Arguements About Facts

As a mom that is in school and working full time, I regularly find myself missing the quality TV watching that I so enjoyed in my pre-mom life. I had been hearing about all of these incredible shows that I just had to see, but alas, homework, grading or playing My Little Pony would always take precedence.

Then I decided to train for a marathon.

“Huh???”

It’s true. Training for a marathon actually gave me an opportunity to start watching TV again. “How?” you might ask. Well, since both my husband and I work all day, and evenings were already packed with the afore mentioned homework, grading, ponies, etc… on weekdays the only feasible time to train was in the early morning. We’re talking four o’clock early, and since I am a 5’3” girl, and the area outside of my neighborhood isn’t exactly the safest, I avoid running outside when it’s dark. This left me with our treadmill, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to do eight miles on a treadmill, but it gets old. After a couple of excruciatingly long treadmill runs where the music that kept me so motivated on the road failed to be enough, I realized I needed something to keep my brain occupied and not concentrating on the monotony that was running on a damn treadmill.

My savior? Netflix.

Now I know that Netflix is Enemy #1 in many minds right now, but there is one undeniable fact about this service­ – it has critically-acclaimed TV shows on live streaming, an I can stream them straight to my phone. The one that I started with was Mad Men, and, yes, it is as awesome as everyone says. It made those hours of running endlessly on that revolving track to nowhere fly by.

There is a moment in one episode of Mad Men that got me thinking about my relationship with my daughter. Again you might be saying, “Huh????” I promise, it was not a moment that had anything to do with the boozing, chain smoking or womanizing. There is an episode in the second season where the character of Pete Campbell recounts the last conversation he had with his late father. It was an argument about whether or not someone they knew bred French Bulldogs or Boston Terriers. “An argument about facts, “ he called it.

I know these arguments. I have them often with my three-year-old. The first such disagreement that comes to mind is one that started as we were reading a book (the title escapes me) with a picture of a cow in it.

“What are these,” she asked, pointing to the udders.

“Udders,” I replied. “It’s where the milk comes from.”

“No,” she contradicted. “It where the poop comes from.”

“Nope. It’s milk.”

“Mommy. It’s poop.”

I would like to say that it ended there, but, no, I kept it going, trying to convince Olivia that an udder had nothing to do with excrement.

In a previous post, I mentioned a notorious stubborn streak that runs through my family, and it is in conversations like these that it rears its ugly head in both of us.

“Olivia, I promise, milk comes from these udders. A farmer comes and he squeezes the udders and the milk goes in a bucket...”

“Poop.”

“No. It really is milk, they just squeeze...”

“Poop!”

It is at this point that I know I will never win. Olivia has dug in her heels, and even if I took her to a farm and milked a cow with my own hands, she would still insist that it was just white poop.

I am unsure of what to do. While I find myself incredibly frustrated at her unwillingness to listen, anger gets us nowhere. It’s actually a pretty absurd argument to begin with, so any sort of reaction on my part seems equally as absurd. We find ourselves at an impasse.

However, there is hope. On our drive home yesterday I had a minor breakthrough. Olivia had just informed me that our cat, Max, was a girl.

“No honey, he’s a boy.”

“A girl.”

“Well, honey. Do you want to just pretend that Max is a girl?”

“Pretend? Yes.”

Argument over.

Now I don’t know if this is the perfect way to deal with this. It does nothing to address the hard-headedness that caused the issue in the first place. However, it keeps the argument from happening, at least for now, and that is important to me because the last thing I want is for my relationship with my daughter to be one that she someday looks back on as defined by a series of arguments about facts.