The Story About the Toddler, Volume 25.

The Story About the Toddler, Volume 25.
by Jeff Vogel

Or daughter Cordelia is now three years and two months old. Her mental
improvement, as measured by the number of TV shows she can ask to see
in any given day, is shooting through the roof.

While her body has undergone no changes of note since she became potty
trained, she is developing all signs of a mental inner life. She talks
to her toys. And her shoes. And her spoon. She pretends to make
mistakes when we ask her questions, so that she can say, "Oh! You're
right! I'm sorry!"

Based on my observation of humanity, she will lose her ability to ever
admit that someone else can be right in the next few months, and never
regain it again during her entire life.

When she isn't pretending to be a fierce monster or dragon, she likes
to be a pirate. This means that she runs around saying, "Arrr! I'm a
pirate!" a lot. If it weren't for her fear of water, it would be an
uncanny imitation of these once-feared, foul, murderous rapists of the
deep. I do enjoy how the passage of years makes it cute to adorably
imitate those who were once justifiably hated and feared for their evil
deeds. In a century, will parents say, "Oh, look, husband-unit! She's
being a little Nazi! Goose-step higher, honey!"

It helps that children don't grasp reality. That is one of my favorite
things about them. Until they reach the age of thirteen or so and their
brains firm up, their brains are suspended halfway between the real
world old people understand and this weird, cloud cuckoo, South
Park-esque fantasy space.

Hell, when I was thirteen, I wouldn't drink tap water for a while
because I was afraid it would contain hemlock and I would die. No ****.
At summer camp one year, I drank water out of the lake to keep from
drinking tap water. I probably still have millions of parasites living
in my urethra from that. But it made absolute sense at the time. And I
consider myself to be reasonably well-adjusted.

Cordelia, on the other hand, is still three. Her brain is even more
pixelated. Why, the other night, she asked us for a piece of cake, and
we kept her happy by making her a drawing of a cake. The recovered
memory of that won't be any help to us when she tries to have us jailed
under the Offspring Retaliation Act of 2017.

Now that her brain has developed, it is like this lump of clay, waiting
to be molded into a person. And even if I had time to do it, I'm not
sure I'd trust myself. And even if I did trust myself, I forgot how to
do long division, so I can't teach her. So she has to go to school.

* "Ok, Honey. Time To Be Another Brick In the Wall. Put On Your Shoes."

We have started shopping for a preschool for Cordelia.

Preschool is great. It's basically day care, in that you give someone
money to get the kid out of your house. But the word "Preschool"
doesn't have the sort of child-neglecty feel that "day care" does. It
has the word "School" in it, which helps.

But it basically the same thing. I take the kid to a building and drop
her off. They throw her and a bunch of similarly sized monkeys in a pit
and they all throw crap at each other for three hours.

There are organized activities, which teach her to sit still in one
spot for ten seconds. There are arts and crafts, which teach her to do
something besides destroy. There is a snack time, which introduces her
to the unpleasant fact that vegetarians exist. The class raises
bunnies, which enables me to outsource the filthy, thankless job of
having pets.

Then, after three hours of that, we take her home. She is basically
unchanged by this experience, except that she is slightly more used to
being around her peer group, and she now has three different colds.

After visiting a few preschools, we finally picked one with afternoon
classes and a pretty nice feel to it. The children were very well
behaved and mostly clothed and being really nice to each other. So you
know what that must mean. The teachers beat them.

A sign on the wall said, "There is no good reason for you to hit a
child." But, you know. Wink, wink.

(Later, Mariann pointed out that I was reading the sign wrong. What
they meant was, "There is no good reason for YOU to hit a child." But
them, they're trained professionals.)

* Being A Smartass Makes Everything Worse

I hope nobody working at the school ever reads the above, because they
will hate me. And take it out on my child, who will then be forced to
live with reduced snacktime rations of juice and sweetened tofu snacks.

It's gotten better, though. At least now my repellent personality is
limited to this online journal. Before, when representatives from the
schools called us and listened to our answering message, what they
heard was, "Oh, and if you are a telemarketer, we hope that you suffer
a permanant, debilitating knee injury." Which can't have made them want
to be exposed to that much more of me.

Soon, out of a vague sense of respect for my child's privacy, I will
have to stop putting this stuff online. I'll stop when I genuinely feel
that I can cause her harm by my writing. Or when I have enough material
for a second book. Whichever comes second.

* Health, At Last

For the last two months, Cordelia had this lingering hacking cough,
which only struck at night and which was often intense enough to cause
vomiting. This caugh finally started to go away this month, although it
left her terrified to go to sleep at night.

