Mom Fail: When Analogies Attack

We live, conveniently enough, smack dab between two metro stations. One of them is older and contains the longest escalator in North America. It has only one slow, creaky elevator that people who are afraid of the longest escalator in North America feel free to monopolize, making it inaccessible for people who need it, such as the disabled and mother with little kids who are terrified that their little kid will fall down the longest escalator in North America. The other stop has six shiny new high speed elevators and no escalators whatsoever.  So you know which one is my preference.

For some reason, my husband recently took C to the longest escalator stop. C LOVED it because not only does he get to ride an escalator in a big tunnel but there’s also a pedestrian bridge connecting the station to the parking garage and the excitement of standing above the road looking down at cars really can’t be over-emphasized. Now C wants to do the bridge-and-tunnel routine all the time, much to Mommy’s displeasure.

This morning he and I were flying solo for the morning commute and he asked me if we could go to the tunnel. I said no because I’m scared of the long escalator. He asked me why and I tried to say that I’m afraid of the tunnel the same way he’s afraid of monsters. Because analogies are great ways to illustrate a point, right? Wrong. Three year-olds do not “get” equivalencies. At least mine doesn’t.

He took my “fear of 20-story-long escalators = fear of monsters” to mean  that  there might be monsters at metro stops. And dinosaurs. Who will eat you up. Luckily, he has a plan for dealing with dinosaurs: he’ll hit them with a stick and roar at them.  Which is a good plan and one I’ll definitely put into action if I ever run across a t-rex in the metro. But in the meantime, I may be spending a lot of time in the foreseeable future assuring C that the monsters and dinosaurs are not lurking in the metro station, just waiting to eat him up.

Yeah. I’m awesome.