Project Happily Ever After

My 4-year-old daughter is a capitalist who is a firm believer in retail therapy.

She even wants to buy things off the TV. For instance, not long ago, she excitedly told me, “Mommy, come look. You need to see this! You need to buy Daddy this laser tag kit! It’s just five easy payments of 19.99. He needs it!”

She finds things she wants nearly anywhere. If things are for sale, she can find things she wants, even at pet stores, office supply stores, grocery stores, and convenience stores.

Yes, indeed, just the other day we were at a CVS so I could get any number of essentials, such as prescription allergy medicine, hair dye, or dental floss. She dragged me to the kid’s toothbrush section and said, “Let. Me See. Which toothbrush do I need?” I gently reminded her, “Kaarina, you don’t need any of them. You already own five toothbrushes.”

And she said, “but Moooommy! I don’t have a Diego one and I neeeeed it!”

For a while, I solved her spendthrift tendencies by enacting the following rule: You can get one thing. If you whine—even the tiniest bit—you’ll get nothing.

That worked until somewhat recently, when I put the entire family on a strict budget. My husband and I now start the week with $60 each. Once either of us runs out of cash, we’re broke until week’s end, when we’re allowed to hit the ATM for another $60.

Neither one of us wants to use up our weekly $60 on any of the various things that our spendaholic daughter might want to buy, especially if spending $20 on the newest Crayola invention means we won’t have enough money left over, for, say, Girl’s Night Out (in my case). At the same time, I did realize that hogging my weekly allowance to myself wasn’t exactly fair to her.

So I put her to work. I told her that she could earn quarters for doing various things that make my life easier. For instance, she can earn a quarter for feeding the dog and for staying in her room after bedtime without whining, “Mooooommy! There’s a monster in my cloooooset!” Heck I paid her $5 just today for cleaning her room all by herself. It was worth dipping into my weekly $60 for that. If you doubt me, all I can say is this: you should see her room before she cleans it. Holy no available floor space. The place is just dangerous. Dangerous I tell you.

I thought my Work for Pay system was a fair and ingenious way to teach her the value of money. Like all Americans, she would earn money by working, money that she could then spend on acquiring various plastic pieces of the American kid’s dream.

Except, like some Americans, my daughter likes to spend more than she likes to work.

I’ll ask her to feed the dog, and she’ll say, “I don’t like to do that.” I’ll say, “But you can earn a quarter,” and she’ll say, “I don’t care. I don’t want a quarter.”

Later, we’ll be at Target and she’ll want to buy a Ben 10 Watch, a Star Wars Lego set, and a new Bakugan. She’ll look at me with her big brown eyes and ask, “Mommy, can I afford this? How much money do I have?”

I’ll say, “You don’t have any money because you spent everything you had last week on that Sand In a Bottle Kit I told you that you didn’t really want or need. Now you don’t have any money left. You would have a quarter, and a quarter could have at least bought you a gumball, but you didn’t feed the dog, so you can’t even buy a gumball. You’re flat broke.”

And she’ll say, “But Mommy, you have a quarter. I saw it. It’s in your wallet. You can buy it with your quarter.”

And then the conversation usually goes to one of the places that I’m not all that proud to tell you about. I might, for instance, temporarily forget who I am and morph into a different mother that I once knew and say something like, “Just buck up already. You’re lucky you have clothes on your back and a Mommy and Daddy who love you. Some kids don’t have any toys, and some kids don’t have Mommies and Daddies. So stop your complaining and count your blessings.”

Of course, I’ll regret such words as soon as I’m done saying them, which is a good thing because she’s usually crying at that point and saying things like, “But I just wanted a watch. I just wanted a watch.”

And as she’s loudly mourning the loss of the watch she’s never owned, I’ll wonder just how much money I could earn if I allowed a film crew to follow us around for a reality TV show titled, “Why we wish we’d kept using condoms.”

To prevent my mind from dwelling in such dark places, I usually try to head off such arguments by answering any question that starts with, “Can I have…” with, “I’ll think about it.”

She really can’t argue with that, you know? I mean, occasionally, she does ask, “Are you done thinking yet?” But usually, she happily says, “Okay, great!” And by the time I am done not thinking about it, she’s forgotten what she’s asked me to ponder.

The phrase didn’t, however, work for me this morning when my daughter asked, “Mommy can we go to Hollywood? That’s where the Kid’s Choice Awards are. They are tonight. At 7. Can we go?”

Without even thinking about it, I said, “I’ll think about it.”

And I just had to ask myself, “What are you thinking?! You’ll think about making an emergency reservation on a 5 hour flight to California so we can attend an awards ceremony in Hollywood, only to fly right back afterward because I have a photographer from Redbook coming to our home to take pictures of us the following day? That doesn’t require a neuron’s worth of thought.”

When I walked back in the room a half-hour or so later, she asked, “So? Can we go?”

I sighed. I explained that Hollywood was in this place called California and that California was 5 hours away by plane. Even if I managed to get a ticket on such short notice, we probably wouldn’t get there in time. And besides, I didn’t have enough money to pay for three round trips to California. Plus, we weren’t even invited. I suggested we watch the awards on TV, but I really didn’t want to do that.

Oddly, it was the “we weren’t invited” part that got to her. Tears streamed down her face as she asked, “But why didn’t THEY invite US?!”

And before you nominate me for the World’s Worst Mother Award, you should know that, at this point, I did not tell her what I was thinking, which was, “because we are nobodies who are not rich or famous and who are not friends with anyone who is rich or famous. We can only watch rich and famous people on TV. We can’t hang out with them in real life.” I figured that was a piece of knowledge she could absorb on another day, perhaps when she’s a preteen and she’s old enough to withstand the bitter disappointment of that unfair fact of life.

So I held her. I said the only thing I could think of saying, which was, “It’s very disappointing, isn’t it?”

She sniffled into my shoulder and unloaded all sorts of snot into my shirt. Then she said, “You know? I don’t think the Kid’s Choice Awards are very fun anyway. I don’t want to go.”

I said, “Yeah, I think only boring people go to that boring thing.”

She said, “Yeah, me too.”

She was quiet for a while, and then she said, “Mommy? Do you want an Aqua Globe? You should get yourself an Aqua Globe! I think Daddy will buy one for you.”

I said, “Yes, that would be nice. If I had an Aqua Globe, I’m almost certain our plants would stop dying. Maybe he can get it for me for my birthday.”

But I knew in my heart of hearts that my husband wasn’t about to spend any of his weekly allowance to buy me an Aqua Globe, even for my birthday.

So I told my daughter that she could earn a quarter if she felt like watering the plants.

She told me that she did indeed feel like doing such a thing. So I filled up the watering can and she did a very good job of keeping our plants alive.

But I think I forgot to pay her for her effort.

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Tags: parenthood, world's worst mother

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 9:05 pm and is filed under The ups and downs of parenthood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.