Hell hath no fury like a toddler scorned

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

You know, there are few things I’ve experienced in life more enjoyable and simultaneously befuddling than witnessing the disparately different personalities of my four children. How can four children raised in the same environs end up responding to the same things so differently? Genetic combinations are wild, fam. 

My youngest, not quite 3-and-a-half yet, is the most curious. He’s had the benefit of witnessing a ton of things because of his three older siblings. He likes to play big-kid stuff and quite often thinks that he is a big kid. He believes he is capable of doing all the same things his older brothers can do, but he’s fighting potty training with a smile on his face. 

The area I most enjoy watching him cook is when he’s pissed because he can’t get his way. This youngster is 100% a ball of vengeance and fury when you have prevented him from reaching his full glory. Reaching full glory for him is basically giving him what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, for as long as he wants. Of course, he’s the baby, so he’s spoiled. But whew, chile. 

Allow me to paint an adorable picture that will serve as an example of what we deal with on a daily basis. Monday through Thursday, my two older boys have soccer practice. That means for four straight days, some combo of my wife and I are standing outside in the currently cold Washington, D.C., weather for an hour-and-a-half. Because it’s cold, we try to find a place for the other kids to go. Usually, one of us can just stay home, but this past week, both of us have had events that required us to find childcare. 

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Quick sidebar: The 3-year-old (let’s just call him, Lucky…it’s easier than typing out 3-year-old), Lucky, has no truck with expressing his disdain with being picked up from anywhere before he’s ready. He will cry and scream and make a scene, and that rhymed entirely by accident. And he runs through the full gambit of emotions in record time. I picked him up from school recently, and he saw me and smiled, and then in under two seconds threw a full screaming tantrum about how he didn’t like me and wanted his mother to pick him up. Lucky is absolutely not concerned about anybody else’s feelings. 

Back to soccer. I dropped him and his brother off with a friend and went about getting the other boy to soccer practice. Nailed it; soccer went off without a hitch.

We go back to pick up Lucky and his brother, and he starts SCREAMING as soon as he sees me because he realizes it’s time to go. So he’s making a scene on H Street, NE, as I put him in the car, going on and on about not wanting to leave aunty and wanting to play with her cat . She has some cats. I get him in the car, and he settles down. I ask him if he wants snacks, and he yells “No” repeatedly, but eventually he calms down and takes my bribes of his iPad, goldfish crackers and water. He’s still not happy but he’s not screaming at least. 

This is when he gets sinister. 

We’re driving home, and everybody in the car is in their own little world. Lucky is even laughing at a video he’s watching when he say to me, “Daddy?” 

“Yes, buddy?” 

He looks up at me and smiles. 

“I don’t love you.” 

Then he put his head back down and continued watching a video that continued to make him laugh. Meanwhile, I’m staring facefront at the road holding back tears because a toddler randomly decided to tell me that he doesn’t love me, 10-15 minutes removed from crying and screaming. Basically, once he got over his emotional outburst, my descendant was minding his own business, doing just fine, but decided he wanted to make sure that I knew just how pissed he was with me for picking him up from his auntie’s house. It was a full on transference of emotions, and now I’m writing an article about it. 

Calm. Collected. Pissed. Savage. 

Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest), but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said: “Unknown” (Blackest).

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