Scrambled Eggs

“Hannah, what would you like for lunch today?” I ask my three year old daughter.

“Eggie!  Eggie!” she shouts.  Hannah loves scrambled eggs.

“Okey dokey.”  I get out the ingredients and start cooking the eggs, while Hannah sits at her little plastic table and draws people on pieces of blank newsprint.  They have round heads with crooked eyes and crooked smiles.  Their arms and legs are attached directly to their heads.  I think she’s a genius.

When the eggs are ready, I tell Hannah, then start to pick her up to put her into her high chair.  But she screams, “No eggie!  No eggie!  I want cereal!”

I calmly explain that she asked for eggs, so I made eggs, and now she needs to eat eggs.  But she continues to scream for cereal.  I ignore her and make my own lunch.  When it’s ready, I manage to coax her into her high chair with the promise of some of my lunch to go with her eggs.  I put on her bib, but she yanks it off:  “No bib!  No bib!”

“You have to wear a bib so you don’t get your clothes all messy.”

“No! No!”

“All right, then no lunch.”  She screams for a while, then tearfully agrees to a different bib.  I give her the eggs and she eats a few bites, then asks for some juice. I bring it, but she doesn’t like the cup it’s in.  Nor does she like any of the other cups I offer.

I give up and sit back down. Hannah continues to scream for juice, despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good cup full of juice sitting right in front of her. By now, I’ve been in and out of my chair a dozen times and my own lunch is stone cold. I’m debating whether to warm it up in the microwave or put it down the garbage disposal when Hannah pushes the last cup I gave her onto the floor.  It’s a sippy cup, but the impact makes the lid pop off and the juice goes everywhere. That’s when I reach the end of my patience. 

I jump out of my seat, yank the tray off of the high chair, and dump it on the table.  I pull Hannah out of her seat and put her roughly on the floor.  All the while, I’m yelling at her and I know I’m scaring her.  But it takes me several long minutes to finally go quiet.

What’s the matter with me?  What could possess me to be mean to my sweet daughter, this child that I love so deeply?  She’s three years old — why do I expect her to be rational and cooperative?  She hasn’t reached “the age of reason” yet — why do I expect her to be reasonable? Why am I so upset? Yes, there’s a mess to clean up, but I know that’s not the reason for my outburst.

I felt very confident of my mothering skills when I gave birth to Hannah. Having grown up as the oldest of six siblings, I already knew how to burp her and change her diaper. I knew how to get her clothes onto her flailing, not-yet-unfurled limbs. I’d watched my mother nurse so many babies that I even felt like I already knew how to breastfeed her. When she got older, I knew how to get pureed squash into her mouth using a tiny rubber-coated spoon. I knew how to rock her to sleep. But nothing in my years of helping to care for my siblings prepared me for the anger I’m feeling right now. When my brothers and sisters weren’t cooperative, I just handed them back to my mother. But now I’m the mother — there’s no one in the house to take over.

Hannah lies on the floor crying while I grimly wipe up the juice.  Then I sit back down and try to understand my feelings.  I don’t want to admit it, but I realize that I’m angry because I can’t always bend Hannah to my will.  She may be only three, but she’s a human being with her own desires, which don’t necessarily mesh with mine. I can’t always control her, and my attempt to do so has brought me to a point where I can’t control myself either. I see that I have a lesson to learn, and I’m guessing that I’ll have to learn it over and over again, throughout Hannah’s childhood, and also throughout the childhoods of the siblings I hope to give her. 

While I’ve been trying to sort myself out, Hannah has stopped crying, gotten off the floor, and left the kitchen. In a few minutes, she comes back with her blankie and puts her head in my lap.  I start to cry and now I realize that under my anger is a deep sadness, sadness because she’s pushing so hard to be separate from me.  I know it’s her job, it’s what three year olds are supposed to do. She has to become her own person and I have to help her. I have to learn to love her as herself, not as a part of me. But it feels so soon — I don’t feel ready to let her go.  Maybe I’ll never feel ready. But life will not give me any choice. I pull her into my lap and, for a few moments, I hold her close.