The mess I almost tidied away

In which I apologise to a three-year-old about lentils.

This is about the minute before you say no. Not the no itself, the minute.

Every parent of a toddler knows the scene, so I will describe the standard version. Forty minutes of quiet from his room, which never means nothing. You go to call him for lunch and find out he is already serving it. The entire kitchen drawer is on the play mat on his floor. Wooden spoons, the colander, a bag of lentils tipped out in a wide, deliberate arc across the Roam Square. You have the dustpan in your hand before you are through the door, which tells you everything you need to know about you, and he looks up and says, mind the soup.

The lentils are the soup. The spoons are for the customers. The cushions by the door are the queue, because it is a busy day, and you are informed, quite firmly, that you are standing in it.

So you apologise. To a three-year-old. About his lentils. Then you sit down on the mat and have the soup, and it is fine, if a little dry, and you are charged for it, and you pay.

That minute is the one I keep coming back to. For about sixty seconds you are the only person in the room who cannot see the restaurant. To you a wooden spoon is a wooden spoon and a lentil on the floor is a job. To him they are a business with a queue out the door.

I have no idea what I would have said if I had got there first. Something sensible, probably. The restaurant would have closed before its first customer, and he would not have argued, because at three you do not yet know that a dustpan can be argued with. You just learn that the drawer is off limits, and the next time the idea comes past you let it go. Nobody tells you how to grow an imagination in a child. As far as I can work out, you mostly grow it by not walking in with a dustpan.

Which is a problem, because I am a tidier. Not a good one, a compulsive one. When the house gets loud I start picking things up, and I know by now it is me trying to get a handle on the day, not on the floor. I have written about this before. None of the tidying was ever memorable. Not once.

And the honest reason I walked in with the dustpan was never the mess. It was the twenty minutes of scrubbing after. The mess is fine. The mess is the game. The twenty minutes after the game is what I was really saying no to, before I had even seen the game. The no is rarely to the paint. The no is to the sink afterwards. The child hears no to the paint, though, and files it accordingly.

That is the bit the mat took away. Lift the Roam Square by two corners, one shake over the bin, restaurant closed for the day. It did not make anyone tidier. It made me easier to say yes to, which turns out to be the thing that matters. Some games are floor-scale play or nothing, the whole drawer out and spread wide, and those were the ones I used to cancel from the doorway.