Perfecting the Second Pancake

Have you ever heard the old adage that says parenting is like making pancakes? You should probably just throw the first one out and start with number two.

It’s not the fault of the pancake batter, of course: it’s about the cook and the pan who aren’t quite ready for the job at hand. The irony is that it is only thanks to the sturdy resilience of that first pancake, the practice it gives the cook and the seasoning it gives the pan, that subsequent hotcakes will cook up with ease. (Let’s give it up for the sacrifice of the first pancake.)

Well, now that our oldest daughter is two weeks into her college classes and things have settled down into their new rhythm around here with only three of us at home, my husband and I can turn our attention to a new goal: perfecting the second pancake.

We’ve just moved back to the two-on-one parenting scenario that our oldest kid was subjected to for the first three years of her life. Only this is even better, because we actually know what we are doing! We have parented a teenage girl/pancake before! THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST PANCAKE EVER.

It helps that our second kid is hardwired to be reasonable, risk-averse but not too much so, confident without being sassy. She is admired by babies and old people. She doesn’t Snapchat, though her Instagram speed scrolling is a little too practiced for my tastes.

But perfect, she is not. There are three areas emerging this fall as real growth opportunities, if only she will accede to the coaching that her father and I now have unlimited time and focus to provide.

1. Think Yourself Tall! My husband is 6’1”, and my driver’s license has me at 5’8” which is at least as truthy as the weight printed on it. When our oldest daughter wears heels, she enjoys looking down into her father’s face. All three of us can reach things on the top shelves in the kitchen, and can still see the band if we stand in the back of a venue.

And then there’s the youngest, who stubbornly refuses to be more than 5’5”. That actually makes her one inch taller than the average American woman, taller than her godmother and aunt, a perfectly normal size. Our shorty doesn’t want to be a millimeter taller, because she’s at a good ballet height, meaning most male partners can lift her with herniating something.

For some reason, though, her father has embarked on a rigorous program of willing his youngest to be taller. “Did you do the height visualization exercises I gave you today?” he will ask her when he walks in the door from work. “Can you ask your tall friend Amy for height tips? Did you eat lunch with Tiny Bess? I don’t think that’s a good precedent.” To which the 5’5” daughter serenely says, “No, yes, and I think I may have even gotten shorter today, Dad.” That’s his signal to groan, lean his palm against the kitchen doorframe on which our kids’ heights have been recorded since 2003, and sigh, “I just don’t think you’re trying hard enough.” She then walks under his arm toward her room, without having to stoop.

She’s killing him, one non-inch at a time. And this is not an isolated discussion. This is a six-times-a-week debate. Why do you think the older daughter chose to go to college so far from home?

2. Neither a borrower nor…no, just don’t be a borrower. The girls freely traded clothes in the past couple of years, by which I mean the youngest daughter always took her older sister’s clothes and mostly without asking. Over the summer when the older girl was away working at camp, the younger one shopped her sisters closet with abandon, the extent of which is only now becoming clear that the older one is unpacked at college and has no shirts.

“Mom, have you seen that black tank top with lace on it?” she called to ask the other day. I glanced up to see her sister sitting at the dining room table, doing her homework and wearing said shirt. After I got off the phone I said, “Did you really think she wouldn’t notice you took her shirt, when you wore it for your school picture?”

The clothes are slowly making their way back to their rightful owner in a convoy of care packages, but now there’s a borrowing-clothes vacuum. So the other night our littlest pancake went off to babysit wearing her father’s Adidas sweatpants topped with one of my sweaters. See height difference, above. We are considering putting locks on the closet before she is mistaken for a hobo.

3. Put things away the 17^th time we ask. This is not a child for whom the “put it back where and how you found it” rule has ever resonated. In her world, you open a drawer for a hairbrush, and then just leave it open, in case someone else wants to come look for a hairbrush. By not putting it back the way it was, you are actually saving your family members the hard work of opening a drawer.

This applies to shoes, cooking utensils, and borrowed Adidas sweatpants. Remember that scene in Last of the Mohicans when Daniel Day Lewis and the second-to-last and last of the Mohicans come across the pioneer family that’s been killed, and leave the bodies where they find them so they don’t alert the marauding Hurons to their presence? Madeleine Stowe protests that they need a proper burial, and she and Daniel Day-Lewis click into that fight/lust chemistry that makes this the best movie of the ‘90s? Our second pancake would have been totally comfortable with Daniel’s plan. “Good idea, Hawkeye, I vote to leave them too, just give me a quick sec to see if they have a hairbrush drawer that needs opening,” she would have said.

We are too experienced as parents to believe we will get her to put stuff away the first time we ask. First pancake taught us to be realistic in our goals. We believe that with both Mom and Dad nagging together, there’s a chance she will put things away by the 17^th time we ask her, 15^th if we’re going for a stretch goal.

And if nothing else, we’re ensuring that second pancake also has good incentive to go away to college someday.

Why yes I will get up and dance around my office to this one.