My two-year-old daughter only has one joke, but it’s a banger. She usually deploys it when I’m at my wit’s end – an alarmingly frequent condition – and it catches me off guard every time. I’ll be pouring pasta from pot to colander, or scrubbing Weetabix from a wall, and will look over to see her ambling towards me wearing my giant shoes on her absurdly small feet. In fact, since they’re high-tops, they come up well past her knees, causing both of us to laugh ourselves senseless.
It’s good she’s mastered comedy, because it leavens the more irascible aspects of her character. She doesn’t respond to the disciplinary strategies we used with her older brother, who was always placatable after a few warnings.
Our daughter, on the other hand, has the fixity of purpose you’d expect from an officer in the French resistance, and twice as much haughty insouciance. Had she access to cigarettes, she’d respond to all our demands by lighting one and singing La Marseillaise.
I now realise the seemingly endless battles I had with our son, which would eventually, finally, result in my turning him towards carrots or sharing, were mere scuffles. This lady’s will is iron and she is not for turning.
I’m only ever really made aware of this when she’s around other kids her own age, since her more unreasonable peccadilloes have become so normalised I’ve stopped noticing them. So it was last week, when her cousin, Clodagh, visited and our daughter’s, shall we say, ‘spirited’ personality was clear for all to see.
Clodagh had brought along Pop-Up Pirate and put it on the table for them to share. In case you’ve never played that game, it’s a barrel in which a small plastic pirate is placed and who you must impale with small plastic swords until you hit the requisite one to eject him. It falls into that odd category of needlessly tense and inscrutable games like Operation or Buckaroo, which might best be described as ‘Russian Roulette for children’. Soon we had tension of another sort. The second my daughter saw the jaunty jump-scare amusement, she seized its barrel and said, ‘Mine!’ All attempts to wrestle it from her grasp proved futile and any time we tried to place a little plastic sword in its scare-enabling slats, she would clasp them at the hilt and throw them to the floor.
We fared no better with colouring, which saw her grab Clodagh’s pages and take them, now crumpled, to the corner by herself. It was only when we gave her and Clodagh the exact same toys to play with that equanimity was restored. In this case, two slinkies – and she played happily with Clodagh, but observed her closely at all times, presumably to make sure her angelic cousin didn’t produce two more slinkies and therefore attain a moral advantage she would never countenance in her own home.
After Clodagh left, we tried to restate the importance of sharing, but our little boss was unmoved. In fact, she simply left the room. Upon returning, she was entirely unrepentant – not that we noticed, of course, since our stubborn little genius came back wearing my bloody shoes.
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