Possessives

Number 96
October 7, 2011

This morning, Kiana used the dish towel to dry her hands. “Kiki hands,” she said. Then, she marched through the entire family, helping to dry off dry hands. “Dadda hands, Momma hands, Bro-Bro hands.”

She’s learning her possessives. In a big way.

A few minutes later, Owen awoke and came into the kitchen. In no time, they were squabbling over who had what right to which part of the couch. Later, this evolved into a battle of wills over an unopened bottle of flavored water.

Here we go.

One couch, one bottle, one lap – two kids. Welcome to the endless war over relative scarcities, family. And with it, I put on the striped shirt in my new and permanent role as referee of the scraps.

Instinctively, we have begun siding with the younger. Since Owen is all of four now, he has the experience, forbearance, and judgment to step back and thereby smooth things out. Yeah, we’re gonna have to rethink that.

Kiki grabs or Owen grabs, and in the push and pull, one or both starts shrieking. In our residual hovering over our formerly infant daughter, we move pretty quickly to get in the middle, to separate, to sort things out. No one ends up happy, and toys get lifted up the cliff to their crowded cave on the top shelf.

We’re not ready for this, I think. We have no plan. We have no policy.

When I was a kid, the rule was writ: after two days, it’s the whole family’s. Dissatisfying and wholly unenforceable, this policy drove my four siblings and me crazy. Maybe therein lay its genius; instead of battling over the possession, we fought over the intangible policy. With more angry words and less bloodshed, it’s surprising that none of us ended up as lawyers.

We lobbied Mom and Dad vociferously for adjudication and enforcement but rarely with satisfying results. As the youngest of four boys, possession was very difficult to maintain. What I learned, then, was that the only way to safeguard possessions was to place them behind my locked bedroom door, which did not promote good sharing at all.

Even as a teenager, I told my siblings that the computer was off-limits because it “needed to rest.” Ask my sister about that one.

Right now, Margaret and I seem to be refereeing possessions along ownership lines; if the toy is Owen’s, he gets some jurisdiction over it, unless Kiki picked it up while Owen was doing something else. Owen cannot grab it out of her hand just because he realizes it is there. And items like favorite blankies get returned immediately to their rightful owner.

It’s not working.

I stumble along, trying to find the right words to get things sorted with a minimum of tears and wails and a tired eye wandering over toward consistency. Distraction is becoming less effective in this arena. Two kids enter; one leaves with the toy, and one leaves in tears.

With the arrival of young Kiana’s assertiveness, the fourth dimension has opened below us, and the whole family is tumbling through it without a clue of where we are going.

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