Surrender, Dorothy

There are some fights I am just not going to win, no matter what.

I bowed to this inevitability when one of my kids was in preschool and his innocent query about doorbells ("why doesn't our car have one?") resulted in a two-and-a-half hour battle that ended with one of us sprawled out on the driveway, snot-nosed, screaming, and the other one of us thinking that if we had just put the fucking spermicide in the fucking diaphragm (instead of Preparation H, which looks a lot like Ortho Gynol. At least, in the dark. If one has taken out her contact lenses so as to appear more attractive to one's partner - as I was wont to do back in those days -  which, I realize now, is ridiculous. Just because I cannot see without my contacts doesn't mean the guy couldn't see me perfectly. Clearly, what I need to do is temporarily blind my partner before I get naked, perhaps a quick squirt of silver nitrate or something into his eyes while I distract him with, oh, I don't know, magic tricks. Or maybe a nice bagel with schmear), if I had only blocked the sperm that night, I wouldn't be in this hell.

"Where is the doorbell? WHERE IS THE DOORBELL?? WHERE IS THE DOORBELL??? " my son shrieked. 

God, I hated my life at that moment. I hated our stupid Honda Civic which did not have a fucking doorbell. I hated my stupid neighborhood with all the stupid moms outside watching my horrible child. I also hated Robin who, as I saw it, was the reason our child was thoroughly unlovable. I mean, the issue of only my tissue would totally have gotten over the fact that cars don't have doorbells.  This behavior surely came from Robin's side of the family.  The Browns are nothing if not a completely reasonable people.

My proud heritage of reason, however, got me nowhere with my four year old that afternoon. It was about 170 degrees in the LA summer sun and I thought I was going to have a stroke. So I drank my son's grape Kool-Aid, I allied with my captor, I joined the Symbionese Liberation Army and robbed the damn bank. I slept with the enemy (so to speak. Yuck). I sold my soul to the devil, just to make my child shut up.

"Honey, the doorbell on the Honda is broken. I sent it to the doorbell fixer."  Fine. He won. What the fuck. I'd figure something out when he asked about it again. Maybe he would forget. I mean, he was a smart kid about dinosaurs and shit but I could probably still get away with a few lies.

"Oh. Okay, mom."

He got up, dusted himself off, climbed cheerfully into the car and asked for a fruit roll-up. I ate an entire pound of Trader Joe's chocolate covered espresso beans (which I kept in the glove compartment for crises such as this) as I drove my son to his playdate.

Another successful day of parenting. And a lesson not lost on me. I cannot always win.

So I suggest we fill our courts with four year old attorneys. They are kickass litigators, they can find loopholes in anything we tell them, and they are virtually tireless, going nonstop for hours fueled only on juice boxes and strawberry Go-gurts. I bet opposing council, after rifling through their briefcases for anything to stop the throbbing in their temples, even funky, fuzzy old Advils that had fallen out of the container years earlier, would finally just give in to them, just to make them shut up, and the judge would lurch to her chambers and take to the couch with a cold compress on her forehead. Such is the power of a child with an opinion.

However, my kid might have had a point back then.  A doorbell on a car would be kind of bitchen.