The other night at dinner, our four-year old daughter got very giggly, as little girls with their heads full of princesses and glittery things are wont to do. My husband and I looked back at her a few times and shrugged it all off to kid weirdness. We returned our attention to our dinners. A few minutes later, the giggling started again, along with a question, “Are you getting married again?”
“We are already married, honey,” my husband responded.
“Then why do you keep looking at each other?” she asked. Okay, this conversation was now getting interesting, I thought. We needed to get to the bottom of it.
Blame it on Disney princesses or on our day to day life, but our daughter had developed some solid ideas about marriage. “If you kiss, then you are married!” she declares. Far be it from me to discourage this. My husband, who would probably prefer that our daughter didn’t look at a boy let alone kiss him until she was already married to that boy in a marriage with a house in the suburbs, agreed. “Yup, that is right.”
Also grounds for getting married according to our daughter: looking at each other.
“So, if too people look at each other, then they are married?” I asked. She thought about this for a bit and then decided.
“Well….they have to look like they have a secret.”
They say that children are little mirrors. Insightful little mirrors actually. At four, she is already sensing that married people should have a private connection and affection for one another.
I try to keep this in mind later the next day, when I emerge from working in my office near noon, to find congealed bowls of breakfast oatmeal on the table and enough pancake crumbs scattered on the floor to make an area rug while my husband uses the excuse that I am just better at cleaning up after the kids. Although my first reaction is to scream or storm away, how will my daughter, indeed any of my kids, relate my reactions to how two people should act in a marriage?
“You know,” I say to my husband, “I know you probably don’t mean it this way, but what you said sounds awfully condescending. What I am hearing is that women are made to be cleaning up after everyone, as if there isn’t anything else they should be doing”
“No, of course not,” he says with what I hope is enough shock. “You are better at certain things than I am, such as writing and doing a bunch of things at once.”
“Do you mean multitasking?”
“Yes.”
Okay, I will choose to take this as a compliment for now and deal with the mess later. Seeing how her parents interact with each other is forming definite ideas in my daughter’s head about marriage, and that is an opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted.
You can read more articles by Mary Ann Romans when you click here.
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