The biggest source of friction between Little Boy and myself comes in the car, when we’re driving either to or from home and work/day care. “Mom, look! Look!” he’ll call from the back seat. I, ever the cautious driver, will make vague noises of interest, as experience has taught me he wants to show me a truck, a police car, or (lately) Christmas lights, or he simply wants me to look at him while he is regaling me with day care tales.
“You no looking at me?” he’ll say when he fails to detect my eyes.
“Mommy has to look at the road,” I’ll explain.
“No. You no looking at me!” he’ll say, his voice full of hurt.
“Mommy has to look at the road!” I’ll say. “I don’t want to hit another car. I don’t want to get into an accident.” But for all my carefully-worded logic about all the bad things that could happen if Mommy lifted her eyes from the road in order to look at a light-strung bush, he is deeply offended and starts muttering things like “Mommy no good, Mommy bad” for the duration of the car ride home while I turn up the radio and try to look happy.
There is little I can do. I’m not going to start sneaking peeks away from the road simply to appease him, and anyway, he is starting to understand or at least absorb my reasoning. The other night, we were reading a book that features a rabbit, bird, and mouse in non sequitur situations with various trucks. In the garbage truck scene, the bird and mouse tending to the trash bins while the rabbit sat in the driver’s seat. “Where is the rabbit?” Little Boy asked.
“He’s driving,” I said, pointing to the rabbit. “Driving, like Mommy.”
“Yes!” he said. Pause, and then “We have to look at the road,” he said, and the intonation was an exact imitation of me. “We have to look at the road.”
“Yes, the rabbit has to look at the road,” I confirmed, somewhat abashed.
“We have to look at the road!” he repeated. “We have to look at the road!”
Oh gawd. Do I really sound like such a prim nag?
Little Boy then carefully strung together a question, the gist of which was: When he is big (a concept that I’ve been emphasizing lately because he was steadfast in his refusal to “get big” until I explained he couldn’t drive a car unless he was big), and I am little (a concept that I have no idea where he got), and when I sit in the little seat and he is driving, will he “have to look at the road?” Oh, ha, he was being snarky without even trying. And he is dreaming of his revenge.
Once time, I didn’t look at the road. We were driving in a residential neighborhood and I heard, “Mommy, look! Look! Christmas moose!”
“What? What?” I said, my eyes seeking out his pointing finger so I could follow its guidance to a small herd of cheap plastic reindeer on a crowded lawn. “Moose?”
“Christmas moose!”
I stifled my giggles and floated home in mirth. Maybe I should stop looking at the road more often.
