Just Say "NO!"

My daughter doesn’t seem to like me very much. She hasn’t actually come out and said this, but I have my suspicions. For example, it used to be when I picked her up from the babysitter, she would look up and smile, eager to accept my hug and anxious to return home. This heartwarming scene has now, at fifteen-months, devolved into a much colder reception. These days, upon my arrival, she immediately begins to say, “No, no, no!” while toddling away in her highest gear.

The word “No,” in fact, has become her standard rebuttal to nearly any question I might have.

“Do you want some milk?”

“No.”

“Do you want to read a book?”

“No.”

“Can I play blocks with you?”

“NO!”

Even her animals have become involved.

“Hey, what does a kitty cat say?”

“NO!”

“Then what does a puppy dog say?”

“NO!”

It’s terrible, these creatures. Cows that once made an adorable little “mooo!” and roosters that went “dooo!” have all joined up in a menagerie of mutes. It’s as if Napoleon, that foul pig from Animal Farm, has hijacked the barnyard in an effort to make all these beasts equally disagreeable.

According to the baby experts who e-mail my wife every week, however, my daughter is merely exerting her independence. Apparently she’s uncovered one of the great existential epitomes of her life: namely, she is not of us. She is her own person, not a hapless extension of her mother or me or anyone else in the room. One would think such a discovery would be elating. Instead, she’s chosen to demonstrate her uniqueness by disagreeing with nearly everything we ever say.

“Want to take a bath?”

“NOO!”

“Want to play outside?”

“NO!”

“Want to play inside?”

“NOOO!”

What she doesn’t know, though, is that we’ve been conditioned to such abuse due to our careers as educators. Working in a junior high all these years has at least somewhat prepared us for many daily parenting dilemmas, and this is certainly one of them. Our poor daughter, I’m afraid, doesn’t stand much of a chance.

One crucial parenting axiom I’ve picked up is that under most circumstances, it’s not personal. For example, when a student bemoans that “this is the most boring class in the world,” I know what they’re really saying is “I’d rather be playing Halo.” I know my class may be dull on occasion, but it is certainly not the most boring class in the world. I already took that class in college.

Despite my conditioning, however, I must admit that my gut reaction when I see my progeny putter away from me is heartache. When she’d rather have someone else hold her, like mommy or grandma or the lady at the grocery store, it can be a bit depressing. I have to keep reminding myself, It’s not about you, it’s about what you represent. When I pick her up from the sitter, she’s having a wonderful time playing outside with her friends. I represent the end of that fun. Of course she’d rather have a grandparent hold her than me. With a grandparent there’s an incredibly good chance she will be fed candy within minutes.

Knowing all this, though, knowing that it’s not personal and that deep down, she probably really does like me quite a bit doesn’t mean I’ve stopped seeking the external tokens of her affection. I’ve simply become sneaky. The morning, it turns out, is a good time to catch her in a more agreeable mood.

Recently she woke a bit earlier than usual, and instead of waking mommy and beginning the day, I decided I’d spend a little time with her by myself. I sat with her on our gliding chair, her sleepy head nestled atop my shoulder, and we rocked awhile in the morning quiet. Realizing my chance, I asked her a question for which “No,” would not suffice.

“Sweet girl, will you always be my baby?”

She rested there and said nothing, and I suppose that must do for now.

The worldwide financial meltdown has been good for us. Not us, as a society, I guess, or as a civilization per se. However, for my wife and me specifically, it’s been pretty neat. You see, it took the worst economic disaster in three generations to get us to where we are today: on the brink of moving into our very own home.

It’s taken us a long, long, time to get here, but in a couple weeks we will leave this tiny apartment, with its thin walls, stinky odors, and verbally abusive tenants, and move into a house we have purchased with the bank’s very own money. "How long have you lived in an apartment?" you might ask. The answer would surprise you, and while I’m too embarrassed to actually admit the specific time frame, I will offer you a hint: when I moved into this apartment, George W. Bush was, based on contemporary polls, the most popular president in American history. Seriously.

Now, while my wife has not lived in the apartment for nearly this long, we have been actively looking for a house for over three years. Why so long? Are we unemployed? No. Do we have poor credit scores? Not at all. Are we victims of racism? (My wife is one-sixteenth Native American Indian) I don’t think so. The answer is much simpler than that, and, I’m afraid, much darker. My wife and I are not very good at being adults.

