A few days ago I went to the grocery store near my home in Stafford, North Brisbane. I had the car, so I took Micah Jade, my constant companion, with me to acquire the groceries that our family would need in the following week. She prattled constantly, in the car, on the way, enquiring honestly about how the world worked and why. Micah Jade, who is two, wore in a cute, little, pink dress, her short, honey-colored curls framing her smiley impish face. She looked adorable; I should emphasize the word "looked." She made it through grocery shopping with no notable incidents, but as I was checking out, Micah Jade began to play on the chrome grocery gate. I was busy trying to pay, so I did not notice her mischief until she began to bang the gate against its post again and again. “Clank! Clank! Clank!” I turned to correct her, calmly requiring that she cease and desist with the loud banging, as it was not appropriate behaviour for respecting the property and hearing of others. For a moment, she looked like she was going consent, but only for a moment.
As I turned back around to the credit card machine, I heard MJ say, abruptly, in a forceful voice, not unlike the voice of Cookie Monster, "NOOO, ya don't tell MEEEE what to DOOOOOO!" The challenge was thrown down, right there in the grocery store. MJ was confident that I was not going to make her mind with an audience of fifty people. Like the jihadists, her main weapon of choice is not force, but fear. At two and a half, she had weighed the shop and the people and had sized me up, in an instant determining that I was not brave enough to face her head-on.
But what MJ didn't know was that I had been fighting terrorism at home for half a decade before she even came along. I had tamed two terrorists, even before she existed. She thought she could take the battle abroad to the grocery store and win it there, because she thought I would be afraid of what that store full of strangers would think of me and of her, but little MJ had made a serious miscalculation.
In an instant, I snatched her naughtiness up, and in the time that it took me to flip her over my shoulder, she commenced shrieking like a banshee. I frantically punched in my pin number in the credit card machine, flung the groceries into the cart, and hastily bid the cashier goodbye, as MJ, still screaming, began to kick the air in front of me. All 100 eyes were upon us, and the people within six meters of us began to put their fingers into their ears to protect their hearing. As we walked out of the store, the horror of the situation overcame me and I began to laugh out loud, my mad cackling adding to the audio-mayhem created by MJ's super-human lungs. All the way to the car, she continued to belt out high-pitched screams, the kind of screams that Jamie Lee Curtis screamed in those 80's Wes Craven films, while I laughed like a madwoman.
I held my naughty, air-kicking toddler over my shoulder, and I pushed the trolley to my car in the parking lot with one hand, walking with ease through the channel through people and cars that we had cut with our sound waves. When we reached the car, MJ received a well-needed disciplining--a short speech on obedience before I buckled her in her car seat and closed her into the car alone. Her rebellion lasted about a minute more, but she was only able to deafen herself, since the car could now contain her voice. After that, she found her thumb, and calmed herself down on the five minute ride home. By the time we arrived home, she was back to Dr. Jekyll, and her Mr. Hyde personality stowed away for another day. She was smiling and laughing and discussing her take on the world again like the cute little toddler she appears to be.
Gifted toddlers are amazing creatures. They paint with poo and eat dog food, at least MJ does. They routinely bite and hit beloved family members and close friends, even while kissing and cuddling, as they honestly critique your parenting skills, physical fitness, or eating habits. They are unashamed to be naked in public, and occasionally refuse to brush their teeth, despite having dog-food-breath (again MJ). The gifted toddler will proudly proclaim his toilet habits and demand lollies for not making a mess in his own pants, before demanding to know how exactly the toilet and the entire sewer system function. I love to watch gifted toddlers as they discover the world. Each one is as unique as a snowflake. Gifted toddlers are equal parts sweetness and raw ambition, both adorable and insufferable, simultaneously. Gifted toddlers are so much more exciting to me than infants; but, in my experience with my children and the children of my family members and friends, I have continually found that gifted toddlers are terrorists, almost by definition. They are hell-bent on imposing their vision of reality on the world and will use fear to accomplish their sinister goal, (though a world where the loving guidance of a parent is replaced by the anarchy of toddler is a scary place, especially for the toddler herself.)
