The Invisible Cup Compromise

Ear­lier in the week Hubby and I thought it would be good to get the kids out­side after din­ner.  Maybe if they got out and ran around, they’d blow off some steam before get­ting washed up & going to bed.  The end of the day at our house it seems every­one gets a lit­tle (or a lot) stir-crazy.   While out­side the older 3 decided to have a race in the back­yard.  They were rac­ing to win a cup.  Mr.  J kept call­ing it a Pis­ton Cup, because in the movie Cars that’s what they are try­ing to win.

To clar­ify some­thing at the start this.  It was an invis­i­ble cup, it was NOT real, & they didn’t have any­thing they wanted to use as the cup. Instead they were using their imag­i­na­tions. I have to say I was pretty proud of them com­ing up with a whole game & even an elab­o­rate prize at the end. Sounds like a good idea right? I mean what could pos­si­bly go wrong with kids ages 6 to 3, who are sib­lings, hav­ing a race & try­ing beat each for an invis­i­ble cup?

Well, it started off with laugh­ing, rac­ing, and silli­ness. Some­how it turned into fight­ing over an invis­i­ble cup. A com­plete sur­prise to me since I was in la-la land think­ing that the ini­tial smooth start would con­tinue, silly mommy.  After fight­ing over this cup started up, about 5 whole min­utes into play­ing, I tried to offer a compromise.

Appar­ently one of the rea­sons they were fight­ing is that Mamacita wanted the cup to be pink. As pink is her favorite color, her sig­na­ture color ala Steel Mag­no­lias. While the boys wanted it to be blue and have stripes on it. Mr. G in par­tic­u­lar was both­ered that Mamacita would attempt to girl-ify his cup.  Mind you it’s invis­i­ble so it’s not like they are actu­ally paint­ing a cup or get­ting one at the end of all this. Yet, I being the ever-peace-making mommy who was try­ing not to yell “It’s a damn invis­i­ble cup. Be quiet & just play for Pete’s sake” got into bro­ker­ing a compromise.

First, I offered a solu­tion of a green cup. Given green is a color they all like I fig­ured it might be a good com­pro­mise.  All the while won­der­ing why the kids decided to con­form so heav­ily to gen­dered color-coding.  In my view Toy-R-Us is to blame.  Haven’t you ever noticed how as you get to the over age 3 sec­tion it’s like the part­ing of the gen­dered sea?  Boys on side with blues/reds & girls on the other with pinks/purples.  It’s a conspiracy.

I even gave a quick expla­na­tion of how blue/pink was really stereo­typ­ing and there was no rea­son that the col­ors had to be for one sex or the other, but hey if they didn’t want share those col­ors why not try a color they all liked.  That didn’t go over so well.  I don’t know what the issue was, per­haps it’s that they are all under 6 and gen­der social­iza­tion isn’t top on their list of impor­tant top­ics?  Nah, had to be the way I explained it.  I think charts would have helped,  every­one loves charts.  After all every kid wants to learn that kind of stuff when try­ing to play outside.

How­ever, that didn’t work & obvi­ously they wanted to adhere to the whole boys=blue & girls=pink *thing*.  Which lead me to offer a sec­ond solu­tion, there could be 2 cups that dif­fered in color depend­ing on who won. A pink cup with dia­monds on it for Mam­cita, since she felt it dia­monds were also nec­es­sary some­time into this whole dis­cus­sion. And a blue cup with stripes for Mr. J or Mr. G if one of them one.  This way every­one got what they wanted.  Mam­cita could girl-ify her cup & the 2 Dudes could get all boy-ish with theirs.

After 20 min­utes of try­ing to nego­ti­ate a deal. I real­ized I had become the one highly invested in an INVISIBLE CUP. Com­ing up with all sorts of ways they could share cups, repaint cups, mul­ti­ple styles of cups that could exist and a slew of other cup based plans.  Then I looked over at Hubby who it dawned on me had been laugh­ing at me pretty much the whole time.  I asked him what was so funny?  I was attempt­ing to nego­ti­ate some­thing akin to world peace & here he was laugh­ing at me.  Who did he think he was? This was heavy stuff, my highly tal­ented momma skills were being put to good use.  Not to men­tion that over­priced col­lege edu­ca­tion I have.

So I asked Mr. McLaughs-a-lot what what he would have done.  His answer “I’d have let them duke it out.  You know like a kid’s Thun­der­Dome.  Who­ever wins gets to have what­ever cup they want.  Prob­lem solved.”  Oh, he is ever the come­dian or per­haps  he is just the great­est par­ent­ing expert ever.  I guess that depends on who you ask.

In the end, no solu­tion or com­pro­mise was reached.  Between the jump­ing up & down, stomp­ing of feet, & cry­ing from the kids (not even me this time) we decided it was prob­a­bly best to head in & get washed up for bed.  I had failed at forg­ing a peace treaty in my own back­yard that day.  Still I’m think­ing there is a les­son in this about gen­der social­iza­tion somewhere.

Tagged as: children, family, kids, playing, toys