At my house, there are some days when listening to the children’s conversation is quite comical. It’s very apparent that there is an age spread.
Big Kid, in all his seven year old wisdom, is forever trying to explain things that the two year old can not possibly comprehend. For instance, the other day, I heard him trying to explain that her baby doll was not a real baby. Although she already knew this, I’m sure she found his explanation of plastics quite fascinating. After he assured her that her baby could not eat or breathe, he launched into a comparison between human skin and plastic, which of course, her baby is made of. By the time he finished, I thought I should enroll him in college and give her an entire gallon of ice cream, just for listening to him.
Then there are those moments, when he’s trying so hard to ward off trouble, so he thinks if he just calmly explains to her why she shouldn’t climb onto the rocking recliner and hop on one foot while juggling steak knives, she will surely see his logic and appreciate his concern. I feel for him, I really do. Because while he’s still talking, she’s already surveying the room for items to stack and climb, to give her access to the knife block. And the poor Big Kid, he’s just oblivious that there is about to be a catastrophic storm blowing through the living room in about 8.2 seconds.
Other times, he just wants to be funny. But a seven year old’s humor is quite different than a two year old’s capacity to decipher his strange code. He thinks it’s just infinitely amusing to say, “Hey, Little Kid, do you want some candy?… Well, you can’t have any!” or “Hey, Little Kid, do you want to see my game? … Well, you can’t!” And this will always, without fail, take place in a moving vehicle. And every time I ask, why, why, WHY would you do this? You know it’s going to make her scream. We were five minutes from home. We almost made it. But now, rather than spend my last five minutes in peace, driving along happily and still possessing the ability to hear oncoming fire engines, I have to listen to this child wail. What kind of warped sense of humor do you and your friends share all day in seven-year-old world? Because here in grown-up world, we do not find this funny one bit, Mister, and you are now going to pay for it by listening to my rant.
Then, sometimes, the age spread grows by about thirty years when he tries to become the extra parent in the house. He’s barking at her for every move she makes, either scolding her for stepping one toe outside his designated good behavior zone or trying to protect her from the terrible evils of carpet fuzz or fruit snacks. The poor Little Kid can’t blink without him giving her a lecture on the proper way to flutter her eyelashes. He’s a worrier, to a fault. He thinks up ways in which she will get into trouble and acts as though she’s already committed the unpardonable. She’s tried and sentenced before I’ve got a chance to make him see that he’s the one who gave her the idea which, up until his lecture, she hadn’t even thought of yet. Or, he frets over every breath she takes until he’s dreaming up scenarios in which something that will barely fit into her mouth, will somehow become so lodged in her throat that it will take a team of surgeons fifteen hours to pull her through the tragedy. I have honestly never seen a seven year old child who could work himself into a full blown ulcer in under 5 minutes the way this child does. I’d like to have grandchildren some day, but at this rate, I’m not sure he - or they - would survive it.
Through all of this though, without fail, there will be a moment when I’m busy doing some grown-up thing, and I’ll hear the unmistakable affection in his voice when he says to her, “You know what? I like you.”
And it’s in that moment that I can let go of the breath I was holding while I waited for the next round of trouble to start, and believe that someday, this age spread thing won’t make a bit of difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment