The Power of No

“Dubsie, do you want to play in the snow?” “No!”

Each morning I feed Dubsie her standard breakfast of steel-cut oats, half a mashed banana, a dollop of whole organic milk and — here’s the kicker — a whole hard-boiled egg, shredded into little bits.

Most observers are not fond of this recipe. (“Gruel?” said a seven-year-old boy recently. “You feed her gruel?”) Adults look at the gelatinous beige concoction, spotted with mottles of egg, and then look at me, as if wondering what sort of man would inflict this meal on such a sweet little girl.

I am obliged to explain that, sure, you might find it disgusting, you with your mature taste buds, but it’s a nutritional wonder for a toddler who can be easily fooled. You’ve got your complex carbs (the oats), fat (milk and yolk), protein (egg white) and a sweet, all-natural banana finish.

And besides, you can’t argue with results.

Since she started on solid food over a year ago Dubsie has eaten astonishing quantities of it, day in and day out. She is bumping up against the top of the growth charts while maintaining thighs as plump as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. She has opened her mouth wide to accept spoonful after spoonful, month after month, at least until a few weeks ago, when she began to discover the astonishing Power of No.

Yes, it’s No now, invoked in response to everything, morning till night, uttered like a mantra, addressed to anyone who ventures to offer any food or toy or activity, at almost any time. Such as to her Mummy, at dinnertime:

Mummy: Are you hungry?
Dubsie: Mmmm hmmmm.
Do you want chicken?
No.
Do you want rice?
No.
Do you want…umm…(searching fridge)…carrots?
No.
Do you want two giant fistfuls of candy?
No.

She states the negative with relish, with gusto, with a rising and dramatic Nnnnnnno! that betrays how much she enjoys saying it. Think of how satisfying it must be, as a little creature just discovering words, to find that No — a single syllable and one of the very easiest to pronounce — can stop a full-grown adult in his or her tracks. How intoxicating. You’d want to say it all the time.

Dubsie is working through the varieties of negation, scoping out her personal style. She likes Not! and Naaaah! and occasionally adds a Go ‘way! The one that leaves me particularly dejected is when she yells Nope! and puckers her lips to pronounce the P with a percussive pop.

So there I was last week, a spoonful of gruel in my hand, parrying with a year-and-a-half-year old reveling in her Power of No. I thought that I should propose to Congress, or perhaps to Merriam-Webster, that we permanently retire the word No and replace it with a word that requires some grown-up enunciation, like lilliputian, or prerogative.

But the utterance itself didn’t matter. I needed only to look at her expression of extreme distaste to know that she had exercised her lilliputian prerogative. Every time I brought a dripping spoonful near her mouth, she swatted at the air as if battling a cloud of mosquitoes. Then this little girl, my own daughter, looked me straight in the eye and made a brilliant counter-proposal.

“Daddy eat it,” she said.