Forget America’s most wanted criminal. The most wanted person in the United States is a nursing mom.

If the nursing mom has older children to care for too, then she might as well paint a sign on her forehead that says, “I can’t punish you for the next 20 minutes, so you’re free to go wild!”

Children are hardwired to know that Mom can’t react quickly when she’s breastfeeding the baby. They take the opportunity to try things like putting plastic bags over their heads. (True story, but don’t worry. The kid survived. The mom, however, is still on Zoloft to get over it.)

All the women I know who have two or more kids warned me that my 2 1/2 year old would try something mischievous when I brought our newborn home from the hospital. But he didn’t. Two weeks of me nursing the baby every two hours had passed, and my toddler acted normally. I thought I had the only well-behaved toddler who understood the demands placed on me by the baby’s nursing schedule.

I learned that anytime I think I have the only well-behaved toddler, I’m in for it.
One day, my son got fed up with sharing me, and he reacted. Thankfully, he didn’t do anything destructive like cover the walls with permanent marker, though I would have felt less guilty if he had.

He started to make me wait, too. If I asked him to sit at the table for dinner, he’d move so slowly he wouldn’t arrive until breakfast the next morning. If I told him to pick out a book to read at bedtime, he’d take so long to choose that he could have learned to read it himself.
Like clockwork, every time my toddler moved at a snail’s pace, the baby would cry a blood-curdling scream that made me want to sprint to tend to his need. I felt like they were already ganging up on me, practicing for the teenage years.

Like many other times, I fouled up. Instead of showing my toddler patience and understanding, I became annoyed with his slow pace, and I tried to rush him. I didn’t get the message he was sending. And each time I lost my patience, I felt I was failing as a mom.

It all came to a head one day when we went to the park with a group of other moms and kids. I had promised he could play with his most beloved new toy, a giant bubble maker. He was thrilled because he’d waited for months for the weather to be warm enough to blow bubbles. But when he started to play with it, the other kids wanted to play with it, too. I made him share his new toy before he got the chance to enjoy it. He sat by the jungle gym heartbroken, and I finally got it.

I had asked him to share one more cherished thing. Just like he wanted the bubbles to himself, he needed me to himself.

That night, my husband watched the baby while my son and I drew pictures on the sidewalk with chalk. Ever since then, I’ve made special one-on-one time for him every day, and every night he picks out a bedtime book before I can say, “Once upon a time.”

‹ Shasta Clark is a St. Clairsville native who lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with her husband and two sons. Her e-mail address is clarkshasta@hotmail.com.