The Long and Winding Road
The Museum of Science and Industry was crowded on January 2nd. The day after the New Year fell on a Friday, so any adult with a choice had taken the day off, plus the schools were still out on holiday break. But the museum exhibits are dispersed widely enough that the mob wasn’t claustrophobic, and my almost four-year-old son Carter and I had a nice time. We toured the U-505 submarine, Carter gawked at the Great Train Story model train exhibit, and we each posed for pictures in a fake Apollo space suit. We shared a snack in the cafeteria, and he didn’t even complain when I didn’t buy him a toy at the gift shop. I judged the trip a success. Then we tried to leave.
The crowd control engineers who designed the museum proper must have neglected the underground parking garage. By the time we reached our car, much of the crowd had decided to leave too, and a line of cars snaked down the aisles from the exit ramps two floors above us. One good samaritan waited to let us back out and join the parade, then we waited.
When I first decided to stay home with Carter, my wife Debbie and I joked that he would never learn how to talk because I’m such a quiet person. But now he chatters away like he’s trying to make up for my 32 years of word deficits, and it’s only gotten worse since he started preschool. Now, instead of worrying that we’ll have to communicate with him through grunts and hand signals, we think he’s going to have a career as a broadcast announcer who moonlights as a lawyer and auctioneer on the side. After viewing exhibits on the solar system and the mechanics of submarine warfare, I had already fielded more difficult questions than Rod Blagojevich at a press conference. But pack that inquisitiveness into a compact car sitting at a dead stop for 45 minutes in a parking garage, and that’s a recipe for frustration.
Carter had been on holiday break from preschool for two full weeks, since both Christmas and New Year’s fell on Thursdays, making for a natural, extra-long break at the end of the calendar year. The first week went by quickly, as we visited my sister in Indianapolis for Christmas and my parents in southern Indiana for a few days after that. But this second week has been interminable.
In my nearly four years of staying at home with him, I’ve marveled at my patience, developed in those endless days of arguing with a toddler about everything from why he can’t have a popsicle for lunch to the science of banana peel decomposition. I can literally squat on my knees for 15 minutes, holding out a pair of pants and waiting for him to get dressed, while he runs around in his underwear, shrieking “Poopy!” at the top of his lungs. Yelling and demanding obedience doesn’t work; it’s best to wait it out. But Carter started full-time preschool this fall, and I’ve learned that patience must be practiced rigorously, like a Zen monk, if I’m expected to possess a semblance of it for more than an hour or so each day.
This week I’ve struggled to find ways to entertain him without completely losing my cool, and believe me, it’s been misplaced more than once. I’m at a loss how quickly that parental muscle atrophied; I don’t know how I ever managed before he started school. Granted, much of it has to do with the cold weather. My go-to solution when the temperature is above 50 degrees is to spend the afternoon at the park. But I don’t remember the days being this exasperating last year, when he had a similar, if not so long, break. I can only chalk it up the honeymoon that his absence at school has given me.
Debbie and I have tried everything, from timeouts to confiscating toys to the occasional, good old fashioned spanking, none of which do much good. Our biggest success has been recreating the stoplight, smiley-face/sad-face sign that his teachers use at school. Each one of the kids has a clothespin with their name written on it. If they’re good, it stays on green; starting to act up, yellow; the final straw, red. We hung one on a doorknob near the kitchen with a chip clip to indicate his status, and he’s responded accordingly. He gets upset and repentant when we move his clip down the scale, but it’s hard to gauge the severity of what constitutes a yellow or red offense, and we’ve already diminished the effectiveness of the nuclear option with overuse.
The problem with Carter of course, aside from the usual preschooler insanity, is that he has a new baby sister, Sadie, who was born in September. He wants our attention, and no form of corporal punishment or cutesy signs are going to fix that. When we’re trying to explain the arcane reasons for why he’s move from yellow to red, he’s getting what he wants. He doesn’t care about the volume or tone of our voices, which explains why I was taking such care to explain everything I could at the museum. I felt bad for losing my patience with him so much during the week, and I owed him some undivided daddy time.
I did my best with all his questions about planets and trains and airplanes, but things started to go off the rails in the submarine exhibit. The U-505 is a German U-boat that the U.S. Navy captured during World War II. This led to all kinds of unanswerable questions about war and death and life jackets and torpedos. Carter was particularly concerned with a display that showed two bloodied American sailors floating on a piece of driftwood after their ship had been destroyed by the sub.
“Why are those men on that piece of wood?” he asked.
“Because their boat sank,” I said. “They grabbed on so they don’t have to swim.”
“But why do they have blood on their faces? Why didn’t they put on Band-aids?”
“Well, they didn’t really have time. Their boat sank and they had to get out.”
You can imagine the rest. This kept up off and on into the long wait in the parking garage, until our attention turned to the music I was playing on the stereo. As I fiddled with my iPod, he asked for his favorite band, the Beatles, which of course I didn’t have loaded. This led to another discussion about why the Beatles aren’t recording music anymore, during which I unfortunately told him that John and George were dead.
“Don’t say that!” he wailed. “They’re not dead, we still play the Beatles on my CD player!”
I tried to explain to him how we could still listen to recorded music even after a singer dies, but this only made it worse. The conversation went downhill as I grew increasingly frustrated with the stalled traffic, and ended with me shouting, “THERE ARE NO MORE BEATLES BECAUSE TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD!”
Way to go, Dad. As terrible as I felt though, the outburst didn’t seem to make an impression. When we got home, he told Debbie, “Daddy bought me some Cheetos and I took a picture in the astronaut suit!” and the next day, he treated us to a karaoke concert of the Beatles greatest hits album, hopping around on his bed, sans pants. Science and industry; submarines and war; death and the Beatles and no pants. This holiday break has been a long and winding road.