The Tyrant in the Polar Bear Pajamas

Here’s something I did not understand before becoming a parent: Toddlers are both the most predictable and least predictable creatures on the planet. They are simultaneously governed by a narrow set of appetites — food, independence, attention, the irresistible urge to fill their pockets with things they’re 70% sure they’re not supposed to touch — and capable of producing spontaneous chaos that would make Werner Herzog throw up his hands and say, “I cannot document this.”

My son is two and a half. He is funny. He is wildly verbal for his age. He has the kind of expressive face that makes elderly women in Aldi pause, gasp, and whisper, “Oh my goodness, he’s darling,” as though they have just witnessed a minor miracle. He is mischievous in a way that suggests he’s studying subterfuge as a second language. He loves people. He loves making people laugh. He loves saying “Oh hi” in a tone that suggests he’s bumping into an old friend at a coffee shop, even if it’s a stranger he has met exactly zero times.

He is also stubborn, fiercely independent, constitutionally incapable of doing anything in the amount of time required, and occasionally possessed by the kind of cartoonish rage that makes you wonder if toddlers exist to remind adults of the theological doctrine of depravity.

Raising him has been one of the greatest joys of my life and one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I have found myself saying: “I am exhausted and confused but also weirdly in love with the tiny person who is destroying me.”

And if all of that sounds tender or sentimental or even remotely put-together, it’s only because I haven’t yet described what mornings actually look like. Theoretical parenthood has nothing on the lived experience of opening your child’s door and discovering what they have accomplished while unsupervised for ninety seconds.

Morning: The Wipes Massacre

Let’s start with the morning. Not morning in the poetic sense — the kind with blue light coming in through the blinds and a cup of black coffee sitting virtuously on the counter. No. I mean the real morning. The waking-up-with-a-pit-in-your-stomach-because-you-don’t-know-what-your-child-has-done-in-the-last-three-minutes morning.

This particular morning begins with open drawers. A crime scene. A small, chubby-fingered anarchist has gone through his dresser like a raccoon attacking a campsite. He has solved the child locks on his drawers. The wipes package has been ripped open, its contents flayed and scattered like confetti at a parade. Several wipes are draped over the edge of his bed’s guardrail like flags of warning. He has also located a tube of Aquaphor and is working on opening it with the intensity of a jewel thief cracking a safe.

I catch him before he succeeds. But the look he gives me is the look of someone who believes I am thwarting destiny.

This is our son. This is our life. This is the day beginning with the assumption that I have at least some power over the trajectory of what comes next. A foolish assumption. A rookie mistake.

Breakfast: The Greek Yogurt Betrayal

Breakfast, in theory, is simple. Waffle. Fruit. Milk. A toddler should be able to handle it. Civilizations have been built on foundations less stable than an Eggo.

But the toddler insists on making it performance art.

We begin with him choosing a bib, which takes five full minutes. Five minutes in toddler time is the equivalent of waiting for a tow truck in a blizzard. Then he climbs into his chair with the slow deliberateness of a 92-year-old man settling into a rocking chair on the porch after Thanksgiving dinner. Then he decides he wants to buckle himself in – not me. This takes perhaps the remaining viable portion of my lifespan.

Finally — mercifully — he settles and is ready for the waffle. He takes one bite. He pushes away from the table.

Then betrayal strikes.

He wants my food. The Greek yogurt with granola he previously rejected.

Cue negotiations.

You might think a toddler is not capable of sustained negotiation, but oh, they can negotiate. They negotiate with the moral flexibility of a defense attorney for the mafia.

Five minutes of back-and-forth. Then I fold. I resort to bribing him. He eats exactly four additional bites of waffle and six pieces of a clementine because every bite is purchased with a spoonful of my yogurt, as if we are trading currency in a high-stakes black-market economy.

Breakfast lasts forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes for what amounts to half a waffle and fruit. The only other human categories who take forty-five minutes to eat half a waffle are the infirm and the chronically disinterested. My son is neither. He is simply two and a half.

This is when the intrusive thought returns: Parenting is essentially the art of losing control on purpose and pretending you’re not losing it.

