by Annette Poro

Created on: May 20, 2008

Most Amazing Life Experience : Motherhood (of a Toddler)

There is a seemingly interminable period when toddlers are highly mobile and utterly devoid of the desire or ability to be civilised. A year or so when they can move around, lift things easily, prise the refrigerator open, investigate gas flames with their hands, plug in irons, open bottles, put yoghurt in the innards of the new camcorder and be found at the top of the stairs wearing your highest heels at 6am. The toddlers who violently resist everything suggested and attempted, including eating, sleeping and putting on clothes. The toddlers who throw things, spit, rub half chewed food into the carpet, kick you as you try to minister to their needs, pee on your best clothes.

The exhausted mother of a toddler knows that toddlers move ceaselessly while awake between dangers to themselves and others and causing ruin to their environment and any possessions in their environment. If she needs to go to the loo, she has to take the toddler with her, where he issues a running commentary on the sound of pee hitting the loo. "Water" he repeats over and over, pointing at her while she piddles. The intelligent toddler attempts to identify the source of the sound by trying to push his mother off the toilet seat to have a look.

Logic would dictate that no sane adult would choose to spend her time in the company of someone who screams at her, defecates and vomits on her and then wants her to carry his not inconsiderable weight around the supermarket because he doesn't want to walk and won't sit in the shopping trolley. Mother lurches along the aisles with his bulk on her hip knocking out the alignment of her spine. She hopes she does not bump into the chiropractor to whom she gives a good portion of her income to point out how not to treat her skeleton.

To amuse himself while his mother convey him around, the toddler picks his nose with concentration and offers her what he discovers up his nostril with the air of an archaeologist who has found something interesting on a dig. "Look" he enjoins her, holding his findings in front of her face before he wipes his fingers on her neck. "Not nice" mother says, shaking her head, in case someone is watching and thinks she is not training him properly. "No - nice" he repeats and continues doing it his way, even though she has offered him a sheet of kitchen paper (which she always keeps in her pockets).

Mother attempts with one hand to push along a trolley full of yoghurts and rusks

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