And So It Begins

One day, not long ago, Quinn looked up at me while I was getting dressed and she said, “Mom, you’re my best fwiend.” She smiled at me and nodded, as if to reinforce it, yup, that’s right, best fwiend. (Not a typo, incidentally; she can’t say r’s bewy well). I responded, as any reasonable adult would, by dropping my earring and starting to cry. She smiled proudly and seemed to be making a mental note.

It was an overwhelmingly sweet moment for me and I thought, right then, I could happily die...with my adorable kid smiling up at me, long before she learns to consider me her enemy. I am not looking forward to that inevitability and I know already I won’t handle it well.

I appreciate the importance of being her mother and not her friend, and yet I hope friendship will be part of it as it was with my own mother. I went through a parent-hating phase, but it was brief and early and for the most part I considered my own mom my best friend too.

This was, to some degree I imagine, out of necessity. We moved twice when I was growing up and each time I found myself on the outside of already-formed pairs. I always had friends, but I was never anyone’s best friend, and I never had a true best friend of my own when I was young. And because I didn’t, it was a focal point of my youth. Eventually I gave up searching and felt lucky to have the kind of mom I could talk to and always count on for support. (And then I went to college and met Chelsey, and then Kim and Julie. And the world righted itself, thank god.)

My hope for Quinn is that she'll have more early options than I did, and I'll confess that it is already something that has me worried: Will she have friends? Will kids like her? Will the world treat her kindly? This seems especially important to me knowing she will never have a sibling, in spite of also knowing that not all siblings are guaranteed friends. As she gets closer and closer to being school-aged, I find myself increasingly anxious about how to get her started off right. So far, things are not ideal. She is the oldest in the “pebbles” group at her daycare right now, and when she becomes a “rock” on her third birthday, she’ll be the youngest. The other day I arrived to pick her up just in time to see her attempting to join a group of “rocks” on the playground; she idolizes them and mentions their names at home all the time. The eldest of the three girls sneered at her, “No, Quinn! You can’t play with us.” And her little followers echoed her, one of them putting down what she was playing with to turn Quinn around by the shoulders and march her off to be by herself. 

I’m sure it would be hard to explain to other adults why I grabbed a three year old by the face and shoved her to the ground, so instead of doing that I just said, calmly, “Hey, Quinnie...” And she looked up, called my name, and ran to me for a hug. I told her she could come  play with me, anytime and for the rest of time, and we promptly left those little twerps there in the mud. 

My hope is that Quinn forgets those things from day to day, but I’m afraid she doesn’t. We are currently getting ready to visit friends in Wyoming whose daughter, Eloise, is just a bit older than Quinn. It will be Quinn’s first time on an airplane, so we’re trying to prepare her by talking about it a lot. The other day, driving to the store, Quinn asked me, quite out of nowhere, “Mom, will The Eloise bite me?” I was a bit horrified. “No!” I told her, hoping that would prove to be true. “Will The Eloise say hi to me?” she asked next. She sounded so worried my heart broke, and then I pictured those three little twerps at daycare again...

I know I sound crazy and I really don’t want to be that crazy mother who jumps in and tries to solve all of her kid’s problems, because obviously that causes problems far worse than not being liked by the snotty kid on the playground. Nevertheless, it’s hard to hold back, and excruciating to watch her have her feelings hurt. It’s my job, isn’t it, to protect her? 

I suppose what I have to do in those moments when the Mother Lion in me starts to flick her tail back and forth, is call up the slightly less vulnerable Quinn who manages to hold her own at home. We recently went thirty minutes in a battle over a tiny bite of boiled potato. I was determined that she would try it and she was determined that she would not. After about five minutes, the potato was irrelevant and the battle between us was the only real point. I pulled out all my bargaining chips: 

If you eat this potato, I’ll read you a book while you have dinner. No. 

If you try just this little bit of potato, we can “play puzzles.” No. 

If you have this tiny little minuscule piece of potato, you can have some Nems! No.

That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to win, when she turned down M&Ms, as if she wasn’t at all interested. 

In the middle of that battle, when she was getting frustrated, she said to me, “You’re not my fwiend, wight now.” And I froze. It had only been a few days since she told me I was not only her friend, but her best fwiend. How could it be over that quickly? When I gave up the potato battle, conceding that she had won (rather easily), she changed her mind again, “Okay, you’re my fwiend now. I’m happy again.” 

I suppose that’s the real work I have to do: not protect her from mean kids, but teach her what real friendship looks like. It’s not fleeting, or capricious, or dependent on one person’s behavior alone. Done right, it’s a team effort, based on the faith that each person will treat the other one fairly and kindly, even on bad days.