This Mother’s Day, I have been thinking about what an advantage my parents had when they were raising me, compared to the situation I find myself in. They had one child. My husband and I have five.
The great advantage to having an only child is that anytime a kid around the house does something wrong, you know exactly who to blame. Only one person could have done it!
If there’s a pile of dirty, child-sized socks on the floor, you know whose they are. If something gets broken and you, the parents, didn’t break it, it’s obvious who the culprit is. If you approach the front steps of your house and see that some child has left out the congealed remains of an experiment that involved mixing vinegar, chocolate sauce, oatmeal, cooking oil, peanut butter and dish soap, well, you know whose name to yell up the stairs and who to make clean it up.
By contrast, in a larger family there is every opportunity to commit the great parental crime of blaming the wrong child for someone else’s wrongdoing. Alas for me, but worse for my poor children, no matter how hard I try I never seem to miss a chance.
“Oh for goodness’ sake!” I could be heard expostulating angrily the other day, as I arrived home and found a beautiful ripe mango on the kitchen counter bristling with pencils and chopsticks.
It looked like a child’s sculpture of a hedgehog. It looked like the victim of someone who enjoys pursuits that involve aiming missiles at targets, and before thinking, I began yelling.
“X! What on earth? I told you, X, never again to waste perfectly good fruit by impaling it!” Because I had, gentle reader, told X that I never again wanted a repeat of an episode involving crayons and a piece of watermelon.
X came into the room with a wounded expression.
“You’ve done it again, Mummy,” X said sorrowfully. “It wasn’t me.”
There was a sudden outbreak of guilty laughter from A, B and C that I realized was being echoed by Z, our Spanish exchange student.
“We did it!” sniggered A, B and C. “The mango was getting kind of wrinkly anyway.”
“You — ? Oh, my gosh, X, I am so sorry,” I said, turning to the offended child. I was falling over myself with sincerity because I felt absolutely terrible. I still do.
But it was too late. The stricken face of X showed the gravity of what I had done. I had committed the act that probably stings a child’s natural sense of justice more than any other, the false accusation, and it was far from the first time.
“This is why a person’s previous record isn’t supposed to come up in court,” I said brightly, trying with pathetic obviousness to turn my bad act into a teaching moment.
“See? Just because a person impaled a piece of fruit once doesn’t mean that the person is to blame the next time. X, please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
X didn’t smile. “It’s OK. I forgive you.”
There was a pause and perhaps the briefest twitch at the corner of X’s mouth.
“Again,” said X.
Reader, it was an early Mother’s Day present better than I deserved.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
