The Unstable Republic
My Five-Year Old Daughter
The Morning Treaty
Let the official record how that the first treaty of the day was negotiated at 9:00 AM in the demilitarized zone of my daughter’s swimming class changing room.
The terms, if one were to call it that, were brutally simple. My daughter, a five-year-old sovereign state with a notoriously volatile foreign policy, desired a lollipop. I, the weary ambassador from the land of Get Things Done, required the completion of two days' worth of Kumon homework. The lollipop, a luridly coloured sphere of pure sucrose, was to be held in escrow, a glittering promise of a future where all worksheets were completed and all whining was suppressed.
"You can choose a lollipop," I proposed, adopting the carefully neutral tone of a hostage negotiator, "but you can't have it until after Kumon is done."
Her eyes, large and calculating, narrowed. She was already probing for loopholes, testing the tensile strength of the agreement. "Which Kumon?" she asked.
"Today's Kumon," I clarified.
"Yeah, but I didn't do yesterday's reading."
"Yeah, so you have to finish that one too," I said, closing the loophole before she could drive a truck through it. The deal was struck. A clear, conditional reward for good behaviour. As I placed the chosen lollipop in my bag, I felt the familiar, faint nausea of a diplomat who has just committed his nation to a irreversible course of action from which there is no honourable retreat. The Kumon Gauntlet awaited.
The Nature of Diplomatic Relations
This is the central work of parenting a five-year-old: acting as the chief emissary to a breakaway republic of one. My daughter is the charismatic, mercurial, and occasionally tyrannical leader of this nation. Her moods are its gross domestic product. Her whims are its legal code.
My job is to maintain diplomatic relations, to broker trade agreements involving screen time and dessert, and to conduct low-grade intelligence operations to decipher the baffling internal logic that governs her every action.
It is a posting for which no training can prepare you.
Anthropological Fieldwork
The day had already been thick with the kind of anthropological fieldwork that defines my role. Hours earlier, during a post-swim shower, I had been granted a rare and unsettling glimpse into the foundational myths of her republic.
"Imagine," she began, her voice echoing slightly off the tiled walls as I towel-dried her hair, "if there's little pieces and I was spreading some tissue paper out of my butt."
I have learned that in these moments, the best ethnographic practice is to play along. "Why would you have tissue paper coming out of your butt?" I asked, as if this were a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry.
She escalated immediately, her imagination a runaway train of surrealism.
"Imagine if there was tissue paper all over my butt and I pulled it and more came out, but it was actually bacon strips."
"Ew," I managed. It was a failure of professional detachment, but a triumph of human decency.
"And then daddy ate my bum bacon strips," she decreed, her voice ringing with the authority of a storyteller creating her own canon.
"And you said it tastes so good," she continued unabashed.
This is the geo-political landscape I navigate. A world where bacon can be a tariff-free rectal export and a father's endorsement is a crucial part of the fantasy. I am not just a character in her stories; I am a prop, a foil, a consumer of imaginary horrors. My primary function is to react. When she followed up with the Socratic question, "Poo is good?" I knew we had reached a critical juncture. The ambassador must sometimes respond with threats of sanctions.
"No," I sighed, with the gravity of a UN resolution. "Don't ever taste poop. Poop is very toxic."
The Sponge Brain Propaganda Campaign
It is this internal world, so rich with bum bacon and philosophical inquiries into feces, that makes the external demands of our world—like Kumon—so fraught. The Kumon worksheets, with their neat lines and logical progressions, are an invading force. They represent an alien ideology.
On the drive home, I attempted a pre-emptive propaganda campaign. I launched into what I call the "Sponge Brain" pep talk, a half-baked theory about the neuroplasticity of the young mind, delivered with the fervor of a wartime leader.
"When you are five years old," I explained, "your brain is basically super genius mode. All the learning happens now."
She offered a correction with the serene wisdom of a tiny Dalai Lama.
"No Daddy, everyone is never ever going to know everything. You'll keep learning."
She was, of course, correct. But I was not dealing in philosophical truths. I was trying to prepare the ground for a battle. I placed the lollipop on the counter—a visible manifestation of the treaty—and the gauntlet began.
The Battle of Homework
The first front was reading. Resistance was immediate and fierce. She was distracted by pencils, discouraged by unfamiliar words. "I knew it was going to be hard," she mumbled after a single failed attempt, the lament of a soldier who has lost the will to fight.
I knelt beside her, shifting from commanding officer to battlefield medic. "It's okay when you don't get stuff," I said, my voice low. "Everything just takes practice." I deployed an analogy I hoped would resonate within her specific cultural framework.
"You know how daddy got so good at giving you yucky kisses? By giving you lots and lots and lots of yucky kisses."
It was a weak parallel, but it was all I had. She confessed her true fear:
"I was too scared I could get it wrong."
This was the core of it.
The fear of failure is the great enemy of the Republic.
It can cause trade to grind to a halt and spark civil unrest in the form of a full-blown tantrum. "It's perfectly okay if you get things wrong," I insisted, while simultaneously noting that the bacon I was cooking would be held hostage until the first page was complete. It was a classic carrot-and-stick diplomacy.
The smell of perfectly cooked pork proved to be a powerful incentive.