We are both bad at making important decisions, and we approach this malady from opposite ends of the spectrum. I like to quickly make decisions based on haphazardly collected data and then adjust my life to whatever ends may result. This is a fun way to live, in my opinion, and almost guarantees I have something to write about every two weeks. My wife, however, likes to examine a situation from all possible vantage points, analyze the plausible positive outcomes with even the most remote negative ones, and then ask someone their opinion. She is a science teacher and I teach English, and I suppose this explains a lot.

Thus, trying to find a house we both would be willing to live in for a quarter-century has always been a bit complicated. I would walk into a house and mentally figure out what’s right with it while she would do the exact opposite. This, obviously, has resulted in numerous, heated arguments followed by long periods of intense silence. A marriage cannot work, though, without the wonderful joy of conversation, and so we opted to swallow our pride and frustrations and kept looking. We have worn out several real estate agents in the past few years, bewildering them with confusing and often contradictory instructions. The following is a sample conversation:

Me: We’d like a bigger yard than this.

Agent: Last week you said you didn’t want to mow a big yard.

Me: Well, I don’t.

Agent: But this yard won’t take long to mow.

Wife: This yard seems a bit small.

Agent: (Scribbling something, probably profanity, onto her notepad) So, you want a
yard that’s not too big, but not too small.

Me: Yeah. That’s it. A medium-sized yard.

Wife: (Pointing across the street) That yard over there would be just right.

Agent: That house has no basement. Do you want me to schedule a look at that house? Because you said you wanted a basement.

Me: I guess we could live without a basement.

Wife: Maybe we could put a storage shed in the yard.

Me: Yeah. Well, then I guess we’d need a pretty big yard.

For years this went on. Occasionally, we would actually put a bid on a house, to show people we were serious potential home-buyers who had the guts to make large, important decisions. Our bartering strategy was both simple and straightforward. We would start with an offer so low only a desperate weakling with a house full of termites would even consider taking it. This would serve two crucial purposes: One, it would demonstrate to our agents and increasingly confused family members that we truly wanted to buy a house, and two, it would keep us from actually buying a house.

Thus, we rented, and despite conventional wisdom, renting does have some obvious advantages. We paid no property taxes, for example, had no maintenance issues, and, particularly important for a couple in the education profession, we had no trees from which to pull wet toilet paper on soggy Saturday mornings. We convinced ourselves we were financial all-stars, since the money we were saving on not paying property taxes and insurance more than compensated for the check we wrote out each month to a landlord we’d never met.

But, then an interesting thing happened. We had a baby, and despite what you may have heard about the relative size of a baby compared to most other humans, they actually do take up an immense amount of space. Then, another interesting thing happened. Due to the terrible, terrible financial environment, the federal government decided it would actually pay us to buy our own home. Thus, the perfect storm of market forces—an eight-thousand dollar tax credit and historically low interest rates—combined with premonitions of birthdays and Christmases filled with large plastic toys, convinced us to make the purchase of a lifetime.

So we did, and now it only seems appropriate to thank everyone responsible for making our dreams come true. Thank you, in general, to the vast, historic forces of which I do not control nor truly comprehend for lighting a fire under our backsides and getting us out of this tiny apartment. Thank you, specifically, to the thousands of criminally short-sighted lenders for offering vast amounts of money to people who had no business buying an RV, much less a half-million dollar home. Thank you, too, all you satanically-greedy mega-banks (yes, I’m looking at you, Goldman Sachs) who sold investors large chunks of overinflated real-estate products. Thank you, all you ignoramuses, for buying those products, and a special thank you to our very own federal government for knowing that the best way to teach its citizens a valuable lesson in fiscal discipline is to borrow more money than it can physically count.

And speaking of giant sums of capital, we offer our last nod of appreciation to you, China, for making all this possible in the first place. Where would we be without your terrified willingness to keep the loans coming? After all, if we stop spending, you guys stop making almost every single piece of plastic junk on Earth.

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a curse. However, without these “interesting times,” who knows if we’d ever move out of this place. Now, please excuse me while I spend the next 75 minutes of my life mowing my lawn.