By Elke Govertsen

Isn’t it funny how the age of your children is simultaneously the best and the worst one yet? Each new stage brings its own discoveries and difficulties. Walking means the world is opening up to their exploration, and it means that you are running trying to keep up and bombproof at the same time. With talking comes access to their ideas and wishes, but you are struggling for a foot hold of control. I had a vague notion that the storm of toddler hood was brewing. I had been warned of the “terrible twos: and the dreaded “fearsome fours”, but why, I ask, had no one informed me of the relentless three-year-old?

My theory is that you rarely see three-year-olds out in the community, and so the general vernacular has never developed a term for the third year of life. I have, however, coined a phrase that seems to fit: “The Vortex of Three.” The hypothesis is that those little tri-devils are in such an unpredictable frenzy that they basically hold their parents hostage at home. Who wants to go out for dinner with a negotiating tyrant who is fighting to “do-it-myself” but yet needs you for every last detail of that meal, from cutting food, to zipping up the coat that they don’t even want to wear? No, home is both sanctuary and cage, protecting us from effort of the outside world, and sheltering it from the tyranny of our little dictator.
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