Life’s Too Hot to Handle Lessons

I managed to maintain this cheery outlook despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Qualities I’d assumed would come naturally to my kids—fairness, patience, civility—seemed entirely absent in my young charges. Often, they could be just plain mean.

My three-year-old son, for instance, appeared to enjoy nothing more than batting his infant sister on the head with a Lincoln Log Lincoln Logs. Even as I disciplined him, I found a way to justify—or at least reconcile—the occasional outburst of savagery. He was, I mused, simply expressing the innate impulses of his primate forefathers.

Which also helped explain the kids’ stubborn refusal to conform to the carefully constructed gender-neutral world my wife and I had assembled for them, painting their nursery a neutral shade of avocado and providing each with unisex playthings. We cringed when a relative, usually a grandparent, did something so gauche as give our daughter a baby doll or our son a toy steam locomotive.

But wouldn’t you know it: our firstborn son came out of the womb crazy for trains and our daughter instantly gravitated to ballerinas and princesses and to this day gripes about putting on any garment that isn’t sufficiently pink and sparkly.

One militantly gender-neutral friend who had withheld dolls from her daughter says she once walked in on her daughter cooing to a toy truck she’d swaddled in a pink blankie. OK, so children are born barbarians, boys like boy stuff and girls often fall prey to the tyranny of pink.

But none of that quite compared to the hard lesson in human nature I learned from the hot babysitter. Allow me to explain. A few years ago my wife and I took the kids for a weekend to a fancy hotel. We planned to have a grown-up dinner and arranged a babysitter look after the kids. When informed of our plans, the kids expressed terror at the prospect of spending the entire evening with a stranger; they whined and worried the entire day. Then the door opened and in stepped a nineteen-year-old yoga instructor with impossibly long limbs and the bone structure of Sophia Loren in The Black Orchid.