I never truly understood the term ‘“I’ve created a monster” until I had children. More specifically, I never understood it until my son turned about 18 months old and turned into, well, a monster. (A very sweet, wonderful, adorable monster who I love with all my heart BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.)
The thought popped into my head a couple days ago, when my husband and I were making the snowy, six-hour drive home from a long weekend with both kids. About halfway through the drive, my husband started–for some unknown and inexplicable reason–chewing grape-flavored bubble gum. After a couple minutes, he said “Hey, Miles, look!” and blew a big old purple bubble.
Because I was sitting in the back between the two kids, I had a close-up look of Miles’ fascinated little face. His eyes went wide, his jaw dropped, then he broke into a delighted giggle. “More! More! More, Daddy!” So my husband blew a few more bubbles, each one bigger than the last, as Miles laughed and laughed. But after a couple minutes, the gum lost its ability to stretch out enough to create a bubble, which is a problem for the 10-year-old boys and 35-year-old full-grown men who enjoy Big League Chew.
It’s also a problem for two-year-olds who enjoy bubbles.
My husband was able to recreate the bubble-blowing for a few more minutes, thanks to a big bag of gum. But after a while, the gum ran out and my husband and I met eyes in the rearview mirror, matching looks of panic on our faces. It was that feeling familiar to all parents: Oh, no. We don’t have any way of doing this anymore. He’s going to lose it. It was similar to my anxiety level a few weeks ago when we couldn’t find Miles’ purple stuffed animal at daycare pickup. What are we going to do? How quickly can a new, identical purple stuffed animal be delivered to our doorstep? Please say it’s before bedtime.
So the bubbles stopped and, as predicted, our son lost it. “BUBBLES! MORE BUBBLES! DADDY MORE BUBBLES! PURPLE! PURPLE! GUM!” The tantrum went on for 40 minutes (probably actually two minutes but every tantrum minute feels like 20). While I was trying to soothe him, saying “I understand you feel disappointed that the bubbles are over” and offering him Goldfish and blueberries and pumpkin bread out of my Mary Poppins bag, I started thinking: We never should have shown him that bubble gum exists. We’ve created a monster.
And a lightbulb went off in my head. That’s such a major theme of one- and two-year-old kids. Parents try to entertain and please their kids, offering fun things like bubble-gum-viewing and purple stuffed animals and Goldfish crackers. And it works for a few minutes! But then it backfires. The bubble gum runs out. The purple stuffed animal goes missing. The bag of Goldfish is gone, or it’s time to stop eating crackers because we don’t want to spoil dinner. Then the monster emerges, the monster we’ve created by introducing the bubble gum, the purple stuffed animal, the Goldfish crackers.
The epiphany quickly faded away as I racked my brain, trying to figure out how to distract my kid from the end of bubble-blowing. He didn’t want the Goldfish or the blueberries or the pumpkin bread and my words of understanding were doing exactly nothing, so I pulled out the big guns: The Baby Shark music video. There’s a reason why it has 10 billion views on YouTube.
It worked. We watched classic Baby Shark, then dinosaur Baby Shark, then techno Baby Shark, then I stopped paying attention and let Miles hold my phone and watch the 60-minute loop as I fed the baby, who was sitting on the other side of me throughout the bubble-gum ordeal, more interested in staring at her hands.
But then.
But then, this morning as I drove Miles to daycare, he started yelling “Baby Shark! Baby Shark!” That in itself isn’t all that unusual, and I started playing the song through the car speakers.
He wasn’t satisfied. “I hold phone! Baby Shark phone. I HOLD!” And again, I thought: I’ve created a monster. A phone-holding, music-video-watching, techno-loving two-year-old terror.
I tried explaining that we could listen to Baby Shark through the speakers, that he couldn’t hold my phone, that holding the phone is a special privilege for long car rides. Of course he didn’t understand that, and it’s not his fault. His brain isn’t developed enough to understand that sometimes he can hold my phone to watch music, but most of the time he can’t, and here’s the reason why yesterday was different from today. That’s why every piece of parenting advice says to remain consistent with rules and boundaries, and why me letting him hold the phone may have solved one problem but it created another problem. A monster-shaped problem.
By the way, when we got home after the long car ride yesterday, I let him hold the apple juice carton all by himself and pour it into four separate sippy cups, then drink from them without putting on lids. So obviously that’s going to be happening every night for all of eternity. Monster.
The moral of the story
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that I’m bad at setting boundaries and creating limits and I probably deserve listening to my two-year-old throw tantrums. If there’s another moral, it’s that parents should never chew bubble gum. If there’s yet another, it’s that you should never let your kid know that Baby Shark exists.