This morning Eli and I were snuggling on the couch and looking at the Timehop app on my phone, which shows all the photos and videos and status updates I've done on the same day in previous years. Last year on this day was the first time Eli ever drew a "representational figure" (a stick figure with legs coming out of its head and "angry tears" on its face). From four years ago there's an incredibly sweet video of Phil stuffing Eli's fat flailing limbs into his swaddle and putting him into his swing with a Fisher-Price glowworm on top of him — obviously I was trying to capture the sturm und drang of naptime in infancy.
Eli was fixated on a video from three years ago: taking a bath at 18 months old. Sandra Boynton's Barnyard Bath! floats in front of him. "Where's your washcloth?" I'm asking him. He grabs it with a goofy grin on his face. "Wash the duckies!" I chirp. He obliges cheerfully. "Wash the cow!" I say. He looks up at me quizzically. "Bus? Bus?" he inquires apropos of nothing, and the video ends.
Present-day Eli wanted to know if we still had Barnyard Bath!, because suddenly Barnyard Bath! was the thing he desired most in the world. "But can we look at a map of where we bought it and can we buy it again? I really want that book," he said.
These days in the bath Eli is usually crashing his Transformers or submerging his Hot Wheels; I haven't encouraged him to wash the duckies in years. "Why do you want it?" I asked. He arranged his face into a crestfallen pout.
"I didn't get to wash the cow," he said despondently. "I really want to wash the cow."
Which strikes me in its own capricious way as a perfect metaphor for regret of any kind. I didn't get to study abroad in college, I didn't land that job at Sesame Street I always dreamed of, I never broke 4:30 in the marathon. I didn't get to wash the cow.
Parenting in some ways is like a crash course in regret. If I could go back to the beginning, I'd breastfeed longer, worry less, encourage a greater variety of vegetable-eating...
In a lot of ways, childhood is a crash course in regret too. Every parent knows what it feels like when your kid melts down at the end of a day that's been a orgy of excess in the fun department: We recently went to a birthday party where Eli boogied down during a dance party, rubbed elbows with a life-sized Minion, ate pizza and cake, drank several juice boxes, ran through a funhouse maze with his friends, played a host of arcade games and traded in tickets for prizes — but of course at the end of it all he was fixated on the prizes he didn't get, the tickets he didn't earn, the game he didn't get to play for the dozenth time. Woe! Oh, how his life might have been changed by that teeny slinky!
Doesn't he know there are starving children who would feel thankful to drink even one of those high-fructose juice boxes? Doesn't he understand how lucky he is?
Well, no, he doesn't. And I guess in some ways that's a blessing, that right now his biggest regret is not washing the cow, as opposed to the ones that keep me up at night: I wish I'd called my nana more, not fallen out of touch with those friends, campaigned harder for Hillary Clinton. After all, if YOLO behavior is supposed to prevent looking back in regret, there's no better embodiment than a child who's living his best life as 100% id.
Three years ago Eli was a chubby toddler in a tub who couldn't distinguish between a cow and a bus, and now he's a kid with enough self-awareness to actually feel mournful about that fleeting experience — isn't the human consciousness amazing? He's grown into this saucy, funny, earnest little person. And — I'm tempting fate here, but — when you have a baby everyone warns you about the terrible 2s and then about how 3 is worse than 2 and 4 is worse than 3, and these days we are in kind of a groovy place where I can't wait to see what he comes up with next and where his mind and heart will go.
And from this point forward, I'm going to think about regret the way Eli did this morning. There are some cows I didn't get to wash too, Eli. I really want to wash those cows.
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