Mommy Watch This

By Victoria Fortune

“Mommy, Mommy, watch this,” my four-year-old sings as she skips back and forth across the kitchen. I attempt to observe her while keeping an eye on the garlic sizzling in the skillet. “That’s great, honey,” I say, glancing at the recipe again.

She stops short and puts her hands on her hips. “Mommy, don’t look at the food. You’re ignoying me.”

Ignoy is a word she has coined to describe when someone is annoying her by ignoring her. The third child in a busy family, she works hard to get my attention. I can relate: I was the third child too. There were four of us, and my mother was a single parent, so her attention was stretched pretty thin. I didn’t hold it against her, but I swore that when I became a mother, I would listen — really listen — to my children.

I started off on the right foot, but as our family has grown, I’ve found it harder and harder to clear my mind of the ever-growing to-do list and simply attend to my children. That’s not to say I don’t tend to them. I spend much of my time washing clothes, filling out forms, cooking meals, helping with homework, and chauffeuring them to activities. But that’s entirely different from attending to them.

My four-year-old knows the difference. She has developed a number of strategies for ensuring that she has my undivided attention, which she seems to want most when I am least able to give it. When I’m talking to someone, for example, she will climb into my lap, put her hands on my cheeks, turn my face so that I’m staring directly at her, and say, “Only talk to me, Mommy.” When I tell her that it’s rude to interrupt, she furrows her brow, clamps her little hand over my lips, and says, “Stop talking.” It’s surprisingly difficult to remove that tiny hand from my mouth.

At bedtime she is a master manipulator. She knows I’m a sucker for books and can rarely refuse her pleas for “just one more.” She draws that last one out as long as possible, asking questions about each line of text and expounding upon each illustration. At times my mind starts to drift toward the e-mails I need to answer, the story I’ve been working on, the dishes piled in the sink. Then I hear her voice repeat a line from the book with the exact intonation and cadence I use, and I realize just how closely she has been paying attention.