The first packet of homework fell like the Berlin Wall.
The Pencil Crisis and Diplomatic Breakthrough
But then, a crisis. Her pencil lead broke. Then it broke again. The primary tool of production had failed. It was a supply-chain catastrophe!
"Daddy?" she called out, her voice laced with the panic of impending collapse. "This little lead, it just popped out!"
This was a test of my ambassadorship. I could have offered another cheap, disposable pencil. Instead, I made a high-level gesture of faith. I retrieved one of my own mechanical pencils—a fine, expensive instrument of Japanese engineering. "This is much nicer," I said, handing it to her. "This is an expensive pencil, you can't lose it. It stays at home, okay?"
I was conferring upon her a symbol of statehood. It was a promotion. It was a risk. And it worked. The new pencil, with its satisfying click and smooth, unbroken line, changed the dynamic. She was no longer a conscript forced into labor; she was a trusted functionary of the state, equipped with superior technology.
The rest of the homework—math, more reading—flew by. The numbers, from 101 to 120, were dispatched with the ruthless efficiency of a practiced bureaucrat. When she wrote the final number, we chanted "Ding dong, ding dong!" a celebratory anthem for a hard-won peace.
The treaty was fulfilled. The lollipop was released. The armies stood down.
Cultural Exchange and Shared Values
Later, in a moment of post-conflict calm, we engaged in some cultural exchange. We watched a Masterclass by the entrepreneur Sarah Blakely. As Blakely spoke of finding one's purpose, I saw an opportunity to translate these abstract concepts into Izzy's native language. I got out her notebook.
"What do you enjoy?" I asked, pausing the video.
"I enjoy candy," she said. A solid, honest start.
"What are you good at?"
"Math," she replied, fresh off her Kumon victory. We added ballet, gymnastics, and, at her suggestion, "standing up for myself."
It felt like a breakthrough. For a brief, shining moment, our two worlds were in alignment. The principles of American capitalism and the desires of a five-year-old girl were, however fleetingly, one and the same. I was teaching her how to hold her fountain pen, and she was absorbing lessons on monetizing her passions.
It was a utopian dream.
The Arrival of Foreign Dignitaries
The dream was, of course, shattered by the arrival of other foreign dignitaries: my wife friend and her two young daughters. The apartment transformed from a quiet embassy into a boisterous G-3 summit. The energy shifted. The carefully constructed order I had imposed on the morning dissolved into a whirlwind of scooter adjustments and butterfly nets.
Intelligence Briefing and Strategic Realignment
And with the arrival of other parents came the sharing of intelligence. As the children played, the three of us on the couch held an impromptu security council meeting on the state of the public school system. It was here I finally gathered the intel that explained the recent increase in the Republic’s domestic terrorism. I learned I had been blaming the wrong factors. Her tantrums weren't just random acts of a delusional leader; they were symptoms of a larger, external threat.
"Her main teacher got suspended," I explained, recounting the story of the violent child in her class, the thrown chairs, the school's baffling policy of removing the twenty-nine other children instead of the one.
"And the kid threw a sharp object, glass, and it actually went past my daughter’s head and shattered... They didn't report it because it was a near miss."
The other mother's look of horror confirmed my own. We were allies, sharing classified information about a failing state—the public school system—that was negatively impacting our own. My decision to move our daughter to a private school, a move that would compromise my retirement and commit us to a decade of tuition payments, suddenly felt less like an overreaction and more like a necessary political asylum.
My intelligence had been incomplete.
I had been treating the symptoms—the homework resistance—without understanding the root cause of the disease.
Afternoon Operations and Minor Crises
The rest of the afternoon was a blur of park trips and pizza. An intelligence failure of my own making led to a brief medical exfiltration when the Republic conquered an entire container of dried apricots and suffered the predictable gastrointestinal consequences, a mystery my wife, my fellow operative, quickly solved. Another small victory for the agency.
Evening Negotiations and the End of Hostilities
The day wound down as it always does, with another series of low-stakes negotiations. A treaty on tickle-enhanced-interrogation was established (a two-day moratorium, followed by a reversal of roles). A debate over kissing protocols was tabled after my wife correctly pointed out that my insistence on "yucky kisses" was undermining my own lectures on not always getting what you want.
Finally, she was in bed, squealing with a joy so pure and high-pitched it was almost indistinguishable from a cry of pain. I stood in the hallway, listening, trying to discern the emotion.
That is the job, isn't it? To stand outside the door of their private world and just try to understand.
The True Nature of Diplomacy
Later, long after the lights were out, a small shadow appeared at our bedroom border. The unstable republic, it seemed, was seeking humanitarian aid. She climbed into our bed, a warm, sleepy weight between us. All the day's battles and diplomatic maneuvers, the treaties and intelligence failures, the bum bacon and the Kumon worksheets, dissolved in that moment.
There was no agenda, no hidden logic to decode, no nuclear launch warnings.
There was only the undeniable fact of her small body seeking the warmth and safety of the two weary ambassadors who loved her more than anything.
Holding her there, a tiny, peaceful nation finally at rest, I understood that for all my attempts to impose order and logic, my most important duty will always be to provide a safe harbour when the complex geopolitics of being five years old become too much to bear.