I was immersed in a cookbook trying to decide if Betty Crocker conspired to kill America with saturated fat when I heard a weary voice from behind the bathroom door.

“Mama, can I come out now?”

There are many times of the day a mother feels guilty in the art of raising children.  One of those times is when she realizes her child just served what was supposed to be a four-minute timeout for forty-five minutes.  So much for “I don’t need to set the timer.  I’ll just remember to get her out at 4:42.”

Timeout:  the ultimate fix to atrocious behavior of just about any kind.  In this case, the offense was excessive use of potty talk at the table (thus, a dose of solitary confinement with the object of her fascination, the potty itself).  One minute per year—or four minutes for a four-year-old—is all it takes to magically transform a set of devil’s horns into a halo.  In proportion, you would think forty-five minutes would’ve turned my potty-spewing preschooler into Mother Theresa.

Not so.  Even before I became a parent, after a decade of teaching I came to the conclusion that the underlying difference between girls and boys is that girls hold grudges.  Punish a boy, and he loves you five minutes after the fact.  It is unknown when a girl stops resenting you, because long before she recovers from one consequence, she is onto another.

“Mama, why did you forget about me?” Eva demanded, little legs poking out of her Tinkerbell nightgown, lips puffed in full pout mode.

My mind raced with how I could make it up to her.  Mathematically speaking, seeing how she served forty-five minutes instead of four, she had, in fact, served 11.25 consecutive timeouts, and rounded to the nearest minute, that meant she was entitled to get off scot free for her next ten misdemeanors.  Usually these misdemeanors make me too livid to consider mathematical reasoning or freebees, but it was a comforting thought to tuck away as I consoled my wild-haired princess after serving her over-sentence with the commode.

And as I tried to kiss the pout clear off her face, I saw my little girl morph into a teenager, when a timeout in her room would undoubtedly transition from punishment to reward.  What do I have to do around here to score my own thirty-nine minutes of solitary confinement?

Recently after a grueling day of kindergarten Tyler was parked at the kitchen table sifting through his Legos while I was stationed at my second home, the kitchen sink.

“I can’t find my storm trooper,” he said, half to me and half to himself.  “But that’s OK. I’ll just ask Santa to buy me a new one.”

“What makes you think Santa has time to make you a new storm trooper?” I asked while scrubbing a scorched frying pan with SOS.  “He has a whole world full of kids to make presents for, and he’s only got a year to do it.”

“He’s got his elves,” he shrugged.  “They’ll make anything he asks them to.”

I paused to examine my brillo-blue fingernails and wondered about elf labor laws and the working conditions at Santa’s workshop.  Did they get reasonable health insurance?  Time and a half?  At least two twenty-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch break per shift?

My thoughts were interrupted as a I pulled another pan out of the murky water.  “Now where did I just put that SOS?” I wondered out loud, stirring the water with a spatula.

“Why don’t you just ask Santa for a new one?” Tyler suggested.  “Then you don’t even have to look for it!”

It was time to have the talk.

“Tyler, Santa doesn’t have time to drop everything at the North Pole just because you lost your storm trooper and I lost a piece of brillo,” I said.  There’s all kinds of problems in the world, much bigger problems than we have.  The Middle East is still going crazy, global warming is wiping out entire species every day, and we’re all standing on the edge of something called the fiscal cliff. The last I heard, there were a bunch of people locked in a room trying to figure it out, and I don’t think Santa was one of them.  So I don’t want to hear anymore about asking Santa for small favors.  OK?

I thought he was considering my spiel, because he never did respond.  When he was finished with his Legos, he found his shirt stuck to the arm of the kitchen chair.

“I don’t like this chair,” he whined as I freed him.  “It has pegs on it.  Let’s tell Santa we need chairs with no pegs!”

“OK,” I sighed.  “Maybe if we’re all really, really good.”

It must be hard to be a kid from New Year’s to Thanksgiving, when Santa and his elves fall from the limelight and barricade themselves in their workshop, endlessly preparing for the season ahead.  During those months, there’s no one to solve their problems, replenish their shortages, toil away just to fulfill their insatiable material desires, or make their every whimsical dream come true.

All they can do is dream away until next Christmas.  Until then, there’s always welfare, sweatshops and Walmart.