Experiment in Essay #17: Starring, Pants--#52essays2017

I am making a movie about tantrums. It is going to star my 23 month-old son. He is handy and doesn't need to be paid and knows a thing or two about the subject. I have a day job--most days, it is called getting through the day-- but I feel fairly confident we can shoot footage even in the middle of the night if we need to. Such is the convenience of living with a star. 

His verbal ability is rocketing. He says things like NO I DON'T WANT TO PUT ON MY PANTS MKAY?

He repeats it as you approach with the sad sack of pants with all the benign respectful leadershippy approaches you learned from podcasts on graceful parenting, damnit, with the vague and vain hope someone would some day write an article on you. You're that good at this crap.

Pants? I DONT WANT PANTS, he reminds you in case sentences die on impact. MKAY? I NEED MILK. DONT PANTS! 

And he still yells just to make sure you have understood.

Writer's interlude, in which she pretends she can still think critically: If google is so advanced why didn't its spellcheck guess that I was missing an apostrophe in the contraction above, when I spelled "don't" like it sounds-- DONT? Autocorrect suggested WONT and FONT. As in: No, I WONT want to do what you want--no matter your fucking clever essay FONT.

 I, the mother, am suggestive under the influence of tantshrooms. I start saying things, nonsense things. I am no better than the toddler. If such clothing anarchy doesn't bring out the worst in you, take me out for drinks and tell me how. I will put you in the film credits, near the end.

Brute force is not my thing. Forcing someone to put on their pants feels like inverse violation. Don't we teach kids no means no? But we don't like it when they use that against us. "I threwed it!" The 23 month old star says about his shirt, gloating, but also about my equilibrium. My equilibrium is the opposite of pants, look at them, the right leg and left leg perfect reflections of each other, such admirable balance. Who could hate them, with what cause? Isn't that like hating puppies, baby giraffes?

In the grips of TanTrum, in the dark main street of TanTrum Town, things are bleak. Clouds roll in and make the light for our shoot crappy, but we don't care, because we have star power. My toddler leans back in his high chair nude as the day he was born which was not that long ago in relative time. He is ready to play his part so well you would never know it took his whole life of training to arrive at such a convincing show.

So, check it, critics: Today sucks the most but tomorrow could suck even more which is why we need to get the documentation on so we can remember how good we had it before things tanked. Also, mamaguilt sets in as I try to squeeze satire out of my own sad attempts at dressing him: after all this using him for material-- what if Ro has ACTUAL sensory issues? Not so much that he likes being in his diaper as that he hates the feeling of everything else? And then I would feel awful for not commiserating more, for getting into a battle of wills rather than being a paragon of empathy. I would be the accidental villain, part of the job description of parenting, the part they put in small print and hope you don't read until your contract is signed.

Brute force is not my thing but I am kinda thinking I might need to black market purchase a hospital smock and go hide out in the postpartum recovery welcometotheshitshowofmaternity ward...and watch the shaking baby video.

Or maybe wherever you birthed  should invite you by 20 months postpartum to a special screening of Shaking Toddlers. Or mail you cartons and cartons of box wine and a note: "Not everything improves with age!"

So I tell my brilliant agreeable son--because I still speak to him like he is capable of apprehending reasonable speech-- he will have to star in this video we are going to make together about tantrums, huge tantrums, and that when I put on his clothes he should go apeshit and yell.  He has been doing this all morning anyway to new levels of intensity and has it down pat. 

Writer's interlude (because you guessed, didn't you, that I had to have escaped into the real world to write this all down? You know that can't happen when I am rescuing pants all day, right?): Look, Look around for proof that life goes on, and will even after our movie is made; on my subway, there is some guy, dressed in tight blue jeans and a seablue synthetic sports shirt, trying so hard to give away the empty seat on the train to a woman before he occupies it. "M'am would you like to sit?" He asks me, with incredible self-satisfaction. When I at first don't realize he is talking to me, he repeats it: JUST LIKE his mama taught him. I shake my head, and wonder if I look pregnant or ill. In New York, little else propels Random Acts of Politeness. But then he asks another woman the same thing, and another, with a pained pinched "This is how I was brought up!" Smile on his face. I wonder at what age he started putting his pants on himself with no fuss or if he still, in the privacy of his home, cries hysterically to no one while he sticks his foot into his jeans.

I coach Ro while I change his diaper, which also offends his sensibilities-- and I pull it off surprisingly without summary execution by his foot into my throat. "OK I am going to pick a pair of pants and when I do you need to go buckwild, yelling and protesting and doing the worm and stiff as a board and crying!" Maybe I am getting carried away but he says mmmhmmm, like he is a Jew fleeing the plagues with Moses giving instructions, the first plague is Outfits, towering over the Earth.

I continue, conspiratorial, egging on the overblown drama of our little lives: "And then your shirt, okay? Do not let mama put that shirt on whatever you do. Yell, scream, howl, bitch, make sure the neighbors think I am sacrificing your testicles, OK? You have to do it like you really mean it and do not back down. If I get the shirt over your head and colossal green protruding noseboogers, do NOT LET me win, pull it in the opposite direction as hard as you can! OK, ready?"

We are both super into it. Parenting is amazing. 

I run into the livingroom for the surprise clothes move-- trust me, every other more enlightened approach hasn't worked for shit-- and whisk him into my lap and the pants and the shirt and ---

He is mute and cooperative and holds out one legs tentatively but amiably. 

My movie is a flop, but my life a riveting, riveting success.