Before you have children, you think, I won’t be one of those parents who uses fear and coercion to control my children’s behavior.
Guess what, pal. You’re wrong! You’ll use whatever desperate tactics your exhausted lizard brain can muster in whatever theatre of parenting war you’re enduring at any given moment. And guess what the native tongue of your lizard brain is. That’s right, you pitiful, clueless dolt: Fear.
My child convinced me right before Valentine’s Day to make some cupcakes. He’s slowly developing more of an interest in how things are made in the kitchen, so I try to indulge this impulse in him when it arises. I made a batch of twenty or so cute little pink and red Funfetti cakes and let him run the mixer for a few seconds, then lick the beaters when we were done. He got the first iced cupcake and I told him that was enough for the evening. He didn’t put up a fight.
In retrospect, that’s how I should have known something was up.
The next day, I am almost positive he forgot we had made cupcakes at all. He didn’t ask for one. I surprised him with one after he completed his homework. He was awed. And then he wanted another. No, not tonight, one is plenty, etc.
That night he was particularly restless at bedtime. He rushed me through our book and our nightly songs and basically booted me out of his room. I went straight to bed to read or stare at my phone — or, more accurately, both because my attention span and I are broken — and I kept hearing the creak of hardwood as he got up and down, up and down.
I left him get his wiggles out for a good half hour and finally hollered at him to get back in bed and go to sleep. How could I have known what he was plotting?
The next morning he woke up at 5. I get up at 6 and get him up by 6:30 on school days. He is up by 6:30 every day, even weekends. We’ve been struggling with too-early wakeups lately — including some middle-of-the-night wakeups — so I’ve gotten the ol’ color-changing clock back out to give him a visual cue of when it’s okay to come bouncing into our room and forcing us into a new day. This was the first morning we were back to the color-changing clock, which I had told him would turn green at 6:30 when it was time for him to get up. Otherwise, he was to play in his room or use the bathroom or whatever until official wakeup time.
I sent him back to bed, which upset him. Like, upset him. Stomping feet, stiff arms, the whole deal. He huffed and puffed and turned his light on and went about his business … loudly. I got up at 6 as planned and made his breakfast and began my routine: Shower, making coffee, drying hair, getting dressed, checking in with him periodically to make sure he was hitting his own benchmarks of food eaten, clothes on, teeth brushed, etc.
His breakfast was untouched.
Normally, he wakes up ravenous because he’s growing about three inches a day.
I implored him to eat his food and then looked over at the cupcake container. It was looking suspiciously underpopulated.
I’ll be honest, I had had a couple the night before (Mom tax!) so I wasn’t sure if I had made that big a dent in the overall count or what. But it didn’t feel right. So I asked Richard if he’d had any. He’s a golden child of fitness and health, so he had not.
Then it hit me, about the time I caught sight of a lanky seven-year-old with what looked like shit streaks on his face: THE BOY.
He had been sneaking cupcakes back to his room all morning. So many that he was too full to eat breakfast. That was bad enough.
But tonight, as he was getting ready for bed and shimmying into the sheets, I saw him put his hand on something that looked like a cross between a rotten apple and a moon rock. His face fell as he reached for it and I saw a delicious display of remorse and shame flash across his face. Here we were, a week later (he’d been at his dad’s house in the intervening week), and he was laying a hand on the evidence of his mischief — the naughty misbehavior he’d had the luxury of distancing himself from due to our week-on, week-off parenting arrangement.
“What’s that?” I asked, knowing exactly what it was.
He handed it to me, and I knew in that instant that the only chance I had to keep this child from making a habit — a crusade — of sneaking food into his room was to go big.
“Oh no,” I said, eyeing him seriously. “I bet the ants have found this.”
He looked at me blankly.
“And the roaches and the mice,” I said.
His expression shifted to interest, then understanding, then revelation, then regret.
“Do they know where I am? Are they coming for me?”
“They might have been coming for this fossilized cupcake.”
“I can’t sleep in this bed!”
Touché, kid!
I explained how ants are really just looking for food; they’re not trying to hurt anyone. They’re not after him. They’re just hungry, scavenging for food. But they’ll go anywhere for it, including into a house and into a kid’s room. They smell it from far away and come all in a line. I told him the story of the time I threw a party at our last apartment and left all the food out, and how the next morning the kitchen was overrun with ants who’d come in through the back door to eat the leftovers. That’s why we’ve got go clean up after ourselves and throw food and trash away and not let things get piled up and cluttered. Otherwise ants and cockroaches and mice want to come and hang out and eat your food and then they make us sick with their poops.
A million tiny points of connection flickered behind his eyes. He looked at his sheets like they were infected with smallpox.
He didn’t want to sleep in his bed anymore. He was not going to be able to sleep in his bed ever again, he said. They would know he’d had food in here, there had to be tiny crumbs they could smell.
I had gone too far, flown too close to the cautionary-tale sun! I explained that he was in the clear because we cleaned up the food and put it in the trash properly, and we’d take the trash out tomorrow. And how I felt like he was fixating on the ant attack part of the story where I felt like the real moral was quit stealing cupcakes and stashing them in your room.
I laid down in his bed to demonstrate its safety. He crawled in reluctantly and got snuggly and proceeded to ask me three dozen questions about ants.
“They build houses, but do they build churches?”
“Does the queen wear a crown?”
“Do fire ants come after your food?”
“Do they believe in God?” (No.) “What, I thought everyone believed in God!” (Also no.)
“Do they have a heart?”
“If you put a piece of food under your head, would they come for it?”
“What happens if there are two houses that have food? Where do they choose to go?”
“What happens if they run out of food? Do they die?”
“Do we want them to die?”
I had to tell him no more questions so he could go to sleep.
As a result of my fear-based parenting, I have now promised him that as soon as we get up — probably at 5 a.m., who am I kidding? — we are going to look up ant info and possibly get an ant farm.
But he did say he’d never sneak food into his room ever again.
So, win?