"My Parents Won't Stop Talking!" by Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden
When I first read the hilarious book “My Parents Won’t Stop Talking!” I thought it was trying to tell me something about patience. Its protagonist, Molly, is a kid who has been promised a trip to the park, and she’s amped. “I’m going to bake and sell mud pies. I’m going to run between the people swinging. And I’m going to climb my favorite tree… I can’t wait to go to the park,” she says. The cartoonists Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden make Molly look as excited as she is. Her mouth is agape, her pupils are dilated, and her shoes are on.
So out they go, Molly, her two moms, and her younger brother. The park is just down the street, they’ll be there in no time… except, oh no, it’s… it’s…
The Credenzas are those neighbors who love to gab, and they love to gab about the most insipid mundanities of grown-up life. Gardening, crystal healing, magazine articles, library events, furniture, single-use kitchen gadgets -- the Credenzas love to talk about nothing. We all know the Credenzas.
Molly knows them all too well. She’s trapped, and there’s nothing to do but be patient. Except, Molly never talks about patience. She talks about waiting. And as I’ve read this book over and over again to my 4.5-year-old, I’ve realized there’s a difference between patience and waiting that I’d been ignoring in my parenting. I’ve been preaching patience; I haven’t been teaching how to wait like Molly.
Molly isn’t just going to sit idly while her parents gab on. She’s going to wait, because waiting is something to do. Waiting is Molly’s specialty.
Every time the Credenzas are outside, they talk to my parents!!!! They talk and talk and talk, and I can’t do anything except wait. But it’s OK -- I’ve waited before. I’m amazing at waiting. No one waits better than me. No one.
And so Molly shows us what she does while she waits.
But the grown-ups keep droning on. “Do you know a good garage for an oil change?” “I don’t know if the kids are old enough for a ‘spiritual bath’ just yet, but it sounds nice.” “I normally don’t just give out my eggplant piccata recipe, but since you’re my favorite neighbors…”
This is next-level nonsense, but Molly is a next-level waiter. So she starts counting the sunflowers on Ms. Credenza’s pants. She tallies the cats in their yard. She keeps track of all the times the Credenzas call her moms their “favorite neighbors.”
Still, it’s not enough. The adults are talking about “boring things, like driving to the mall to return something and work phone calls and how much they like cooking vegetables and all the people they know who I’ve never met!” (People like the impeccably named “Salazar Saladbar, Domingo Dodecagon, and Geminor Ronkonkoma.”)
Even Molly has reached her limit. She can’t take it anymore.
Existential despair is setting in. Time has no meaning when you’re living inside so much boredom. There is no knowing when this will end. “In forever, there is nothing. No park. No parents. No Credenzas. No waiting.”
She starts to leave this world for one of her own creation. “If I can become the park, then I can become anything, and I’ll never have to wait again.” She doesn’t need her parents to stop talking anymore. She has ascended beyond the quotidian chatter of grown-ups to become the master of her own reality.
But then an interruption arrives from the reality she left behind. “Ready to go to the park?” her mom asks from the corner of the page.
Now everyone’s waiting on her.
One of the joys of this book is it has no lesson to teach. It’s just one long, beautifully illustrated joke about how boring adults can be, and the collateral damage that boredom can wreak on the kids caught nearby. Yet even though there isn’t an explicit lesson, I couldn’t stop thinking about how active Molly was while she was waiting, and how passive I encourage my kids to be when I ask them to be patient.
Patience is something (I think?) most parents are trying to teach their kids. Not every fig bar can be furnished instantaneously, after all. But my reminder to be patient is, in essence, a request for my kids to suppress their desire. It’s asking them to negate what they feel until I say otherwise. That’s folly. These are creatures who only have an id!
Molly showed me another way. Instead of encouraging patience, what if I encouraged waiting, and all the possibilities that come with it? Molly’s not patient in the book; she pulls at her parents, flops down dramatically on the sidewalk, and flits from one distraction to another in a huff. But despite her impatience, her mind is wandering to fantastical places. She imagines herself as a slide, a water fountain, a chipmunk. What if, instead of asking my kids to feel something else, I asked them to do something else besides say “Dada” over and over until the syllables lose their meaning? Surely that will be marginally more successful.
Perhaps my blind spot on waiting is because I hardly ever do it. Sure I have to wait, but I’m not doing it like Molly. I’ve got my phone out. I’m researching whether to trade Paul Goldschmidt in fantasy baseball. (Help!) I’m wondering whether that prospective employer is going to email me and finally offer me the job I’ve been talking to them about for months. I’m elsewhere, but it’s not an elsewhere of my own creation.
“My Parents Won’t Stop Talking” is another library find, and I encourage you to seek it out from your local branch. If these 1,000 words convinced you to buy it outright, I love your confidence. You can buy the book here, but be careful with your money, I make a small commission when you do.
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Tillie Walden forever. They’re such a powerful force.