The Puzzle of Parenting

t its most outcome-oriented, parenting very tiny children can feel like a game. Our one month old baby, for example, is kind of a Tamagotchi at the moment: all she needs to meet her milestones are breastmilk, burps, clean diapers and the occasional wipe-down with a damp cloth. When she fusses in the evening, we apply all of the above with increasing urgency until everyone passes out from exhaustion. The baby has no care for the finer things in life. Songs, numbers, letters, nursery rhymes: she really doesn't give a s***.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is the major development between babies #1 and #2. We have realized that shit-giving won't start for weeks. And until then, I'm living it up in the secure knowledge that the Sugar Puff will forget all of this, probably within minutes! 

For a few precious weeks my whole job is to keep Puff Pea warm and full and feel her soft, squishy little cheeks and make her stop crying hysterically between the hours of 8pm and midnight. But as I go about it, I freely watch Nigella Lawson on the TV while answering emails on my phone, reading about the American elections on the tablet and loudly commenting about what a f***ing f***wit Ben Carson is and how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. 

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not ignoring her. I love her, I love her, I love her. it's just that she won't remember any of this! Which is why she should know that I am alarmed by the bags of the g***d**** clown shoes hoping to my home country. President "Bleeding Out of Her Whatever" is going to sit next to the big red button? Gof preserve us all.

My first born, of course, is two years and three months old and is thus much more advanced. Parenting her is more like doing one of those 3D logic puzzles that you get in science museum gift shops or, in the case of Vienna, at Christmas markets. 

You know the ones: they are usually wood or metal, have an appealing weight in the hand, and are often said to come from Ancient China or some other neverland where children, all of whom grew up to be philosopher generals, spent their days honing their strategic minds not by playing Minecraft, but rather by contemplating knots and pebbles in the leafy shade of the emperor's palace. Smells like jasmine and myrrh. There's elephants. You know the ones. These puzzles require you to take apart three rings that are seemingly impossibly interlocked, or move a big shape through a smaller one, or make seven triangles fit into a space that seems too small.

Getting the Noodle to do what we want (e.g. at least taste the damn broccoli; stop screeching when very happy; put on her shoes no not those shoes the proper shoes, etc.) similarly requires cunning and strategy. It requires forethought. If you act too quickly, you might tie yourself in further knots, move yourself even further from the goal. The thing to do is sit and observe the puzzle, understand its nature, and then imagine what simple, counterintuitive gesture or word might cause it to unlock, to untangle, to cheerfully bend to your will. 

Failing that, just go "aaargh" and flail about doing things at random until the puzzle solves itself.  It always does in the end.