Getting Dressed for Church: The Flight of the Semi-Clothed Toddler

Getting dressed to go to church sounds simple, but only if you have never tried to clothe a small person whose entire life goal is to avoid wearing whatever you have selected for them.

He wants to play. I tell him we are going to church and he will see his friends. He says he wants to go. This, however, is apparently unrelated to the task of putting pants on his body.

He runs. He runs into our room. He runs into the closet. He begins sorting through our shoes as if he is a curator for a museum of footwear. He looks at shoes he has never seen before with the awe of a man uncovering artifacts from a lost civilization.

Eventually I lock him in his room with me. This feels wrong. It also feels necessary. He is dressed. The cost was my dignity.

Church: The Public Exhibition of Our Helplessness

The first five minutes go fine. The toddler sits politely. He participates as best he can for the first two songs with mild bodily enthusiasm (which is basically him not fighting me as I hold him and not shrieking, screaming, or talking).

Then the time for corporate confession begins.

What follows is a slow, escalating unraveling of decorum. Our child wriggles, kicks, speaks at an unreasonably loud volume, and attempts to greet every person around us with the same cheerful “Oh hi!” he uses at home. But there is something uniquely humbling about your child loudly greeting the woman in the pew behind you as she is silently confessing her sins to God.

I whisper, “You need to sit quietly.” Whispering is useless. Whispering to a toddler is like trying to discipline a puppy using only interpretive dance.

By the time the offering begins, I have tapped out. We walk to the nursery, where he immediately becomes the most charming version of himself — smiling, waving, initiating his signature “Oh hi!” with everyone in the hallway. Adults laugh. They melt. They adore him.

And I cannot help but feel embarrassed, even though I know struggling to sit still for that long at his age is normal; even though I know he is not out of control — he is two. But I was a quiet child. I was compliant. And there is still some vestigial part of my introverted psyche that dies inside each time my son creates a scene.

I return to the sanctuary. I attempt to listen to the sermon. I hear maybe forty percent of it, which is an improvement from last week.

Lunch: The Pizza Incident

Home again. Lunch again. Another battlefield.

This time it’s pizza, broccoli, milk. All things he loves. It does not matter.

He tries to kick us under the table. He smacks the table with his hands. He moves his food from the plate to the table in what appears to be an avant-garde conceptual statement about domestic oppression. He wants to dip his pizza in his milk, and when I tell him no, he collapses emotionally.

Fifty-five minutes. Fifty-five minutes for pizza. No human being in the history of eating pizza has required fifty-five minutes to eat pizza.

When I tell him that because he spent so long messing around, he has lost playtime before his nap, he melts down like a snowball in the microwave. He does not understand consequences. He will not understand them tomorrow. Or next week.

He falls asleep instantly because performing emotional theater at full intensity for hours is apparently exhausting.

My wife and I collapse too. Our willpower is nonexistent. Our chores remain undone. Our plans disintegrate. We sleep because our bodies demand it, the same way a phone shuts down at 1% battery and refuses to respond until it has been on the charger for 20 minutes.

Afternoon: The Reset Button

When he wakes, we reset. This is what parents do. We reboot the system. He eats a snack and plays with some toys and has a pretty solid 60 to 90 minutes.

But dinner brings another round of chaos. He yells over us as we try to plan meals for the rest of the week. My wife — after experiencing most meals with our son while he revolts against the idea of eating — cannot bear the thought of food and meal-planning. I work full-time. We are perpetually behind, always juggling, always negotiating time as if time is something we can barter with.

My wife looks at me and asks, “How do people do this?”

I have no answer. I give the best approximation of hope I can muster: “I don’t know. But, somehow, they do.” It is insufficient for either of us.

And this is the point in the day where everything in me wants to spiral into a full blown dissection of our cultural fatigue, or a sweeping lament about how the modern home was not built to withstand the pressure as a parent while being accessible, productive, informed, spiritually attentive, emotionally healthy, chronically available, and somehow well-rested. It would be too easy to pivot into a commentary on how post-pandemic life has quietly restructured the expectations for ordinary families, or how the concept of balance has become more like a punchline than an actual target.

But I’m not going down those rabbit holes right now.

