Most parenting advice is completely useless. I often muse that if I could go back in time and give myself the most potent piece of parenting advice I’ve ever gotten whilst having twins, it would be this:
Don’t take any parenting advice.
There is one exception, and I will gladly share it right now in the hopes that it will help someone, somewhere, make better choices than I did:
Do not buy your children balloons.
Balloons are raw evil disguised as fun. Nothing good comes of balloons. Nothing.
Think you’re going to make your child’s birthday extra special by filling up the house with helium balloons? Welcome to hell, where quickly drooping balloons will make your child sob uncontrollably at frequent intervals for the next several weeks. Don’t you dare secretly throw out one single one of those hideous deflated blobs of rubber uselessness, because your kids have a complete inventory of them in their forever minds. Just wade amongst them as if they’re a perfectly normal element of the decor.
Trying to cheer up a kid who had to get a vaccine? Just duck into the Dollar Store for a hideous, environmentally toxic mylar balloon that will quickly turn into a weapon bounced against your head and directly into your line of vision as you try to safely drive your child home.
What harm could come from letting your child take their beloved new helium balloon outside for a walk? Even if it floats away, they’ll learn a valuable lesson about impermanence, right? Wrong. It will float away, and only you will learn a lesson: That you are a cruel simpleton for buying your child a piece of rubber destined to break their heart into smithereens forever. Your eardrums will never recover from this, mark my words.
I have mom friends with slightly older kids who have responded to my whining about endless Balloon Incidents with a very tart, “Yeah, I don’t do balloons.” These are smart people. I wish I had learned from them sooner.
During our Cape “vacation” last week, after Phoebe got over her scarlet fever, the stomach bug kicked in. We had to cut our last leg short and head home. The girls were super disappointed to miss the family reunion we were headed to, so I suggested we stop at the Brewster Country Store for a “treat” on our way off the Cape.
The Brewster General Store is a magical place full of everything, and I mean everything: pincushions, peppermint sticks, twee colanders, coloring books, lobster stuffies, adorable aprons, flip flops, bleach, hot peanuts out of an old-fashioned machine! I told my daughters to pick something out. Anything.
Eliza chose a dalmatian stuffy to be her current dalmatian stuffy’s pet dalmation stuffy, and a candy stick that I stupidly dreamed would keep her busy for at least half the ride home. Phoebe picked out a balloon. Not a blown-up balloon, mind you. Just a limp dick of a rubber balloon that needed to be inflated. Plain pink. No frills. I think it cost 50 cents.
And ten years off my life.
After we left the general store, I begged my family to detour through the ancient burial ground behind the store, where I have legit ancestors buried — Pilgrims who helped settle this part of the Cape and the new world! It’s a complicated ancestral heritage I grapple with all the time in my thoughts and sometimes in my writing, and for all the time I used to spend in Brewster as a teenager, I had never walked through the gravestones to find the markers of my lineage.
While we walked, Phoebe tried repeatedly to blow up her balloon until she, who had been suffering from severe viral stomach cramps and nausea for 24 hours, finally blew so furiously into the stupid balloon that she hurt her face. Yes, she hurt herself trying to blow up a balloon. I don’t know, it hurt just below her ear and a little bit behind it? If I’m being honest, I was so annoyed I refused to look at her as she hysterically pointed at a vague area of her chin-neck and sobbed.
Picture me trying to have a pleasant time in a graveyard, for God’s sake, with one child sobbing and clinging to my leg whilst the other one topples the graves of my ancestors. Picture it, and then also picture my husband on the far other side of the cemetery, blissfully checking out gravestones he has no personal stake in, totally unaware of the drama unfolding fifty yards away.
Then picture the moment when my sick, and now also injured, child realizes that in her zealotry she has created a tiny hole in the balloon, and her brand-new treat — ”Anything you want in the store!” — is now worthless.
Then we got back in the car and spent 3.5 hours driving home.
Kids, do not buy your kids balloons, under any circumstances. This is my one piece of parenting advice.
