Two and Two Make Five

POSTED BY CAROL:

Julia: I want that pink bagel.

Me: Oh, that's actually a pink frosted donut.

Julia: Aaaauuuuggghhhh! Waaaahhhh! (Tears flowing) It's a pink bagel!!!

Me: Um, sorry, it's a pink donut.

Julia: Aaaauuuuggghhhh! Waaaahhhh! (Tears continuing) It's a pink bagel!!!

Me: Okay, okay, it's a pink bagel.

Julia: [silence] (Walks away from me with cold glance). It's a donut mommy.

Ouch, that was a good reminder of how Julia owns me. Also appropriate that Julia would remind me of how a toddler's tantrums has the power of torture a la Orwell's 1984, where the narrator capitulates to his handler and agrees that reality is what Big Brother says it is, even if it means that 2 + 2 = 5, or that a donut is a bagel. Julia was the narrator's great love in 1984 before she betrayed him to Big Brother. In high school, I had a short list of name possibilities for future children and Julia was one of them. After reading 1984, the name Julia seemed synonomous with duplicitous. I guess I forgot about that when we picked Julia's name, so it's funny that I would now remember this through Julia's Big Brother-like behavior.

I've learned my lesson that I must try to hold out against Julia's insistence on her own fake reality. So when I got home last night and she was eating a blue lollipop and told me that she had gone poopy on the potty at school, and then Wayne told me that she had not done so, and then Julia started bawling - tears streaming, snot flowing, and blue water coming out of her mouth - crying, "I pooh poohed on the potty (a supposed requirement for getting lollipops)" it was very hard, but both Wayne and I stood our ground and refused to comfort her by agreeing that she had pooh poohed on the potty when in fact, she had not. We moved on to things we could agree on, like watching "Little Einsteins."

It's very interesting, this stage, when it's apparent that she's tired of being corrected about the nature and names of things and also into creating her own stories. A lot of times it's fun to go along with her imaginative universe, but I don't think potty training will work if we just pretend it's happening. Potty training - I'll treat you all to a post about that later.