or, The Day My Daughter Went All Verruca-Salt On Me
The other day, my four-year-old daughter heard the word “festival” and grew very excited. She said, “Do you remember the Tulip Festival?!! That was SO FUN!”
Do I remember the Tulip Festival? Yes. Yes, do I ever. It was the day my daughter turned Verruca-Salt on me. This is how I remember it:
The local tulip festival is an annual celebration lasting a few weeks during peak tulip-blooming season. We’ve gone a handful of times and I have beautiful photographs of my children at various ages amongst the brightly hued flowers. And this was The Perfect Day for Tulip-Admiring: the sky was clear and blue, it was sunny (yes, in April!), and the tulips were at their peak. It was a rainbow-hued horizon with Mt. Hood in the background to boot.
And that’s when it started. The Biggest Tantrum That Ever Was. Well, I know it probably wasn’t the biggest of all time, but this was the worst I’d ever experienced as a mother.
Mind you, I am a seasoned children-under-five-mom at this point, and my four-year-old (here I call her Blossom) and three-year-old (here I call him Buck) were thoroughly watered, rested, and fed before we even set foot on festival grounds. Usually that guarantees a good two-hour chunk of fit-free-fun. But not on this ill-fated day. I want to blame the festival. Before we even reached the tulips, we had to pass a mini-carnival of bouncy houses and hay-slides. Almost immediately Blossom and Buck were complaining—“When are we going to the bouncy house?” “I want to go on the slide!” “Maybe later,” I replied, without really meaning it, “but we’re here for the tulips.” I was patient at first, but less and less the more this carried on.
Buck started taking off, running through the rows of tulips, the top of his head disappearing beneath the tall stalks. Blossom followed suit. Weighed down with my mom-junk (you know, the big mom purse, water bottles, camera, not to mention the 20 extra pounds of life-giving child-bearing weight), I tried desperately to rally them. They’d hold my hands for a short time, then take off again. I felt helpless.
Sweaty and exhausted, I rallied the troops and we started the long walk back to the parking lot. I had stupidly said in one of my desperate attempts to get them to listen that maybe we could get some ice cream. Feeling I should make good on my promise, I slowed down at the ice cream stand to realize there would be no way I could afford everyone ice cream if we were going to eat dinner for the rest of the week. I kept walking past the ice cream, hoping Buck and Blossom wouldn’t notice, but Blossom started in with the demand that would become her war-cry for the next solid hour: “I want an icey-cone! I want an icey-cone! I want an icey-cone!” If we were at home and this happened, after being asked to stop, she would eventually be sent to her room where she could have her little fit without disturbing the rest of us. But what to do when one is out in public?
I asked her to please stop. I pulled her aside to try and talk sensibly with her. I promised her a treat for later if she would calm down. It only made things worse. “I want an icey-cone!” And now Buck had started in. We slowly inched our way through the festival to the parking lot. It was a long, long walk of humiliation. By that point I had two hysterical children, one on each hand, screaming, “I want an icey cone!” People started to stare. Blossom threw herself onto the gravel and screamed. People started walking around us like we had an imaginary perimeter, but definitely slowed down to stare, like when everyone slows down traffic to leer at the fool that just got pulled over for a traffic violation. Some people tried to be encouraging, others made smart-ass quips. It was like an out-of-body experience. I could see myself, standing in the middle of a gravel parking lot with four befuddled older children behind me as a buffer while two otherwise normal toddlers laid in the dirt screaming. It’s almost funny.
We finally got to the car and I could hardly buckle Blossom, her body was writhing in expert tantrum form. Buck soon calmed down, clearly exhausted. For the first 20 minutes of the drive, Blossom kept going (truly remarkable stamina). My older four kids reached a state of stupor and no longer heard anything. I was so impressed with their saintly patience, I decided that as soon as Blossom fell asleep (which is inevitable, right?) I would go through a drive-thru and get smoothies for my normal, sane children. At last she did, mid-sob, and the car was finally quiet. I pulled into the drive-thru and practically whispered an order to the attendant. Not even kidding you, Blossom woke up, and started right where she left off. “I want an icey-cone!”
There was a lot of good that came from this day. I probably sweat off at least five pounds. Blossom learned a lesson: she did not get a smoothie that day because of her fit, and she brought it up a few times the next few days: “I’m sad because I didn’t get a smoothie.” Me: “Do you remember why?” Blossom: “Yes. Because I threw a fit.” Win.
I also saw my older four children exercise heroic patience. Win.
But I definitely do not remember the tulip festival as “so much fun”, as Blossom does. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, the fact that she doesn’t remember how miserable she was that day, and how miserable she made everyone else. Somehow in her memory all she sees are the beautiful tulips. In her mind, that was a good day, while the rest of us remember a hot sweaty mess.
Yet this is humorously similar to my own recollection of life. There are periods of time in my adult life that I remember fondly, even if they were incredibly difficult. I look back now and I am amazed at God’s hand through it all, but when I really think about it, I was a big stinker during those periods of time too. I was needy, whiny, and I pitched some pretty good fits. But I like to recall all the beauty, the work of God’s hand that I see in retrospect.
I’ve been trying to meditate more on God’s Fatherhood—that He is my Father, I am His Child, and He loves me. Simple, but sometimes difficult to wrap my heart around and truly believe. This isn’t the first time God has used my own experience in parenting to show me His Heart: He holds His ground through my own fits of tunnel-vision and stubbornness with patience and wisdom, and maybe with a little smirk of amusement, is happy when, at long last, I can see the beauty, and have grown a little through the dirt and tears.
