ARCHIVE FOR Writing the Family

For a long time, whenever I would drop my older daughter off at a birthday party, she would cling to my leg and beg me to stay, promise me half her slice of cake if I promised not to leave.

Then one day I brought her to a classmate’s party and before I knew it she was off running around with her friends without even waving goodbye – and I just stood there, with a dull, nameless pang rooting around in my chest.

My daughters have been obsessed lately with the soundtrack to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

And though I’ve grown tired of it looping endlessly on repeat, the English teacher in me loves to sing along whenever the narrator croons to young Joseph: If you can interpret you will go far. If you can interpret you’ll be a star.

My four-year-old has been refusing to eat dinner lately.

Sometimes she tells me that she’s too tired to eat, sometimes she protests the tiny specks of color that somehow made it into her meal. Once she tried explaining that some people are eating people and some people are not.

At first, I thought I’d let her suffer the natural consequences of her actions. But once I realized that the natural consequences of her actions involved her waking me up at 2 a.m. to ask for a bowl of cheerios, I figured I needed a new strategy.

My four-year-old asks me to fill her water bottle with really, really, really cold water. She likes her water on the rocks. Or, perhaps better said, she likes her rocks with a splash of water.

I’m on my ninth ice cube when I notice that she is doing the pee-pee dance – legs crossed, hopping as she shifts her weight from side to side, as though she’s practicing for Riverdance.

My four-year-old has been coming home from pre-school lately singing songs about recycling, which my wife and I have seized as an opportunity to get rid of the stacks and stacks of paper – covered in purple scribbles and Trader Joes stickers – cluttering the house.

It’s our way of honoring the earth, we tell her whenever she begins to protest.