My three-year-old and I are in a turf war. Like most wars, it’s pretty immature. Like most turfs, it’s emotionally weighted. And while the tussle has been hard on us both, the real victims here are the Calico Critters—the rabbit, kitten, and hedgehog families who live under our conflicted dollhouse government. I do pity them; it’s hard enough to be a mass-produced, one-inch-tall nylon animal dressed from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Cruise Collection. But the bipolar socialist/dictatorship regime that is their current housing situation has got to be a weirder trip than any boxed family set had imagined when departing the magical woods of Sylvania for Brooklyn.
Not that it’s all bad for them. They’ve got what most New Yorkers crave—space. And here it’s probably critical to note the importance of the dollhouse in our home. As in, when my daughter got her first starter dollhouse, I did not chuck it in the toy box or down to the basement, er, “playroom,” but let her keep it on permanent collection in our guest room; the Critter equivalent of an elegant half acre. Renamed “The Critter Room,” the guest room’s bottom bureau drawer is also handy as a furniture warehouse, where it holds an overstock of miniature beds, tiny Elmos, and the occasional hardened Play-doh nubbin.
The Critter Room is sometimes about guests, but it’s always about the dollhouse, and when my daughter got another, fancier dollhouse for her third birthday, it moved in cozily next to Chez Critter 1.0. I think it’s here that my vision of Utopia ran up against her House of Capulet.
“No clothes for critters!” she is known to announce in the middle of a game, tossing off the puffs of gingham and arranging beds in military rows. “It’s bedtime. No talking. No stories. Lights out. Everyone is going to sleep.” She then likes to smack them stomach-down and all in rows, Hale-bopp style. “Shh, Critters! I said no talking.”
“No, wait. My critters aren’t tired,” I occasionally argue. As gatekeeper of the humbler home, more of a halfway-house for any plastic wildlife injured by magic-marker attack or with pelts gone dingy from being left out in the rain, I like to give them at least a sense of play. “Hey, why don’t your critters come over and visit?”
“Not now! It’s bed time now, and that’s that.”
“Well, it’s not bedtime at my critter house. It’s picnic time.”
“Turn the lights out, Mommy. Please.”
She wins points in strange ways—nobody says “please” with less tone of entreaty than this child. And the fun was done. She shut down the house in a “lights off.” She silently endured my defiant, halfhearted picnic. But what, I wondered, was up with all the rule-making? After all, she gets stories before bed. She’s allowed to say “one more song” a couple of times before she’s totally, absolutely ready for sleep.
“Such a persnickety child.” her grandmother sometimes just has to remark through her opium-haze of devoted doting. “I don’t know where she gets it,” is my go-to answer. Because the Miss Hannigan routine, truly, I promise, is not some homage imitation of her parents, who are generally amiable, fairly flexible, and mostly too tired to fight.
No, it’s the city, I decide. The big bad city is why she rules those Critters with an iron fist. She lives in a neighborhood that offers a thousand other preschool pals at a dozen local playgrounds, plus a hundred different places for her mom to get a cup of coffee, prepared to annoying specifications, before we hit the swings. She’s become hyper-specific in an environment of extreme choice. No, wait, so then it’s not just the city—it’s my laptop, too. Yes, of course! So many options, from streaming DVD to storybook applications to interactive games and puzzles. It stretches her options like a silly putty to infinity. In an external and internal world of endless choosing, she has become expert at deciding. Forcefully. Unequivocally.
I had bargained myself into a kind of resolve with that answer until last month, when a seven-year-old guest arrived, parents in tow, to stay a few days at our house. As gamely as he dealt with being put into Critter Room, my daughter was less gracious.
“Noooo. You can’t stay here! Critter Room is my room,” she screeched at him.
“Not now. It’s a guest room now,” I told her.
“You be quiet,” she said, her finger crooked on me. “Please.”
“I’m happy to be quiet, it’s still not your decision, and that’s that.”
“But—”
“No more talking. It’s grown-ups time now. Please!”
Oh, wait. Is that how I speak when I’m crossed? When I can’t get exactly, precisely my way, with no arguments? Something just became slightly clearer. And I really wish I could delve into a deeper appreciation of that epiphany, but it’s time for my 11:13 coffee—medium latte, extra foam, flat lid.
