The 500 Pound Gorilla

Fear, and the "parent's mulligan"

NOT one of the actual LA Zoo gorillas / © William Crochot / Wikimedia Commons

One of the Los Angeles Zoo’s large male gorillas gave my daughter the stink eye the other day. To be fair, he was in the middle of something— eating a bunch of Romaine-like greens that were about the size of a human arm— and my kid was standing close to the glass, staring at him like a tourist who has just spotted a Housewife of Beverly Hills dining at Nobu.

Juniper doesn’t know what it’s like to be a celebrity or zoo animal, so she couldn’t possibly have known that this behavior might be seen as annoying. Nevertheless, I saw the gorilla’s point.

My daughter ran to me, whimpering, asking to be picked up. The gorilla kept staring at us. She’s reached a stage in development where she’s disturbed by sad or angry faces, and so this upset her even more. She buried her face in my hair and wailed. I thought that this was a good opportunity to establish that zoo animals can’t come through the glass and interact with visitors, but the longer he stared, the tighter Juniper clung to me. It was as though she believed that if the gorilla charged us, I could protect her. Finally, I gave up on Teaching Lessons and carried her away from the exhibit. Within minutes, she was asking for “more gorilla.” 

It’s kind of nice to be thought of as an impenetrable fortress of safety, capable of fighting off a 500-lb primate with the upper body strength of a dozen human men combined. It’s also kind of exhausting. I’d give it the old college try, but if a gorilla tried to fight me, I’d lose.

Somebody once told me that once kids turn three, all of their specific memories of things that happened to them prior are cleared away to the brain’s landfill like discarded Christmas trees in January. So long as you don’t totally suck, parents get a three-year mulligan, courtesy of child brain development. I have no idea how true this is or whether I just want it to be true deeply enough that I haven’t done any follow-up research.

For now, she believes me when I tell her absurd reasons we can’t do something she wants to do, and, even better, because of the three-year-memory-mulligan that may or may not exist, she won’t remember a thing! We can’t watch any more Ms Rachel because Ms Rachel is on her break? Sure, mom! We can’t eat pancakes for dinner because the pancakes are at work? Okay! We can’t watch Frozen anymore because Olaf had to go to sleep until next Christmas? Makes sense. We can’t go look at the “Scary Man” (the large grim reaper figurine that my husband puts in our yard every Halloween) because the Scary Man has gone back to live with his Scary Family? Oh, absolutely. It’s canon. 

But time is running out on this golden era. Soon, she will begin storing long-term memories and my parenting mistakes are going to have to get less stupid if I don’t want them to live forever in her memory. 

Now, if something upsets her, she’ll talk about it for a few weeks and then let it go. She fell down and skinned her knee at HomeState the other week, at a moment when I could have been watching her more closely but was enjoying catching up with a friend. She stood up in the cart at Whole Foods when I had my back turned, and I had to yell at her in front of all the Child-Free hotties and Gentle Parents of Silver Lake about how dangerous that was, and now when she sees a shopping cart she shakes her finger at it and says “Mommy got mad. NO NO NO STAND UP.” At least she seems to have learned?

More worrisome, however, is that after my veritable free trial period runs out, my daughter will have long-term, core memories of times that I did not know what I was doing. And as more time passes and memories get stickier, these recollections of me messing up or getting it wrong or crying in fatigue and frustration because I scalded the milk for the sauce I was trying to make will gather into a corner, like unraked leaves, and one day the wind will blow she’ll recall one or more of them and realize that even though I’m her mother, I’m also just a human. I was never a super hero. I could never protect her from a gorilla.