[Estimated reading time: 2+ minutes] One fall afternoon, I picked my niece up from her daycare at the top of a long country driveway. Under the loving guidance of the couple whose job it was to keep the boisterous imps engaged and happy, the little pixie and her playmates had baked Apple Loaf Cakes.
“Keep your loaf wrapped in the tin foil so it stays warm for your parents,” the couple instructed.
Ava climbed into the back seat of my car, holding the warm bundle. I strapped her into her child seat.
“Destination: Home.” I said cheerily to my favorite person. “We’re going to stop by the video store on our way.”
I liked my once-a-week auntie assignment, shuttling the four-year-old from day care to her home. We generally chatted about the things you chat about with four-year-olds — long forgotten exchanges that nonetheless mattered at the time.
“Grace?” she said in her birdsong voice. “Can I open the Apple Cake? I’m hungry.”
“That’s for your parents. And being hungry is good from time to time.”
This is one of our set-routines: her claiming hunger, me countering with the benefits of learning to wait or the great news that that means that her body signals are working.
“I just want to see it.”
I’ve never been a parent but I get it. Bargaining. Boundary setting.
“OK. Just peel it back a little and peek at it.” I am good at driving country roads with one eye in rear-view mirror.
“It looks good,” she says. I change the subject. We turn left onto Route 9 south.
“Grace?”
“Yes?”
“I just want to smell it. Can I open it and smell it? No one will know.”
She’s appealing to my logic. “Using her words” as the parents say these days. It’s convincing. I mean, who really cares whether she smells it. It’s her cake. I didn’t create the rules I’m now supposed to be enforcing. But she’s inviting me into a conspiracy. I calculate.
“OK. But that’s it. Get it? I know you’re hungry. When we get to the house, you’ll give the cake as a gift to your mom and then we’ll all have some.”
The creature peeled back the aluminum skin and inhaled the molecules rising off of the baked treat.
“It smells really good, Grace.” She’s always called me Grace, not Aunt Grace.
As we pull in to the parking lot at the video store, she goes for the win.
“Grace? I really want to taste it. Can’t I just lick it?”
“Just leave it. It’s a gift for your mom. She’s going to love it. Every time you open it, it gets colder.”
“So? We can put it in the toaster oven.”
Is she four or fourteen?
I find her persistence endearing and annoying and disrespectful. Eat the cake, don’t eat the cake. Following the rules is not a strong family trait. Am I supposed to take a stand? I chose not to have children a long, long time ago. My existential angst needed no extra grist.
“C’mon Grace. What’s the big deal?” Maybe she’s four hundred and forty-four.
Oh, parents. I feel your pain. You’re in it for the long run. You love the animated spirit your child shows in life. But not right now. You had an agreement. She keeps pushing the limits. You tried to be fair, even generous. Now she’s gone too far.
Which is pretty much what I told her, then added my Auntie Grace yoga perspective, “Ava, go ahead, do what you want. This is between you and you. Not you and me or you and your parents. There’s no winning.”
But she did. One happy Apple-Cake-Loaf lick later.
