Bizarro World

As a parent, have you ever found yourself in an alternate universe? Like Bizarro World? Here you find strange things happening, like you’re children are cleaning their room without being asked to even once, or they are putting their own clothes away, or they come to you and say, “mommy, you look a little upset. We’re going to go over there and be quiet for ten minutes and maybe you’ll feel better, okay?”.
The other morning I had just such an experience, and I thought that I had perhaps been suddenly transported to a type of twilight zone that intrigues only parents. This is the way it happened.
It was after lunch, and I put my girls in their room for naptime. I knew they wouldn’t nap, but could you blame me for trying? Anyways, about a half an hour later I hear one of them wailing. Before I could get up and see what was going on, I find myself faced with the girls. The older one stood behind her sister, with her hand on the small of her back as if she were trying to prevent her from falling over. The two-year old had tears trickling down her face. “What’s wrong?” I ask. My four-year old spoke first. “She’s sad because she was asking you to get her off of my ladder and you didn’t come.” I look at them both and note that the two-year old has managed to get down the ladder without my help.
Um, okay.
“I didn’t know she needed my help.”
“Well, she did.”
“Okay, well she seems like she got down okay. Let’s go back to bed.” I turn the girls around and begin ushering them towards their bedroom. The two-year old is suddenly in tears. I think she’s upset because she doesn’t want to take a nap. That is not an unusual occurance in this house. I keep moving her towards her bedroom anyways, promising all sorts of goodies when they wake up from their nap. She turns away from me and continues to cry. I can faintly make out the words “time out” as she sobs. “No, no.” I try to assure her that she is not in trouble, that it is just naptime. Not time out. Just naptime. I reach down for her hand and again she turns around and begins walking towards the living room, mumbling something about timeout the whole way. Finally she gets fed up with my apparent lack of understanding, so she turns around and says loudly, “I want time out!” I stared down at her, completely befuddled. I let her go and sure enough she walked into the living room to their designated time-out corners, although this one is usually reserved by her sister. The point is that she went into her time out corner completely by will. What could I do? I let her go, and then head to the restroom. Once I’m in there, the door is pulled open and an angry four-year old stands there, glaring at me.
“She did not want a time out!” she yells.
“yes, she did. She’s the one who put herself in time out. She did it.”
“That’s not what she said! She said she didn’t want time out!”
And so on and so forth until finally I realize that this is a futile conversation. A debate in which I can not win. It is scientifically impossible. I remind her that her sister did, in fact, put herself in time out and then I shut the bathroom door. She pulled it open one last time. Her hands were balled into fists and she thrust them at her sides toward the ground and belted out her absolute favorite phrase these days.
“IT’S NOT FAIR!”
“No, it’s not. Now leave me alone, I have to pee.”
See what I mean? I have a toddler putting herself into time out, and a preschooler raging over the injustice of her sister being in time out. Bizarro world.