“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 remembered this experience.
“I was just crushed,” she said.
“I really said that?” I asked.
“You really said that.”
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 little wooden donkey with jointed legs. Over the years, we exchanged a score of wooden lions and horses and cats and cows. “You’ll be bored with this in ten minutes,” we told each other and laughed. But
I winced, too.
“I really said that?” I asked again.
“You really did.”
