One of the most frustrating things about raising a fae child is that they will not – or, more accurately, are unable to – communicate accurately with you.
Last week, I was reevaluating every parenting decision I had ever made to try and determine where I had turned my beautiful sweet natured child into the spoiled brat of a daemon that was coming home from school each night. It was exhausting both myself and my husband, and making me dread having her in the house. She was having tantrums over anything, real or imagined. Seriously, I can deal with things I can reason with even if I can’t see the problem – like for example; at her grandparents house they have three cheese graters of various sizes. Whenever she comes across three of a kind that come in small, medium and large she automatically assumes you have a ‘daddy’ a ‘mummy’ and a ‘baby’. This particular day she had noticed that they also had a nest of three tables, which were dutifully categorized in the same way. The problem came when she wanted to introduce the table family to the cheese grater family only to find ‘mummy’ cheese grater was missing. Well, not missing, but in the dishwasher as someone had inconsiderately used ‘her’ to grate cheese. The audacity. So, she informed her grandparents in no uncertain terms that this was not on and mummy grater needed to be found immediately. She also dictated that she could not be used for grating cheese. When questioned what they should use instead they were told a knife. When asked why they should keep graters they couldn’t use they were told ‘because they’re a family’. Somehow throughout this interaction I managed to keep a straight face, although I may have burst a blood vessel trying not to laugh. She completely baffled two adults with her insistence that this made sense. In her mind it did. It’s a strange form of gaslighting where she tries to convince you that what you know isn’t true is, because she genuinely believes it.
In the end, she pulled the winning move of turning on the waterworks and her grandpa fetched mummy grater out the dishwasher, hand cleaned her (it?) and handed her across. The tears promptly dried like magic, and I explained that he had just fallen for the oldest trick in the book as she can make herself cry on demand. She will be winning OSCARs one day. At least there was a solution to this particular problem.
On the other hand, when she was screaming that the elephant had been removed from her bed and what was she going to ride now I was at a loss. Gentle interrogation discovered that the elephant was her grey bedsheet. The only problem being that she doesn’t have a grey bedsheet. It’s blue, it’s always been blue, she’s never had a grey one. So I have no idea how to fix this. Pointing out the her new bedsheet was white and showing her pictures of white elephants was a non-starter, but we did try.
As it turns out, these and all other insanity last week had a very specific cause. On Sunday, she lost a tooth. Apparently it had been loose for a number days and she’d not mentioned it. So the chewing, tantrums and generally awful behavior could have been solved with Calpol.
She has a cold now, but when we are through that I think we will have our lovely little girl back. At least I hope we will.
Raising the Modern Fae 