Molehillian Mountains

Out on an afternoon walk, I found an old friend in the dusty road.

In Britain, you call them 'dummies'. In America they are 'pacifiers'. For some reason, our family name became 'nuka'.

Fork stuck in the road.

Ali was addicted to nukas. Even devoted crackheads agreed that she needed to ease off, but the habit stayed strong even as she flew through her third birthday.

I devised a story about the Nuka Fairy - a cousin of the Tooth Fairy, who exchanged old nukas for sweets. Ali, never a turnip, knew it was rubbish.

Shrewdly, she began stashing nukas where the Nuka Fairy wouldn't find them. Less shrewdly, she forgot her own hiding places. In moments of panic, she screamed at mama for replacement nukas NOW.

Strangely soothing. 

One day, tired up to my eyeballs of being a nuka-slave, I snapped. I banished all nukas from the house and told my screaming kid to put a sock in it.

The kid only took a week or two to forgot all about the damn things, and I had to wonder why I agonized over the situation for so long.

A nuka is a pretty stupid nemesis. But in the surreal netherworld of parenting, there are so many tiny obstacles just like this, that feel for all the world like ginormous mountains at the time. Often I find it's only when I give up trying so damn hard that my tiny mountains blow away.

My nemesis nuka, once a destroyer of worlds with the power of Sauran and Satan combined, now it looked pretty wimpy to me. And quite delicious to my dogs.

Bear Dog chewed it to smithereens, proving that dogs have no taste...I mean, they will actually lick cow poo. This is fitting, because the only creature with possibly less taste than a dog is a cow.