I’m not sure if
the phenomenon I've been exposed to is unique to my daughter or if the majority
of parents with toddlers witness similar episodes, but I believe with near
certainty that my daughter either suffers from a severe, yet undiscovered form
of disassociative identity disorder, or she has had some sort of symbiotic alien
attach to her brain which makes her act as though her mind is fractured into
different people whose thoughts and feelings violently contradict one
another’s, and whoever is in there must battle each other, out loud, for every single decision that needs to be
made, regardless of how menial it may be.
Maybe it’s
because I’m still not completely healed from my pneumonia and I've not yet
quite regained the constitution required
to adequately manage life with a high energy toddler, but I have noticed a
drastic increase in what I can only really define as moments of apparent
insanity. Every day decisions, such as “What would you like for dinner?” are
turning into one sided shouting matches that leave me absolutely befuddled and
slightly fearful for my safety. As I was driving my daughter home from
pre-school recently, I posed the question of what should be for dinner and it
was initially met with a pensive silence. My thought was (as I, who is a dad
without, as my wife puts it, “the intuition of knowing when to not speak”) to
offer suggestions of what COULD be had for dinner. “Mac-n-cheese?”
“NO!”
“ Fish fingers?”
“NOOO!”
“Pasta and meatballs?”
“NAAAOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Ok, I thought, I’ll just leave it for now. Then I heard a tiny voice mutter
from the backseat of the car, “I want mac-n-cheese.” Brilliant. Problem
solved.
“OK, I’ll make some
mac-n-cheese for you as soon as we..”
“NNNNAAAAAAOOOOOOOO!!!!! NO MAC-N-CHEESE!! NOO! NOOOO!!”
Screams and tears and shouting erupted from the backseat as if the tiny two
year old strapped in the car seat who had experienced a brief moment of
lucidity was now being beaten aback and silenced by whichever mind invading
alien was trying to make its presence known, along with the fact that it had an
unnatural hatred for macaroni and cheese. The screaming and apparent internal
conflict continued for the remaining ten minutes of the drive, during which
time I cranked up the volume to the radio and belted out a rather embarrassing
version of “Smoke on the Water” (which was apparently being played in honor of
the fires currently raging northeast of L.A.) while keeping an eye on my
daughter in the rear view mirror to make sure her face didn't transform into
some otherworldly visage or she didn't start tearing a rift in the space-time
continuum. If anything of the sort had started to happen, I’m pretty sure I
would have bailed out of the car while still at speed, knowing she probably
would have used her extraterrestrial powers to fly the car back to her home
planet.
The internal
crisis she had been suffering apparently came to a quick and decisive end
because as we walked inside our home and made our way to the living room, she
said rather affirmatively, “I want man-n-cheese.” I said nothing at all as I
turned on Netflix and started whatever random, nonsensical children’s show was
queued, hoping to keep her distracted just long enough for me to slink into the
kitchen and microwave the container of macaroni I had previously made.
Things such as
this are occurring with much more frequency than they had previously, but this
type of outburst is not the only thing that has me concerned. My daughter can
be laughing and having a wonderful time and suddenly, without warning or
apparent reason will burst into a fit of screaming and flailing, as if someone
has just destroyed her most prized possession. Or, she can be playing and
acting somewhat relaxed (which for her, is still, in my experience, at an
energy level about ten times higher than normal children) and then will
suddenly and without provocation explode in a fury of activity. I liken it to a
power station that has generated way too much electricity, so before it
disintegrates in a giant ball of lightning, it must funnel that excess energy
somewhere. This means for a little while, the lamps in the local town burn a
bit brighter, the clocks run faster and the glow on the television screen just
won’t go away. In my daughter’s case, it means she begins to shake violently
whilst yelling, “I’M FREAKING OUT, DADDY!”
Then she’ll begin to run in tiny circles that get larger in diameter and exponentially faster
with each consecutive lap until Newton’s first law of motion takes effect and
she smacks into either a wall or a piece of furniture, thus ending her
centripetal acceleration and beginning screams of shock and surprise. Normally,
this is enough to reset her system, as it were, and return her to semi-normal
state of toddlerdom.
I've recently
been wondering how people would react if I were to have outbursts of insanity
akin to my daughter’s. I can see myself at work as my compatriots decide where
we will venture for lunch and one would ask, “How about sushi?” and my response
would be, “NAAOOOO! NO SUSHI! NO!” as I start flailing my arms and running in
circles in my office as I cry. I’m pretty sure, though, that actions of that
sort would land me in a dingy hospital, lying in a bed and freshly lobotomized
where another, rather large patient would take pity on me and smother me with a
pillow to put me out of my misery. He would then promptly throw a huge bathroom
sink through the window to make his escape. I don’t think I’ll go that route.
I’ll continue to play the part of the responsible father and let my daughter be
the two year old. If she’s still acting like that in fifteen years, though, we
might have a problem.
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