Settle in and fasten your life vests, people, because I am about to take you on quite the oceanic adventure through my daughter’s brain.

Here’s some background information: my daughter loves clams. Not that she actually eats them, but, she loves playing with the shells. This stems from a time when she was about three years old, and I had invited her grandparents over to join us for a nice dinner in which I made linguine with clams. The food was delicious, and even though she didn’t eat the clams, she enjoyed some buttered linguine and sat for over an hour playing with the clam shells with her grandmother and I. This happened three years ago, and she’s talked very fondly about it ever since. Clearly, I inadvertently constructed a core memory for her with these clams. She mentions it often, always with a big smile on her face, and she will ask me to make linguine with clams again — to which I respond, but you don’t eat them! And we laugh. But I haven’t made the dish since.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Fresh off a learning experience on Friday about how to handle disappointment thanks to an unfavorable popsicle flavor at school, we (as in myself, my husband, my daughter, and her grandparents) attended a lobster boil dinner event put on by a family friend on Saturday afternoon. She is not one for lobster either, but there were other options she enjoyed. Then we were offered steamed clams — and you should have seen her light up, again, not because she would eat them, but because she could relive this wonderful memory with her grandmother and with me about playing with the clam shells. She sat there for quite awhile enjoying this, and as the evening wound down, it occurred to me that I’d better clarify with my husband what our answer would be when inevitably she asked to keep these shells — one of which in particular she’d even affectionately named Pinchakiss. My husband said no; he isn’t wrong in that, we don’t really want her bedroom smelling like the ocean, even if it is decorated with that theme. But she was distraught. The idea of having to say goodbye to Pinchakiss was devastating. She didn’t try to argue, but asked what would happen to the shells, and I told her honestly that they get thrown away, we don’t keep them. She understood it would make the house smelly. She understood she couldn’t keep them. But it broke her little heart. She drew pictures of Pinchakiss and wrote his name and that she loved him; she hated to say goodbye to this frickin’ clam shell. I’m a sucker sometimes, and I decided that I’d look to see if there was a way to get a toy clam so that she could have a happy ending here. I needed better resolution for this disappointing experience than the popsicle situation from Friday.

I don’t know if this is shocking news, but a clam toy is not all that easy to find! There was only one that I saw on Amazon (because I was looking to address this problem quickly), and I promptly ordered it and told my daughter that a new Pinchakiss she could keep would be arriving the following day, Sunday. She waited anxiously for him all day, asking constantly when he would arrive. He finally was delivered right before bedtime Saturday night. Well…cue disappointment number three. This clam was actually a hand puppet, but as far as hand puppets go, he was difficult to use, especially for her with her child-sized fingers. It was also pretty flat, since it’s a puppet, not a stuffed animal meant for snuggling, which is what she had really hoped for. So, she did her best to hide her feelings from her father and I, because she was afraid to upset us, but she was crying as quietly as she could in her bed at bedtime, and that quiet crying finally exploded into body-wracking sobs when I told her that if she doesn’t like this clam puppet, she can tell me, and we can send him back.

Her upset was three-fold: one, she didn’t want us to be mad at her; two, she didn’t like the clam; three, if she admitted to not liking the clam and we sent him back, then she would have no clam. When I say that it took her almost two hours to calm down and get to sleep, I am not exaggerating. I was trying to reassure her and get her to settle down and relax so she can fall asleep, and simultaneously I was hunting online desperately to find other possibilities for clams while occasionally needing to check with her about what, exactly, precisely, she wanted, because I could not bear the thought of a third strike with this clam debacle! I don’t have a lot of money to shell out for this (haha), which limited my options a bit.

Finally, after she fell asleep, I found a great option on eBay, and made an offer with an accompanying message that went something like, please help me in my frantic search for a clam lovey to appease my quirky bighearted daughter. I got lucky, in that they accepted my offer the following morning, and the new and improved Pinchakiss should arrive later this week.

I look forward to a pleasant resolution to all of this — part of which was already established with my kid as understanding that sometimes life has disappointments, sometimes things don’t work out. But another important part of the resolution is that as parents, it is important to recognize the difference between a child whining that they just really want something, and a child who’s devastated because she’s conflated an item with a very precious core memory. The loss of the clam came to represent the same thing as the loss of this very dear idea for her.

I can’t solve all of my daughter’s problems. But I can be there for her when she needs me. I can’t buy her every single thing she wants. But I can find ways to make her see that if something is important to her, it’s important to me too (something my parents never gave me). I can teach her what I actually learned not from my own family at all, but from her father, my husband: that I don’t need to understand something in order to be respectful and supportive.

Monday morning, as she was getting dressed for school, she sat down on her bed and sighed, and said, maybe I am weird. All I could do was smile, give her a kiss, and tell her that all the best people are. Including me. She smiled back, her big silly grin that’s got several spaces now from missing baby teeth; after a big weekend full of disappointments, she finally looked…well, happy as a clam.

Aw, shucks.