What rises to the surface instead, almost embarrassingly, is a far smaller truth: This is the moment in the day when I realize — again — just how desperately I’m clutching for control. How convinced I remain that everything will implode unless I oversee every variable. How quickly my brain converts a toddler’s chaos into a referendum on my competence, my patience, my identity.

And it hits me with the subtle force of something I should already know: The louder the house gets, the harder I try to hold onto a quiet that isn’t mine to manufacture.

The Collapse of the Myth of Control

Before becoming a father, I controlled my environment. My schedule. My home. My leisure time. I could go to bed when I wanted, wake when I wanted, eat when I wanted, watch what I wanted, unwind how I wanted.

Now I live with a small tyrant who makes demands neither he nor I fully understand.

I can parent diligently. I can discipline lovingly. I can model gentleness and consistency and humility and perseverance. I can pray with him, for him, over him. I can read him scripture. I can show him kindness. I can do everything “right,” and he may still not become the man I imagine him becoming — the one who believes Jesus is Lord, who loves people, who repents, who is patient and gentle and brave and wise.

This is the paradox of parenthood: I have a responsibility to shape him, but I do not have the power to control who he becomes.

That belongs to God.

And I hate that — which is exactly why I need to accept it. Because my anger — my frustration when meals go wrong, when routines explode, when plans collapse — is almost always the offspring of my belief that I should be able to direct the universe. My son is disobedient. My home is messy. My time is fragmented. My life feels less like a narrative arc and more like a collection of disrupted bullet points.

It turns out that toddlers don’t only expose your impatience — they expose your theology. (By “theology” I don’t mean what I know in my head about God and how he is in control of all things. I mean what you truly believe in your heart. Sometimes we don’t know what we truly believe until confronted with something like a toddler.)

And my theology, if I’m honest, still has me sitting in God’s chair.

Evening: Grace Arrives in the Shape of a Rubber Ball

After dinner, I send my wife to take a hot shower in peace — the kind of shower that isn’t punctuated by small fists pounding on the door yelling, “Mommy, where are you?” I take my son to his room.

We play with the train table. He tells me the names of all the engines — some real (Like Thomas and Percy), some invented. Then he asks for a “new game,” which generally means “a toy I have not seen since last Tuesday.”

Instead, I pick up a small rubber ball and bounce it against the wall. He laughs. He tells me to aim for a small nail that’s been sticking out of the wall since we moved in. I take a shot. I miss. We both say “Oops!” in unison. He laughs harder.

We do this for fifteen minutes. If the ball bounces weird and rolls away, he retrieves it with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever, insisting I stay seated while he does the work.

In this moment, we are not at war. We are not negotiating the geopolitical boundaries of lunchtime behavior. We are not wrestling over obedience or consequences.

We are just father and son. Playing a dumb game. Laughing at missed shots. Existing in the quiet, fleeting mercy God gives to weary people.

Grace feels like this sometimes — not dramatic, not cinematic, not life-altering. Just peace interrupting chaos. Just affection interrupting frustration. Just joy interrupting my need to control the world.

I know tomorrow will be the same. He will still be the toddler he is. I will still be the flawed parent I am. But for these fifteen minutes, I remember that God is here — patient with me, even when I am not patient with the little person he has entrusted to me.

The Final Complicated Truth

If a toddler teaches you anything, it is that control is an illusion. Not in the nihilistic sense — that nothing matters and there is no meaning — but in the theological sense: You can do everything “right” and still not determine outcomes.

That is terrifying.
It is also freeing.

Because if outcomes truly do depend on me — my discipline, my habits, my carefully calibrated routines — then I should be panicking constantly. I am too human for that, too tired for that, too flawed for that.

But if God is the one who shapes my son’s heart, if God is the one who directs his path, if God is the one who holds the future, then I am free to do the part I’ve been assigned: Love him, guide him, teach him, discipline him, forgive him, model repentance for him, and trust the rest to Someone far more capable.

Parenting a toddler is like living in a low-budget experimental film directed by God to expose your internal monologue and sinfulness. It is chaotic and unplotted and occasionally absurd. It is humbling and destabilizing and strangely profound. It is the feeling of being both overwhelmed by life and overwhelmed with love at the same time.

It is the realization that your child is not a project to be managed. He is a person, and you are not his sculptor. You are his parent.

The sculpting belongs to God.