Child’s eating is beginning to drive me crazy. She is rejecting more and more of the foods she used to eat, and when she asks for food half the time it’s candy or cookies or ice cream. While she’ll cheerfully leap on mangoes and blueberries and other fruits, getting her to eat some form of protein that doesn’t involve breading a chicken is like pulling teeth.

This is on my mind when we are waiting to be seated at a breakfast restaurant, fresh from picking blueberries. We’d spent a half hour at that, and Child had been interested for the first fifteen minutes and then spent the last complaining that she was tired and could we do something else. Mommy told her briskly that the more she complained, the longer it would take for Mommy to pick berries and why didn’t she pick some more of her own?

So, we are hungry and tired. And as the hostess collects menus for us, Child says stubbornly, “Do I have to eat eggs?”

“Yes,” I say.

“AwwwWWWW but I don’t WANT to eat eggs!” she cries.

“Too bad,” I say. “You can eat eggs or nothing.”

We sit and are rewarded with crayons, and she starts doodling while I order for us both—the eggs, because she used to like eggs and they’re good for her and by God, I hope if I just keep putting them in front of her she’ll forget that she decided to hate them and eat the things. We spend a companionable fifteen minutes drawing together on the paper and are interrupted by the waitress with our meals.

I start eating because I am ravenous, and I am a third of the way through my meal when I realize… Child is eating her eggs. Has, in fact, eaten them all. “Now can I have my toast?” she asks.

“You ate all your eggs!” I exclaim, stunned.

“I know,” she says.

“But you didn’t complain once!” I say.

“I was complaining,” she tells me and nibbles on her toast. “I just did it in my head.”

This startles a laugh from me. I say, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I do that too, all the time,” I say. “Complain in my head instead of out loud.”

“I complained a LOT,” she confides.

“Well,” I say. “Since you did all your complaining in your head and ate your eggs anyway, why don’t we walk next door and get a cookie?”

She lights up. “Ooh, yes!”

So we finish breakfast and walk hand-in-hand to the health food store where they sell the gluten-free baked goods. I wonder a little at my buying her a cookie as a reward for not whining. Surely this is bribery? And then I think: But that’s the way the world works. The people who aren’t unpleasant get rewards more often than the people who are nasty or whiny or unpleasant to be around. Is it sad that we learn we can’t always say what we feel? I think it must be a little. But part of growing up has to be learning how not to say everything on your mind… learning that your speech has consequences, and you can either manage those consequences or constantly wonder why life keeps punching you and how it’s not fair and what did you do to deserve it.

“Pick me up!” she cries when we get to the case, and I bend at the knees as if I’m about to lift a very heavy box, because my almost-six-year-old girl is no longer the easy armful she was at three or four. I hold her up and we put our heads together, and practice our reading skills on the labels. She wants the chocolate chip cookie, so she gets it.

And then I buy myself a cookie, too. Because I spend a lot of time biting my tongue, and once you get to be grown up the only reward for good behavior is the knowledge that you were good, and Mommy is no longer around to pat you on the back.

We share out the goodies in the car and to make sure I don’t undercut my message on self-restraint I give us both only half, and we’ll save the rest for later. She sighs—one complaint—and then eats her cookie. So do I. We make crumbs and it’s all good, and on the way home, she sings.

We are sitting together on one of the chairs at the kitchen table, and she is no longer an easy lap-ful, this five-year-old child with her sun-bronzed legs and stretching torso. She has her head on my shoulder and the rest of her curled untidily on my thighs, and we are playing the inevitable “Why?” game, which begins when I tell her that we can’t have the lights on at night because we’re sleeping (“Why?”), because she should sleep because then she can grow (“Why?”), because growing is good for you so you can eventually become an adult, (“Why?”), because being an adult is neat, (“Why?), because you can do lots of things that little kids can’t do, (“Why?”), Oh, because I suppose you have so much practice at them that you can do them when small children can’t—

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say finally. “Why would we want to do anything at all?”

She looks up at me, head nestled on my shoulder… makes a screwed-up thoughtful face, and pops out, “To make money!”

And then I burst out laughing. And she laughs too, and I say, “We don’t do everything because we want money! We do things for love, sometimes, and fun!”

She allows that that might be true, but only after I tickle her and pretend to eat her arm, until she’s used up all all her squealing. And then I go to get dressed to go to work, and think ruefully, “To make money, indeed.”

It occurs to me later that I didn’t tell her that sometimes we do things for duty. But then, what is duty, but a form of love? For ideals, for justice, for the right thing, for people as part of our civilization, our community. So, I think, that’s all right. She’ll understand when she’s older. Why is a big question. We’re all still answering it ourselves.