Last year I found myself at Barnes & Noble on a wet Sunday afternoon, scouring the chaotic kids’ section for a book on toddler leadership skills. An errand straight from the Parent Clownery list, lower-ranked, perhaps, than the “mommy & me glass-blowing class” advertised on the local café bulletin board, but definitely above “calling daycare to ask whose spare Elmo underwear ended up in your kid’s lunchbox”.
Even my sense of the absurd, long strangled by the hands of motherhood and the pandemic, gave a faint twitch. But the toddler leadership book—titled something like “World Leaders to Inspire Young Readers” and featuring headshots of Elizabeth I, Genghis Khan, and George Washington on the cover—was recommended reading for the local daycare of my dreams. Top-rated, with a waitlist slightly shorter than geological eras, and walking distance to one of our jobs, this place was a unicorn. And we had scheduled a tour for Monday.
Heavens forbid one of us forget that our two-year-old’s greatest character weakness is “too sensitive to the needs of others”
I prepared for that tour with all the deranged fervor of a squirrel on crack stocking up for arctic winter. I even made my husband memorize our application answers. (Heavens forbid one of us forget that our two-year-old’s greatest character weakness is “too sensitive to the needs of others” and accidentally respond with the more honest “likes to stick hand down his diaper to check if he pooped”.) But my prep missed the reading list, which I only saw on their website Sunday. Cue the bookstore hunt, to do what my country refers to as “fattening up the pig on Christmas Eve”. I would get the book, polish my kid’s leadership skills at bedtime, and come Monday, Miss Pompadour’s Basket of Shiny Young Stars (name paraphrased) would be so impressed, they would clamor to add him to their exalted firmament.
Could I have questioned a place that had a reading list for an infant/toddler application which, among other things, asked “What’s your child’s greatest character weakness?”? Well, I was too busy calling my kid’s current daycare about lunchbox underwear.
No local bookstores carried the book, so I kept expanding the search radius until I landed at the Barnes & Noble third-closest to our house. For bookstore trips, this indicates a level of desperation on par with scrolling to the fifteenth page of google search results, yet still no luck. I wondered at that point if this was a test for parents of prospective students. If I quit, would another child get the spot, one whose mom had driven on to the fourth-closest Barnes & Noble? I could not do this to my son. I would track down Genghis Khan for Toddlers if I had to drive to the publisher’s home and yank it from their bookcase.
But the fourth-closest B&N was in New Hampshire. So I took a minute to browse books and check in with myself on whether “Local Mom Drives to NH, Breaks Down In Toddler Bookstore Screaming About Daycare Admissions” is the kind of person I want to be.
Mid-deliberation, a stranger abruptly shoved herself into my face, held up a plush beagle toy in a Superman suit, and demanded, “Do you have kids?”
I am someone who gets twitchy about personal information. This is likely a mix of my culture, personality, personal trauma, and growing up in the age of “Axe murderers and pervs roam the internet, kids! Don’t tell anyone anything!”. I took that advice so strongly to heart, it has created results such as: good friends complaining they don’t know my full name; one of my best friends sending cake on the wrong day every year because early in our acquaintance I got suspicious when she asked for my birthday; and very sour conversations with HR when I refuse to have any info up on the company site. In short, personal-info paranoia to an unreasonable level is the character flaw to list on my daycare application. So, a stranger stridently demanding information about my family in a public space is to me what a honk-blasting eighteen-wheeler is to Bambi on I95 at night.
The ambush so frazzled me, I can’t even remember what this woman looked like. My memory supplanted her actual face with the stylized headshot of Elizabeth I from the book cover on the daycare website. Nosy Barnes & Noble Stranger is now enshrined in my head as Cartoon-Elizabeth-I-in-An-Office-Blazer.
As my second-worst character flaw is “zero grace under pressure”, rather than calmly tell this woman to mind her own business, I stammered a confused confirmation that I did indeed have kids. This, regrettably, was taken as an invitation to further personal conversation, and she followed with:
“My son just had a baby.”
Still in the throes of oh-no-a-stranger-is-asking-me-questions panic, I babbled nervous congratulations with such enthusiasm, one would think humanity was going extinct and this lady’s granddaughter was the last hope of species proliferation.
“I want to buy the baby a gift”, she went on. Presumably interpreting my freeze-response as conversational fodder, she further revealed that her son “works with computers, he doesn’t know what a baby girl needs” and his wife “hates girly things and had been hoping for a boy”.
You get the gist. Grandma feared her new granddaughter might never enjoy the joys of girlhood, due to a mom who bought her astronaut onesies and a clueless dad whose IT job apparently disqualified him from parenting. To save the poor child, she was seeking advice on what toy she might buy that would be sufficiently girly, yet not so much as to offend her unreasonable daughter-in-law. I apparently seemed to be a mom not afflicted by the desire to push girls into unsuitable careers like space exploration, and thus my opinion was sought on the suitability of the stuffed Superdog.
