Confessions of a Gentle Discipline Drop Out

It’s taken awhile to get the nerve to write about this one, but here goes.

As we were pulling out of St. Louis, I put my arm around Warren, kissed him on the cheek, and said, “We did it! We had an awesome family vacation. Thank you.”

About three hours later when neither of the kids had fallen asleep, Jiro had requested ten thousand CD changes, and Satchel had officially asked his one-millionth question, Warren and I were getting a little edgy. I was in the front seat taking deep breaths when a red Power Ranger flew past my head.

I leered into the backseat and said, “Do.Not.Throw.Your.Toys,” in my mean mommy voice. I handed Satchel back the Power Ranger and resumed taking deep breaths.

Once again, a red Power Ranger flew past my head, and the boys erupted in giggles.

I was pissed.

“Satchel, if you throw anything else at me, it is going out the window.”

(It never would have occurred to me to actually throw something as precious as a red Power Ranger out the window, but a woman I highly revere on the Internet once wrote about throwing her son’s toy out the window with no warning and as a result, commanded his utmost respect for the rest of their trip and every car ride that followed.)

Without missing a beat, Satchel threw his other red Power Ranger at me. I grabbed it and pushed the button that makes my window go down. Nothing. “Unlock the window!” I barked at Warren. He went a step further and rolled it down for me. I threw the Power Ranger out, rolled my window back up, and sat there with a smug sense of satisfaction. You can’t push me around! I thought.

Satchel immediately burst into tears and Warren looked at me incredulously. “Did you really throw it?” he demanded.

“Of course,” I said.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Did you miss the events leading up to this moment?” I asked sarcastically.

“You didn’t have to actually throw it,” he said. “You could have just pretended.”

Uh, true. I had never actually considered just faking it.

Never one to miss an opportunity to beat a dead horse, Warren continued, “What if you would have hit a trucker? You could have totally caused an accident. Or what if you hit somebody else and they got pissed off and tried to run us off the road! You could have gotten us all killed!”

I was speechless. And pissed. “How about some freaking solidarity!” I screeched.

“You just endangered all of our lives!” he roared.

“Why did you roll down my window then?” I roared back.

I swear Warren truly missed his calling as a court room attorney.

Satchel stopped crying and started whining, “Go get it! I want you to go get it!”

I turned around and said, “It’s gone.”

“Go get it!!” he continued.

“I guess I’m going to have to turn around and go look for it,” Warren said. “I hope I don’t get hit by a truck when I walk out on the interstate.”

“You are not turning around,” I said in my don’t even go there voice.

“Daddy, go get it!” Satchel said.

“We’re not going back to get it,” I said. “If you behave, I’ll get you a new one the next time we go to the red store (aka Target).”

He sniffled and said, “I want to go to the red store now.”

Warren, still riled up and still beating that poor horse, said “Do you even know which Power Ranger it was? They may not even make them anymore.”

(Fresh crying from the backseat.)

“Look,” I said. “In hindsight, I wish I would have done a fake-out, but I didn’t, okay? Can you please just stop?”

“What are you teaching the kids? That it’s okay to throw things out the window?”

“Stop,” I pleaded.

“He’s going to whine the whole way home!” Warren complained. “Do you want to listen to that?”

“He’ll get over it,” I said.

“The minute you said we had had a nice trip, I knew something like this was going to happen. You jinxed us!” he continued.

We sat in silence and stewed while Satchel continued to whine and cry in the backseat.

“You know, there’s a Target not too far from here,” Warren said in an attempt to throw me a bone. (He’d been working nearby for the past few weeks and had made the drive to and from Memphis several times.)

“No,” I said. “No no no no.”

We were in complete role reversal mode. I am usually the pushover and he is the hardass. I had totally thought I was going to win some points for being tough, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

"We are not going to Target," I said.

Satchel whined from the backseat in an English accent I'd never heard before, “But Daddy, I want an oopah loompah nooow!”

I gave in and we went to the freaking Target and bought Satchel a new Power Ranger that wasn’t the same as the one I threw out the window, but good enough to make him happy and then we bought a bunch of other stuff like baby shampoo and pull-ups and garbage bags and juice boxes and who knows what else and eventually we got back in the car and started driving back to Memphis.

As I untwisted the bazillion wires that held the Power Ranger in the box, Warren turned to Satchel and said, “You better not throw this one or I’ll tell Mommy to throw it out the window.”

We were both laughing about it now, and it was like a cute little inside joke. Harmony was restored. Satchel played with his new toy without incident and within ten minutes of leaving the store both he and Jiro fell asleep.

I’d like to consider this a victory, but I don’t.

Before we load up the car for the upcoming Tri-Annual Oster Family reunion in Wichita (that’s a 8-10 hour drive, folks), I think I need to reread Adventures in Gentle Discipline