“Mom, can I have this?” my daughter asked.
We were browsing in a toy store and Sara had picked up one of those little wooden animals with jointed legs that move when you push on the base.
“No,” I said. “You’d be bored with that in ten minutes.”
Like a good daughter, Sara put it back on the shelf. Like a bad mother, I put it out of my mind. Years later she told me how this experience had affected her. “I was just crushed,” she said.
“I really said that?” I asked.
“You really said that,” she said.
I had a vision of myself as a small child, laboring for hours to make a doll out of corn silk. The adults praised my efforts. Nobody said, “That corn silk will be all dried up by morning.”
I found that out for myself.
Of course, I apologized to Sara—long after the fact—and bought her a wooden donkey with jointed legs. Since then, we have exchanged a score of wooden lions and horses and cats and cows.
“You’ll be bored with this in ten minutes,” we tell each other and laugh.
But I wince, too. “I really said that?” I ask again
“You really did,” she says.