“It’s not girly, but it’s cute,” Grandma said. “And she can dress him up. I think the suit comes off—see?”
I’m still not sure what the appropriate reaction is when a stranger demands your help taking the pants off a plush beagle in a Barnes & Noble.
While I vacillated, she demanded to know the gender of my kids. Fortunately, by then, the shock had worn off and I could calmly resort to my trusted strategy against strangers asking intrusive questions: creative confabulation. I proceeded to make up a story about my young son and older daughter and the niece and nephew of similar ages living next door. This cemented my credibility in Grandma’s eyes, and when I suggested a turtle soft-book over the large stuffed dog clearly marked ‘2+’, she agreed.
“It’s a boy color…but turtles are kind of close to mermaids. I can tell her about The Little Mermaid when we look at the book. Maybe she’ll be a marine biologist.”
I hoped our encounter might conclude with this, but she wasn’t done.
As she thanked me, she said, “You’re young and pretty, you’re married, you’ve got great kids and a great job, you have it all! Enjoy it.”
I’m as susceptible as the next exhausted raccoon to any woman who sees my eyebags, the grey frizz escaping my ponytail, the sweatshirt hastily tossed on top of a shirt bearing an animal sticker that’s clung on through several wash cycles, and still calls me “pretty”. Was I aware that the two of us creatively confabulated in that conversation? Yes. Did I appreciate the kind lying nonetheless? YES.
But more importantly, “you have it all” still echoes in my mind, long after the lady herself has gone on to present her granddaughter the turtle-shaped-but-mermaid-adjacent book.
When six frantic interns-to-be emailed later that evening with questions about an application due that night, and two asked to meet on Monday during the same hour as the daycare tour, I told myself: “This isn’t stressful! I’m young and pretty and have it all!” And then I asked my husband whether I should quit my job and we move to the Carpathians to raise sheep.
(He’s in favor.)
Our Monday tour of the Basket of Shiny Young Stars was unremarkable, save for the fact that the director revealed they did not actually have upcoming open spots. They occasionally did tours “just in case”. I congratulated myself for not driving to New Hampshire.
We ended up in a different daycare which, while comparable in poshness and price tag, does not require toddler leadership training. And now I can laugh at my book hunt, at my absurd belief that a random book (which I have since concluded was self-published by a daycare employee) would make or break my son’s future. I can laugh at the ridiculous institution that has a nine-page application when their students’ maximum age is three. I can even laugh at the fact that, despite having left that third Barnes & Noble with a “Teach Your Kid About Poop!” book, which we’ve since read about 900 times, my kid still occasionally sticks a hand in his pants to check.
Having been puzzling over “you have it all” for a while now, sometimes I think I can laugh at that most of all.
It’s true that we rank among the privileged families. We’re young(ish) and in functional shape, effects of chronic stress and sleep deprivation aside. Our families are supportive, insofar as they can be from hundreds or thousands of miles away. My husband and I both hold graduate-degree jobs with reasonable benefits. We manage a mortgage, we eat out, visit museums, take a weekend trip. About once a year we fly abroad to see my aging grandmother, and when our car engine fritzed unexpectedly, we could get it fixed without financial stress on the household.
On the other hand, I postponed getting glasses for a year because we weren’t sure we would make the house down payment. When I recently calculated our budget, after including takeout twice a month and the yearly visit to grandma, our disposable monthly income was an illustrative $1. And almost weekly, at least one of us must choose between going to work or being a parent. Between stomach bugs, runny noses, public holidays, special daycare events (including my favorite, an 11am weekday event to celebrate hard-working moms), staff training days, and the unexpected rogue card – “can’t get to daycare because the road broke and all alternate routes currently take 138 minutes”, I can’t remember the last week that having it all did not require juggling acts usually reserved for circus headliners.
Barnes-and-Noble-Elizabeth-I-Grandma wasn’t wrong. But on those long sleep-regression nights when my kid wiggles like an earthworm on a hot plate and demands I “give him a little more space” on the queen bed he’s occupied 70% of, I ponder how our current definition of “having it all” nevertheless feels like “still needing a whole lot”.
Maybe this is what happens when we raise kids on early reader books that list Genghis Khan as a follow-worthy example. If so, it might be time we buy our kids different books. Don’t Let the Pigeon Skimp on Parental Benefits, perhaps?
Ana is a math nerd and lover of speculative, lyrical, and hopeful fiction. She does STEM research & education by day, and at night she creatively over-interprets Eastern European folklore. Ana’s work has appeared in Electric Spec, Oh, Reader!, Planet Scumm, and others. She can be found at @whataremetaphor.bsky.social