
The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Attack
It’s been 60 days.
60 days of enduring attacks by the hungry caterpillar. It started harmlessly enough, when the daughter first picked ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ as the book she wanted to read for her nightly bedtime story, and we happily read the tale of a caterpillar that eats enormous amounts of food to become a butterfly. ‘How Cute’, I thought after the first day. Boy was I wrong.
The next day, the daughter picked the same story for her bedtime routine, so we read about the caterpillar a second time. And then she picked it again the next night, and the next night too, and has picked that book every single night for the last 60 days, and for 60 straight days, I have read to her the exact same story of the exact same caterpillar eating the exact same foods and turning into the exact same butterfly.
If I have to endure that god dammed caterpillar one more time, I’m going to lose my mind.
Every evening, I dread the arrival of the caterpillar. I get the exact same sinking feeling I used to get when I was walking to school on exam day, except now, there’s an exam every day and the teacher is a giant caterpillar that’s going to wring the soul out of my body — with boredom.
The boredom just keeps getting stronger. Every night that I read the caterpillar story, I feel like I’m in a lab refining boredom, distilling and purifying its essence into ever more potent forms. After 60 days of continuous refining, I now have a type of boredom that is so pure and so refined, that it can knock anyone’s spirit clear out of their body with just a sip, a potion of boredom so powerful that I’m on the edge of preferring to gouge my eyes out rather than drink this highly enriched boredom potion again.
I feel like if I read about that caterpillar one more time, if I have to refine the already highly refined boredom potion one more time, I’m going to end up with boredom so pure and so dense that it will collapse onto itself like a black hole and swallow me with it.
I have to do something about it. I have to hire a metaphorical hitman to silence that caterpillar once and for all.
My first instinct is to make the book disappear. If the daughter can’t find the book, she can’t make me read it.
That night, after brushing her teeth, the daughter as usual runs to her bookshelf, hunting for the caterpillar. As she comes up to the bookshelf, she pauses. Something is missing. The certainty of life that she’s experienced up until now has suddenly been shaken. She can’t find the book.
My understanding of how kids books work is that they are like the succession line to a King’s throne. If the King goes missing, you just go down the line and pick the next king. So, I was hoping that when she found her favorite book missing, she’d just pick the next book and the kingdom would be saved.
Apparently it doesn’t work like that.
She instantly starts crying, screaming, pointing at the bookshelf where the book should have been. 10 seconds later, she’s stomping her feet, her lungs inhaling massive amounts of air to power the industrial-strength amplifier she has in her throat. The wife is giving me a 5000-watt-laser stare that blasts away any resolve I might have to stand up to the daughter. The words in her eyes are unmistakable — “She likes the caterpillar, so just read the god dammed book”.
I cave and pull out the book from under the couch where I’d hidden it. The daughter instantly calms down and hugs her beloved caterpillar and dashes to her room. I follow meekly behind her, back to that day in school when I was heading into the classroom to take an exam that I was 0% prepared for. There’s no hope now. Just waiting for the caterpillar to knock me down with the sledgehammer of boredom.
The daughter settles in as I pick up the book. I swear, the caterpillar on the cover is laughing at me — an evil laugh not dissimilar to the bollywood baddie’s laugh who’s about to torture the hero.
They say you come up with the greatest ideas when your back is to the wall and you are out of options. One such idea hits me. I’m going to try it right now.
I open the first page of the “Very Hungry Caterpillar” as the daughter gets comfortable, smiles and looks at me, indicating I can start reading. She’s all excited to meet her favorite caterpillar.
“Once upon a time, there were three little pigs” I say, pretending to read from the page, gingerly looking at her from the corner of my eye.
The smile on her face is replaced by an expression of confusion, much like the one her mother gets when the Wi-fi doesn’t work because I changed the password yet again.
She gets up and comes over, looking over my shoulder into the book. “Is that what it says?” she seems to be saying to me.
“The three little pigs decide to build three little houses.”
The daughter senses that something is very wrong, but she’s not sure what. She flips the pages of the book, forwards and backwards, but everything seems in order. Her favorite caterpillar is very much there on the page.
“The first little pig builds a house made up of straw” I say, pressing on, trying to achieve escape velocity from the caterpillar.
The daughter comes up really close to me, uses both her hands to open my mouth and looks inside trying to understand where the caterpillar has gone.
“Then the second little pig builds a house made up of sticks” I mumble along, not wanting to lose momentum.
The daughter’s found no traces of the caterpillar inside my mouth, and I can sense the tide turning. She’s into the pigs now, but she’s still hovering over the book, trying to trace what happened to her favorite caterpillar. I sense that if I push too far, she’s going to dive into a tantrum again.
“And then, a little caterpillar comes along and he huffs and he puffs, and he blows the straw house away!” I say. The daughter starts clapping, excited to have her favorite caterpillar finally appear in this story.
The rest of the story works itself out, with the very hungry caterpillar making a meal of the three little pigs and turns into a butterfly. This storyline satisfies the daughter as she falls asleep with a smile on her face.
I think I’m going to tell her the story of how a hungry caterpillar joins a race between a hare and a tortoise and eats them both tomorrow.
