My husband is one of the only people on the planet whom I could talk with for about 100 years without getting bored. He is out of the house between 8:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. every weekday doing something that I call “paying the mortgage and providing health insurance.” These weighty resonsibilities preclude him from checking his personal email all day long to see if I have sent him yet another shocking bit of information about Wolverine copied off Wikipedia, chatting on the phone with me for half an hour about what color we would theoretically paint our bedroom, etc. So by the time he gets home for dinner, I am quite pleased to see him and would like nothing better than to immediately engage in at least an hour of talking about these important topics.
That worked fine until we had a two year old.
When Boy Detective was born, many things I had taken for granted disappeared. The ability to control my physical boundaries – a.k.a. keep people from touching me when I feel like it – and the ability to control my schedule would be included on that list. I wasn’t prepared for those changes, and I’m definitely not prepared for completely losing the ability to talk to C-Man about anything substantial between when he gets home from work and when Boy Detective is in bed.
If we try to discuss anything substantial, Boy Detective starts yelling. Deliberately. To drown us out. He even says “Stop talking! I want you to stop talking!”
When C-Man asks him what he would like to talk about instead, it’s the same answer every time: “I want to talk about rocks.”
The entire content he wishes to contribute about rocks is this: “I dig them out of the ground.”
I just want to put my head down on the dinner table and cry.
Oh, dear.
I think I just stopped ovulating. Maybe forever.
It is time to distinguish between Boy Detective Time and Adult Time. This my parents did very successfully with my brother and I when we got really bossy about who could talk, to whom, and when. (The correct answer was the same as Boy D’s: you, to me and about me, now). They patient, kind, calm, and totally consistent. And sure enough, during Adult Time, my brother and I found something to do besides demand our parents be our audience. Really, I’m not kidding. It’ll work.
Unfortunately this will never end. The good news is that in about 7 years he’ll start contributing very interesting thoughts to discussions. Philip and I can’t talk to each other when Max is three rooms away without his ears knowing he’s being left out of a conversation and then he insists on knowing what we’re discussing and coming up with something to say about it.
The problem for us is that our Max is now going to bed much later than he used to so Philip and I have even less time to talk together which is one of our favorite things too.