All I’ve ever wanted

She moved around the room like big pink pinball. Careening from soft toy to piano and over to the kitchen drawer and the cheese grater inside. Her movement was a relentless cacophony of flailing arms and flapping feet. She babbled and bubbled joyful in her own language, every sound a brand new addition to the lexicon.


The cheese grater is sharpe, I replaced it with a plastic orange juicer. This was, for an instant, the greatest injustice imaginable, before she suddenly noticed the wooden spoon 3 steps away. She took off again. I turned to tidy the breakfast bowls. This was the way of Thursday morning.


She found a piece of banana under her high chair and squeezed until yellow ooze emerged through her fingers. I swept some crumbs into the sink.


The peace split violently as the small child expelled an enormous sound. A full power scream from deep within that heaved her chest and turned her cheeks crimson. She stood in the middle of the room facing me as I spun towards her. Her face cracked from thunder then fluidly transformed into a smile and a she made a musical sound like “wubble blup”.


“What?” I retorted.
“Aaaaarrrh” she exploded again.
I’d seen this before. Moving quickly as I knew the timer had reset to the next need-scream. I slapped Vegemite onto a corn thin and presented it to her. “Please” I proposed as a desirable alternative to the scream. “Shlum kin” she offered matching my tone nicely. “Here you go” I said and handed her the folded snack. She grasped the morsel with all the joy of childhood and thrust a bite into her tiny child mouth. “SNACK!” I imaged her little mind exulting. “All I’ve ever wanted!” She had seemed to execute an emotional swing from fury to rapture in the briefest of moments.


The corn thin had completely satisfied all needs and desires inside her spirit, this was the answer she had required. As she waddled away across the room she spotted her water cup lying sideways on the floor. She instantly threw the snack away like the complete irrelevance it had instantly become. “WATER! All I’ve wanted!”