I just wanted a pastry. That was all I wanted. I mean, it wasn’t just any pastry. It was a fancy ham, bacon, and gruyere croissant from Jinju Patisserie in North Portland. My plan was to get the pastry after my youngest’s one-year well child check. I thought I could swing by there on the way home from the pediatricians as a reward of sorts—for me, not for her (she doesn’t care about buttery layers of thinly laminated dough baked together). I’d sacrificed so much sleep and sanity for my daughter in the past year that I thought I deserved a fancy pastry.
I dropped my oldest off at preschool and then parked at the pediatrics clinic, where my wife met me and the three of us walked in. My wife worked at the clinic as a social worker so it was also basically her office. It was spring and the weather was doing its usual spring thing. Seventy degrees and sunny one day and rainy the next two. (It would even dump four inches of wet, slushy snow the next week).
The nurses checked my daughter in and proceeded to weigh her on a brushed silver scale and measure her skull with a plastic tape measure. They measured her length and checked her ears and lungs. She had a snotty green nose which she kept wiping on everything. She was also crawling half naked on the waiting room floor sure to pick up another virus.
The biggest discovery of the morning in the pediatricians office revolved around her itchy and rashy skin, “Looks like pretty classic eczema,” the doctor said. Doc prescribed some prescription cortisone cream, and then the nurse gave her three shots and a covid test because of her nose. The entire doctor’s appointment lasted an hour and a half. Ninety minutes is a long appointment for me, let alone a one-year-old who only wants to crawl and move and wiggle.
By the time I got out of there, I was ready for my pastry. It was starting to look doubtful, however. My daughter was exhausted, she’d spent her morning nap time at the doctor’s office and was fading fast.
I drove as a fast as I could to get to the pastry place but by the time I had arrived, of course, my daughter was asleep. No way I was going to wake her up after getting shots and lasting through that appointment just so I could have my silly pastry. I drove around the block a couple times looking for a place close enough to park. Perhaps if I could get close enough, I could just run in really quick and return? I’d keep one eye on the car the whole time. I circled and circled. Nothing. Fuck. I turned the car around and began the drive home, angry and frustrated. Now I understood the Target-Starbucks-Drive-Through-Parental-Complex.
It was a silly thing. I wanted something that I couldn’t have. Something that I even thought I deserved. Something so simple that I should have been able to have and could have been able to have with ease were it not for this other thing in the way. And yet, I couldn’t have it. And so I threw a fit. 1
When I revealed this scene to my therapist, he mentioned that my older daughter was probably going through similar things—throwing tantrums about things that to us adults seem pretty silly.
An example:
“Can I have apple sauce?” she might ask.
“No, you already had an apple sauce,” “I’d say, busy with her younger sister.
“Maybe, maybe I have goldfish then?” she’d ask with a pleading smile.
“No, goldfish is a snack.” I respond terse and frustrated for explaining it for the hundredth time. “You can eat something else.”
“No! But I hungry! And I want goldfish! My tummy hungry!”
And on and on it would go for the next five minutes.
My oldest daughter is three and I am thirty-three but really, we have the same struggles: We both freak out when we don’t get what we want. She wants to only eat apple sauce and goldfish crackers for lunch, and I want to fancy pastries. We both like our autonomy and freedom and hate when it is taken away from us.
Us healthy adults have learned to keep our tantrums on the inside and build healthy coping mechanisms and narratives around suffering and the fairness of life in order to face the world around us. If we’re unhealthy and don’t learn these skills, then we start Twitter fights and perhaps even actual wars. But those base emotions are still there. The feeling that this whole thing called life isn’t fair. That we deserved to have something we didn’t get. We throw our tantrums and kick and scream and roll around the floor of the grocery store (I did this recently in Fred Meyer) and we don’t understand why, why! and eventually we come to accept our reality and move on. It doesn’t mean we’ll never get another chance at eating a pastry, just that for now, for today, it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe tomorrow.
“I understand you want this,” I tell my daughter. “But we can’t always have the things we want. At least, not always when we want them.”
It’s still a lesson I’m learning thirty years later.
A week later I was able to return for a pastry.
Perhaps this was because it was the second time I’d tried to go to a coffeeshop and ended up out of luck; on St. Paddy’s Day I’d tried to go to the new Concourse Coffee to have a pastry and cortado and festive green donut from Matta, but all the seating was taken and so I just stand around like an idiot waiting for someone to leave while they worked on important things on their laptop—important things like I used to do; I had to order my things, and sit outside in the rain, and then I just decided it was better to leave so I lugged Emerson back to the car whilst balancing my coffee and pastry.
Carbs are the only thing keeping me going rn, I feel you.
Love this reflection, Levi. Sometimes I wish I could throw a good old fit like I did when I was a toddler…. I’ve gotten pretty close to it…