Thus, whenever we left her to go to sleep at night, she would beg for
more and more books to be read to her, as a way of holding off the
coming darkness. Then my wife and I would attempt to leave the room,
prompting a nightly display that would be heart-wrenching, were I still
capable of human emotions.

One night, she went to sleep with a Dr. Seuss book clenched to her
chest like a teddy bear. It was heartbreaking. Not enough to keep me
from leaving the room to live my own life, but still.

* Kill Piggies?

My wife and I are addicted to a computer game called World of Warcraft.
Basically, it is this fantasy world on the Internet. There, you create
this online persona which runs around, murders orcs and other people
who are bad, and steals their money. You can tell that something is bad
because it looks different than you. This level of racial sensitivity
is not unusual in the computer gaming world.

It is possible to spend many, many hours in these games. God knows we
do. They are very popular among parents, as few people need to escape
into a fantasy world more than the guardians of small children. That
dragon over there may be scary and want to kill my little online
person, but at least I won't have to buy it orthodontic care.

Unfortunately, like every other single thing we do, playing World of
Warcraft has backfired. Cordelia loves the game. She begs us to play it
so we can watch. She wants to run our little people around. It took her
an amazingly small amount of time for her to master the controls enough
to, while I was in the bathroom, pick a fight with the city guard in my
hometown.

Now she wants to pretend to fight monsters in real life. She will say,
"Fight monsters now?" and hand me one of her shoes. This is my weapon.
Then we will run around the house and fight imaginary dragons and wild
boars. She swings a remote control at empty space and shouts, "Piggy! I
kill you!" like an extra in a community theatre production of Lord of
the Flies.

Cute story. Mariann and I are lying in bed reading. Cordelia climbs
onto the bed, solemnly pronounces, "I am killed." and flopped face
first onto the blanket. It was the most adorable thing I have ever
seen.

So forget those lame scare tactic TV news stories about the horrors of
Internet addiction. This game has brought us all closer together. The
only side effect of this is that it has introduced Cordelia to pretend
fighting. Which is terrible because, as we all know, small children
NEVER pretended to fight before the Internet was invented.

* Nerd Original Sin

Cordelia has become a enthusiastically, fearlessly friendly and social.
Mariann and I watch this with confusion. We have no idea where she got
it from. In a public place with lots of kids, she will walk up
strangers, even cutesy, cliqueish girly girls, and say, "Hi! I'm
Cordelia! Let's play!" And when she gets shunned, which often happens,
she just walks up to the next kid down the line and tries again. It
makes me kind of sad to see it.

She's going to get eaten alive in grade school.

At this point, I can say with some confidence that Cordelia is going to
be a bright girl. Not necessarily a super genius or the creator of the
Cure For Cancer, but she is going to have a brain in her head. And she
will probably end up a nerd. The fantasy games and science fiction that
have surrounded her pretty much from birth are going to sink in at
least a little bit.

And that means Mariann and I know exactly what fate awaits her. The
same one we experienced. A childhood of being shunned, of having life
made a daily, lonely misery by the countless multitudes of mean, stupid
people who hate nothing more than someone unusual.

I agonize about it. I wonder what I'm going to say to her when she
comes home crying. I go through all of the useless ****ing speeches
that my useless adult wisdom will produce to try to make her feel
better. I get ****ed at myself for giving her a geek name like
"Cordelia."

But it doesn't matter if we named her Cordelia, or Jennifer, or Peggy
Sue, or Hildegarde. It won't make a difference if we dress her in
overalls or pink, frilly dresses or if we send her to school with
Barbies hanging from around her neck like talismans. You can't disguise
having a brain. Or perhaps you can, but it means giving it up, which is
even worse.

All of my years from six to eighteen were made a misery by mean, stupid
people. Same for Mariann. And, most likely, it will be the same for
Cordelia. And, even if I could do something about it, I wouldn't,
because anything I could do to make her more palatable to the
conformist little monsters that will torment her would hobble her, as
surely as if I broke her legs.

I'm happy with my life. The qualities that made me a misfit as a child
have given me a pretty good adulthood. But first, I had to be hazed.
Cordelia will, too. All I can do is try to teach her not to give a ****
what other people think. It totally won't work, not even a little bit,
but it's what I can do.

Oh, and Mariann will force her to take Tae Kwon Do lessons, so that the
more obnoxious playground bullies can get at least a little crap beaten
out of them. If we can't protect Cordelia from what awaits her, we can
at least hope that a few pink, frilly dresses get blood splattered onto
them along the way.

###

(The dead-tree form of these journals is in bookstores now. God help
us. To learn more or see earlier toddler journals, drop by
http://www.ironycentral.com. Copyright 2005, Jeff Vogel.)

- Jeff Vogel
Spiderweb Software
Fantasy role-playing adventures for Windows and Macintosh.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com