I don’t think this is my daughter’s first time around.
Although she’s only 3 in this life, I’m pretty sure she’s had a crack or two at this planet, previously.
If I had to guess when her last life here on Earth took place? I’ d say somewhere in the 1950s.
Because she has the soul of the Perfect Housewife.
She’s been able to crack eggs, one-handed with no shell bits in the bowl, since she was one and a half. Last year, she asked for her own vacuum cleaner. (I didn’t think she was serious. She was.) Her grandmother called me while The Girl was at her house, asking when we’d baked pies. I laughed out loud. (We don’t make pies, we buy them.) She went on to explain that The Girl was using an old-fashioned, crank-handled apple peeler.
(Image from here.)
With no help. And no instructions.
I had no explanation.
The Girl is never without a baby doll, who she is potty training and diapering and burping, and no she can’t just leave them and come have lunch because she is responsible for them, duh.
And when she’s not taking care of her babies, or cooking, or cleaning,
she’s playing Marrying. (Which, in her own particular dialect, comes out sounding more like “Murraying”.)
I do not understand.
I have never, ever pitched marriage to her as a plan. I’m not against marriage, per se. I just don’t see it as a destination. But I think she does.
She finds weddings fascinating.
She marries everything to everything else.
Barbie & Ken get married.
Her spoon and her fork get married.
When left with nothing else, she’ll even marry crayons. (Can you imagine Blue talking about the wedding night to his blushing bride, Red? “Oh, I am gonna color you so hard. You won’t be able to tell where the Blue starts and the Red ends. When we get done there’s just gonna be a big puddle of purple left, you dig? Aw, yeaaah!” Anyway…)
We had a moment, tonight. To be by ourselves and talk.
I asked her why she wanted to get married.
She just smiled.
I asked how old she thought she should be, when the deal goes down.
“How old were you?”
I told her I was 23, and that was too young. She nodded, agreed.
“Are you going to marry a man or a woman?”
She laughs, looks at me like I’m slow. She will marry a boy, she says, because she will want to have babies. I start to explain that families with 2 moms can have babies, and families with 2 dads can have….but she senses this explanation is going to be bigger than she has patience for, so she tells me she will have 2 babies. One will be named Tito, the other Apple. (P.S., the boy is Apple.) And she tells me that one day Tito and Apple will have babies, and that she will be their grandma, and….
I interrupt. “You know, you don’t just get married. You have to be married. And when you get married, you promise you will stay married. For your whole life.”
She tells me she knows that, stops just short of rolling her eyes at me.
And she tells me that’s why she is going to marry a nice boy, so she will like him for her whole life.
“What would a nice boy be like?”
According to The Girl, a nice boy will kiss you on the forehead and buy you fries and pick up the babies when they cry and open the car door for you.
(Image from here.)
She’s not entirely wrong, you know. She’s kind of got a lot of the elements figured out, already, at the age of 3.
Nearly as figured out as I did at the age of 23.
