NO IMPULSE CONTROL

When my daughter became fully ambulatory at the age of 14 months or so, her purpose in life morphed from putting every small object she could lay hands on into her greedy little mouth, into hovering near wherever I was and darting her fat little hands onto whatever I might be holding.
You would think this would be cute. But you would be oh so wrong.
It lost it’s cuteness quotient pretty quickly I can tell you.
If I was doing a crossword puzzle, she would grab the puzzle, then the pen. If I was enjoying a cup of tea, she would grab the cup, then the tea spoon, then the tea bag. It made the most mundane tasks seem like such an endeavor that it really began to get my dawber down.
She evidenced a special fascination with my glasses, and my glass case. If I held her she would poke her fingers first in my mouth, then in my moustache, then in my nose, slowly working towards her real objective; my glasses. Then quick as a snake she would grab the frames of my eyeglasses, twist cruelly and yank them off my head, making certain that her oily, grubby fingers were sure to smear the spectacles.
And there was no safe place for my glass case. If I left it on the kitchen counter, she would boost herself up and yank it down. I finally resorted to placing it in the middle of the dining room table, only to find her sitting atop the table some time later. She had moved her choo-choo train over near a dining chair, climbed up the choo-choo and thence to the chair, and thence to the tabletop. Where she had then clambered out and seized her big prize; Dad’s eyeglass case.
What made this all the more depressing was that she had just learned how to blow her nose (and don’t you know a toddler get’s a lot of practice blowing her nose because, you guessed it, she is a total sneezing, coughing, germ-producing pathogen who has invaded our living space with the sole purpose of being ground zero for the next great influenza epidemic). And inside my glass case I keep a nice clean, soft chamois, specifically designed for cleaning my nice, new eyeglasses. And because she has just learned to blow her nose and she has a runny nose all the time, she delights in opening my glass case, yanking out the chamois, thrusting her beak in it and honking like the beejeezus.
Then she looks up at me as I frantically remove her from heights of the table and says, “Goo grirl.”
This is her baby-speak for “Good girl”, which is what we say whenever she blows her nose in a more appropriate item, such as a Kleenex or hankie.
What are you gonna say, “Bad girl”? I mean she has just done what you have been training her to do, which is blow her snot filled nose. It just happens to be in my nice clean chamois. And so every time I clean my glasses now I get a glue-like residue of baby snot smeared across my glasses and I think to myself: “What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”
Let me assure you that a middle aged man crying is not a sight for the weak of heart.
It was not long after the chamois smearing incident that I was sitting on the sofa with the Sunday crossword and a cup of tea (while wishing for something stronger, say, hemlock) and Vivienne The Terror approached. She hovered near me, eyeing the tea cup. He hand began to edge towards it.
“Don’t do it,” I told her.
He hand hesitated a moment, her eyes locked on mine, and then the hand, inevitably, began to slither forward once more.
“Don’t touch it,” I warned her.
She paused for only a moment and then the hand shot out, as quick as a cobra skewering a rat, and she latched hold of the tea mug. Of course it spilled all over the coffee table as I became unhinged and slapped her wrist in a vain effort to unlock her grip.
“That’s not being a good girl,” I told my beautiful, willful, persistent daughter, vainly seeking to make some sort of intellectual connection. “That’s being a Bad Girl.”
It dimly occurred to me that in some previous lifetime I had liked, no, even adored, Bad Girls, in all their incipient glory. But this was not what I meant when I talked to my dark-eyed daughter.
At which point my better half Rochelle joined the conversation from where she had been listening to this mockery from the kitchen.
“Her brain is not fully formed,” my wife instructed me.
“Go back to your place in the kitchen,” I told her. “I’ve got this totally under control.”
“That would explain the tea all over the carpet and your calling our daughter a ‘Bad Girl’, I suppose.” She was mopping up the spilled tea as she said this, and gently re-directing our daughter away from her elderly father.
I often ignore my wife and this was just another occasion where I did so as I addressed my daughter; “Vivienne, when Dada says No, he means No.”
My wife was still speaking to me and though I was trying to drone her out I heard something like; “She can’t understand you. Her brain is not fully formed. She has no impulse control.”
This last phrase caught my notice and, unwittingly, I turned my attention to The Wife. “Say that again,” I commanded because it makes me feel good to tell my wife to repeat things.
“She has no impulse control. Her brain is not fully formed. She’s only eighteen months old."
Rochelle can get away with saying stuff like this because she is Physical Therapist and know everything.
“NIC,” I said.
“What?”
“No Impulse Control.”
A fortnight later I was sitting in the group holding cell in the Sonoma County Jail after a 62 hour bender. Things had ended badly with a lot of broken glass and twisted metal. There was a dull throbbing behind my eyes, and the inside of my mouth felt like I had rinsed it out with battery acid. Someone, I’m not naming any names here, had vomited on my crotch and not bothered to clean it up. Somewhere along the line I had lost my right sock and shoe. But on the plus side I had acquired a bitchen-looking Maori tattoo that ran the length of my left forearm. It burned like hell.
The man sitting across from me had lost his teeth to a lifetime of meth addiction. I could smell him from six feet away and it wasn't a good smell. His hair stuck out at crazy angles and his left eye wandered lazily from pillar to post. He was holding an animated conversation with a point just above my head. The gist of the conversation seemed to be; he had not meant to stab that bitch, he would never stab that bitch, he, in fact, really loved that bitch.
For not the first time in my life I was glad I was not that bitch.
Seeming to acquire a new focus his eyes settled on mine. “What’s your excuse?” he demanded.
“My brain is not fully formed,” I told him.
“Huh! I’ve heard that one before.” He snuffled indignantly.
“No, it’s true. I suffer from NIC.”
“Enayewhat?”
“No Impulse Control.”
“Oh, the judge’ll like the sound of that.”
I was hoping he was right, he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about.