My Kid Won’t Stop Talking About Garbage Trucks. Am I Doing Something Wrong?
I was standing in line at our neighborhood coffee shop this morning, waiting for my usual burnt oat milk latte, and Jax, my four-year-old, was latched onto my hip going. Nonstop. “Mom why do garbage trucks come only on Tuesdays? Mom what if the garbage man loses his keys? Mom do garbage trucks go to the bathroom? Mom can a garbage truck eat a whole tree?” I kept nodding and saying “huh, good question” while the barista gave me that polite tight smile and the retired teacher behind me shifted her weight. I wanted to shrink into my worn-out sweatpants. By the time we got outside, I was already reaching for my phone to Google, that’s how anxious it makes me sometimes.
I typed “kid won’t stop talking about the same thing” and the first result popped up with “obsessive conversations in children: when to worry” and my stomach dropped just like it always does. Of course it did. I’ve been here before, when he fixated on the sound our dryer makes for six weeks, and before that, when he only talked about how clouds turn gray. This garbage truck thing has been going on for a month and a half, which feels like a year when you hear about hydraulic lifts three times before breakfast.
My mom came over for dinner last weekend, and when Jax left the table to go get his 12 different garbage truck toys to line up by her plate, she laughed and reminded me I did the exact same thing with sea turtles when I was his age. I don’t remember it, but she said I asked her what sea turtles ate, where they slept, if they could ride on a boat, every single day for three months. I made her hang a crayon drawing of a sea turtle above the dinner table and threw a fit when she tried to take it down after Christmas. That stopped me mid-rant about how I was worried this wasn’t normal. I’d completely forgotten.
I brought it up at his four-year checkup two weeks ago, anyway. I was all fidgety with the crinkly paper on the exam table, saying “he just corners people about this, it’s all he thinks about, should I be concerned?” Our pediatrician, who’s got three kids of her own so she doesn’t do that fake “everything is fine” nonsense, just leaned back in her chair and sipped her coffee and said “it’s not obsession, it’s research. When everything in the world is new, you can’t unpack ten big things at once. You pick the one that feels the most interesting, the most loud, the most different, and you pick it apart piece by piece. That’s how little brains work.” She said most kids grow out of it by five, some take longer, and the only time it’s a problem is if they stop doing all the other stuff they love—if they won’t go play, won’t look at books that aren’t about garbage trucks, can’t sleep because they’re thinking about it too hard. Jax still loves chasing the dog around the yard and eating popsicles and drawing rainbows, so that’s that.
That doesn’t mean it’s not awkward, though, or that I don’t lose my cool sometimes. Last week at the playground, he walked up to a little girl who was swinging, completely unprompted, and asked her “do you know how many wheels a front loader garbage truck has?” She just stared at him for ten seconds then ran to her mom. I sat there next to her mom on the bench, red as a tomato, laughing and saying “he only talks about garbage trucks right now, I’m so sorry” and she was nice about it, said her oldest went through a toilet paper phase that lasted two months, but I still wanted to crawl under the wood chips.
Last Tuesday, I had a brutal day of back-to-back work calls, my head was throbbing, and I just wanted to sit on the couch after Jax went to bed and watch a stupid reality show. I’d just poured a glass of wine when he opened his bedroom door, pajamas all twisted up, just to ask me if garbage trucks drink water when they get thirsty. I sighed louder than I meant to, and said “Jax, we talked about garbage trucks all day, can’t this wait until tomorrow?” His little face fell, he turned and walked back to his room without saying anything, and I sat there on the couch with my warm wine feeling like the worst mom in the world.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually. I used to think he did this to bug me, or to get extra attention, but I’ve noticed lately he’ll just ramble about it to himself when I’m on a work call in the other room. He’ll line all his toy trucks up on the floor and go “this one picks up the recycling, this one picks up the trash, this one is broken” like he’s just talking through it out loud, doesn’t even need me to answer. It’s not attention-seeking. It’s just… thinking out loud. The other day we passed a crushed garbage bin on the side of the road, and he pointed it out and went “see mom? The truck turned too sharp and hit it, right? Because the truck is so big the driver can’t see the little bins by the curb.” He put that all together from a hundred tiny questions and observations. He didn’t get that from a picture book. He got it from bugging me about it for a month.
Next week, the garbage man who picks up our street said we can stop by the dump after he finishes his route to watch the trucks unload. I said yes, even though I’m a little worried it’ll just make this whole garbage truck thing last another month. I still catch myself worrying sometimes, when I see other kids his age jumping from dinosaurs to birthday parties to ice cream in five minutes flat, that I’m missing something. I still Google it when I can’t sleep at 2am, even though I know what the internet will say. I still snap sometimes, when I’ve heard the 19th question about how garbage truck compacters work. It’s not all fine, all the time. But it’s just Jax, figuring out the world one big, loud, smelly, interesting thing at a time. I guess that’s okay, for now.
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