On Choices

Dear Mr. Baby: 


It is, admittedly, hard to accept the perpetual dissatisfaction of life that comes with realizing that the innumerable adages about it apply not only to the rest of those poor schmucks, but to you as well.  However, I think you can embrace these disappointments on your own scale, and come to understand that sometimes the paradoxes - of what we think we want and what we really want, and what we can really have, and what is actually, physically possible in this world - leave us only with the choice to accept that, in point of fact, one cannot have his cake, and cram it into his diapers, and throw it at the dog, and mash it into a fine paste to be smeared on the wall, and stick it up his nose, and drop it in tiny pieces into his sippy cup that someone has been foolishly convinced to ''[take the] top off [of],'' and eat it too.  


Sometimes you do not feel like having your pants changed, because it (apparently) makes your head hurt, and you simultaneously have an extremely uncomfortable, or very large, pile of shit in your pants and would like someone to do something about it.


Sometimes you want to engage yourself in the task of filling a jar of water from the bathtub water into which the jar is overflowing, and you also want to watch Sesame Street, and you are disappointed even furtherly by the fact that you live in the house of people who followed their literary and musical hearts to the inevitable conclusion of poverty and there is no TV in the bathroom, which is explained to you in only the gentlest of cynical tones, and then, after arguing about it incomprehensibly for ten minutes, you decide you actually want to take a walk.


Sometimes you want to eat bread and stuff it in your sippy cup, and you don't want wet bread or, and I quote again, ''trash milk.''


Sometimes you want tomatoes, and then while they are being sliced, you seem to think you want pears, and then when they are on your plate, you want to scream ''May-nose! May-nose!'' and throw your pears all over the walls, because now you want tomatoes, but you might want the pears scraped off the wall and placed back on your plate so you can start screaming about tomatoes again.

Sometimes you want to sit on your potty, and then when taken there by the hand you get very upset, because you don't.  And then when someone tells you, that's okay, you begin crying and yelling, ''potty potty potty!'' because you do want to sit on it. But you will also scream, no no no! and kick someone in the face because you don't.

And so this is when you have to make choices, and I know they are hard, but one does not get out of the crisis by alternating constantly and for seemingly unlimited periods of time between the two choices. And I see you are building yourself a cross over there, but let me just remind you that your father is Polish, and your mother is mostly Irish, and you have spent a grand total of 23 minutes in a Catholic church before being removed due to a lack of solemnity. We will double this amount because it was Easter, but still. You got nothing on us.


Anyway, you're in for a real ride if this is how you're going to be about it. As time marches indefatigably on, sometimes you might want to use your intellect, but will also want to spend your entire day engaged in the Sisyphean task of wiping up juice that didn't need to be poured all over the floor for the ninetieth time in 36 hours.  You will want to purchase a package of gum of your own (and try to eat a piece of it, before bedtime, because, by contorting your neck and painstakingly, over a period twenty minutes and with one hand, unwrapping it and shoving it into your mouth after yelling, "Look, horsies!'' while passing an empty field, you are convinced that you can defeat the x-ray vision of a toddler in a car, which will pierce the seat and set off a stentorian alarm from the back that cannot be dismantled), but you will also want to purchase books whose spines are snapped ten minutes after they are opened and whose ''toddler-proof'' pages are promptly eaten to the intellectual betterment of no one, so you will be too poor to buy that gum.  You will accept so many lies about whether or not pieces of food will be crammed into this or that crevice or orifice of this or that baby or dog, that you will remain in a confused fetal position at the end of the day, defeated, and you will want to read Moby Dick or do yoga like you had planned.  With windswept hair, and a drink in your hand.  But you will make choices.  Choices that might seem misguided without the context: a small person wanders around your house, occasionally ceasing his systematic destruction of Calm, Quiet, and Items With Moveable Parts, to stare at dust floating in the sunlight, mesmerized, before dispensing, in an unearthly voice: "'Ooohhhh, moons."


Now Mr. Baby, your choices are harder in some ways, because your brain is singularly dedicated (at the cost of higher reasoning and sentimentality) to determining, with alarming accuracy and celerity, the contexts in which an expression like ''oh shit,'' would be both (in)appropriate and funny, but easier in others, because you live unencumbered by the constant, nagging fear that another human might be out there, right now, improperly clothed for cold weather or not eating enough vegetables. Nor does the maudlin resignation with which one bids a lifelong farewell to such shimmering things as dancing until three in the morning in a room full of bare-chested gay men while belting out New Order lyrics, haunt you.


What I'm saying is: we don't have to get all Sophie's Choice about whether we are sitting or not sitting on the floor. All I ask is that you limit yourself to the laws of physics as we understand them today, and accept that you cannot be in two places at one time, and you cannot have two superfun things at the same time, especially when one requires you to be naked, and the other requires that you wear clothes.  And that, once they have been soaked in milk and thrown across the room and ingested by a dog, all the insistence in the world, however it may sound like the bleating of a very psychotic sheep, will not enable modern science to reconstitute the three pieces of cake that you also would like to eat peaceably, as you swore - you swore - you would do, nay, but five seconds ago.