every day, but I am also so thoroughly exhausted by him and in desperate need of a break by five o clock than I ever was when he was a small milkfed pudgeball.

It's a mutual sadness my beard and I muse over constantly, how it is possible to love him and be so delighted by him while also so infuriated and fatigued by him.
Is this why parents scream so much? I wonder. Is this the place that we all get to when our kids reach perception and is it why our first memories of our parents are their tyrannical rule?

It's neverending, the catching and protecting and worrying. BEfore you can pour milk in your coffee in the morning, the little fingers have stuffed the plump cheeks with dogfood that you must first pry out of the mouth and then hide away. Then provide some substitute, some consolation, and another activity of a less gravel chomping nature, by which time the coffee is cold and the milk is tepid.

Still this is the age of magic.

And it is flying by.

Each day he grasps more and teeters on the edge of lucid understanding of the world around him in all its awe and horror.

I find myself relying on an afternoon movie every day to assUAGE SOME OF THE MADNESS. LIKE THE FACT THAT HE HAS NOW PUSHED THE CAPSLOCK BUTTON AND I CANNOT TU`RN IT OFF.

IF THE WEATHER WERE BETTER, I TELL MYSELF, WE WOULD SPEND THIS TIME OUTSIDE, PARTYING IN THE MUD, RUNNING ON THE BEACH, COMBING THE SAND AND THE GRASS FOR ACORN CAPS AND PEBBLES, SUCKING IN GREAT GUSTS OF FRESH AIR AND SINGING THE MADE UP SONGS OF HAPPY GO LUCKY CHILDHOOD.

BUT THANKS TO New England's nasty late winter days, we are more often than not just about frantic by 3pm, and in order to not scream cry in front of my child for the following two hours, I put on the muppets, the trollhunters, the disney cartoons, and berate myself for the shit job I am doing as a parent.

In those brief moments of respite, it is possible to remind myself that this is the briefest time, and it will feel so sad and ancient ten to twelve years from now, when he is running out the door with his friends and shooting me judgey looks over the dinner table. In five years when he's seven, he'll already be so different from the sweet, cuddly tornado he is now, I will probably have already forgotten how I used to stress cry in the bathroom while the Fraggles sang, or drank a glass of wine at four pm on a Friday just to remind myself that I was an adult and got to treat myself once in a while.

Which is why, in the ten minutes it has taken to write this confession, the play dough has lost its spellbinding powers, and I am now forced to abandon it without anything close to a resolution.

Time as they say and Toddler, wait for no man.

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