In my opinion, the prevailing wind of popular parent psychology, the stuff you read in the magazines and most popular books, seems to declare that if you just wait out the toddler years and accommodate or ignore tantrums and coups thrown in selfishness for a few years, that a sweet school-age child will emerge, magically reformed and reasonable, just by aging; but I don't believe it for a second. I guess I know too many people, gifted or not, that have never outgrown selfishness, people who have never learned to care for the good of others or to submit to any authority outside themselves. No, character is not reformed by time, but by consistent and kind intervention and guidance by a loving parent, starting during the toddler years.
The cost of refusing to confront terrorism in someone I love is too great to postpone or ignore. A little child who pouts when she doesn't get her way can be funny and outrageously cute, but a pouting adult is intolerable. In life, we don't always get to drink from the pink cup. Sometimes we are lucky to have a cup at all, even a blue one or (horror of horrors!), an orange one. Often in life, we don't get another ice cream cup if we throw ours on the ground--on purpose. Sadly, in real life, throwing tantrums and articulately slicing through others with words sometimes means the loss of a relationship, and as adults, we all experience the lasting consequences of our own poor choices, even when we are sorry afterwards. Though gifted toddlers don't yet know it, a life, well-lived, is not about making the world conform to one's self, but in loving others, in living out honesty, thankfulness and kindness, and in developing one’s potential, not only for the sake of one’s self, but in order to contribute towards the good of others. For me, the most important parts of parenting (though also the most difficult parts) are teaching these global truths in the mundane moments of everyday life.
It is such a huge task to be responsible for the developmental years of someone I love, and I guess that is why I think a lot about what I am working toward, while I am in the thick of grocery store tantrums, deep conversations about the meaning of life or the sewer system, and playground assaults on friends. I'm sure I'm not a perfect parent. Anyone who knows me could tell you that. I get frustrated sometimes, and often I am not as consistent as I should be; but I know what I am working toward and what is not important to me. I am not interested in having the best behaved children on the playground (this goal would be completely unattainable for me). I don't aim to make friends of my children; (Why would anyone want to have friends that are two or six or eight years old?) I may not always find agreement in parenting with my peers, with the current mags, or with my children's school; but if I am parenting for the good of my children, worrying about those things is not worth my time. No, I care most about my girls, about encouraging their inherent strengths, and about confronting and disciplining ugliness in their hearts every single time that I see it, so that they grow integrity instead of selfishness, pride, and deceit. I care about building their character and supporting them while they begin to make their own wise choices as they gradually take from me, the responsibility for their own lives.
I don't know how much progress George Bush made in the "Global War on Terror" during his eight years as president. I guess time will tell, but no matter what happens on a global scale, in my own little corner of the world, even after the eight years I have already served, I know that I will continue to fight my micro-war on terror both at home and abroad in the hopes that one day soon, I will make enough progress with MJ for the folks at the grocery store not to have to endure the ear-piercing shrieks of a terrible tantrum from my gifted toddler. I'll keep on bringing "Texas Justice" to MJ, like I have to Jordan and Meryl before her, because it is in the her best interest that I intervene to help her to build character. Judging from my battles with other temporary terrorists in my family, I think I probably only have eight months or so left between now and the time when I can declare a tentative victory. In the time between now and victory, though, if any of you counter-terrorism-agent-types need help, please shoot me a facebook message. My resolve is sure, my cause is just, and thus, MJ's days as a terrorist are numbered.
Afternote: It was more than two years until my husband and I could declare a tentative victory in the war on terrorism within our house, though some days, we still feel aftershocks and shadows of it hanging around MJ. (probably because MJ inherited a stubborn streak the size of Texas from both of us).
Elissa Mizell is an architect, a writer of several projects including the blog elissainoz.blogspot.com, wife of her best friend, and the mother of three gifted girls, two of which are also 2E.
