Wherever You Go, There You Are

When you're three years old, there are just some things that can't be explained to you. For Julian, the country of Spain is comprised entirely of a five-bedroom apartment where his grandparents live in the city of Zaragoza. Spain is nothing else but that.

So you can imagine his anguish when we finish an eight hour flight and then announce to him that we are in Spain and he looks around and does not see the apartment he is expecting to see. Just palm trees. Just a beach. Some picturesque mountain ranges in the distance. Just a charming country hotel with lovely gardens and farm animals. The stunning, rugged island of Mallorca. He wasn't going to have any of it.

As we're unloading our things onto the hotel's gravel driveway, he twists into a ball and throws himself down.

"NOOOOOOO! I want to go to ESSSSSSPPPAAAAÑÑA!"

I'm jet-lagged and hungry so I can only manage to come up with the obvious answer. I should know by now that the obvious answer is bound to be the wrong one.

"But Julian, you are in España. You are."

"NOOOOOO! This isn't ESSSSSSPPPPAÑÑAAA! NOOOOOOO!" Julian is going full blast, screaming, tears bursting forth, writhing on the ground. We're starting to attract attention from other guests who are relaxing on the terrace with an afternoon beer. I wave. Don't worry. It's not child abuse, I want to say, if I knew how to say it in Spanish.

OK, next tactic. I get down to his level. "Juli. Calm down. Calm down." (He's not hearing me so I say this so many times I feel like it's time to fly home by the time I'm done.) "Listen, you are in España, you are -"

There she goes again! Lying to me! My continued, but unchanging, explanation has only launched him into an even more energetic hysteria. My husband puts down our overweight suitcases and kneels next to Julian with me, starting to make a map with his fingers. Julian is mildly intrigued by this.

"Juli, look. This is España, the peninsula (Iberia - also known as Agustin's left hand), and this is Mallorca over here (his right hand) which is also part of España. It's an island. It's in the Mediterranean. It's also España too, see?" Agustin holds his left and right hands up in front of Julian's face and wags Iberia and Mallorca in front of him to emphasize how they go together.

Julian thinks he is even more crazy than I am.

"NO NO NO NO NO!" he wails. He is totally distraught and I'm about there myself.

The next 24 hours were a continuous rant from him about how he was not, no way, not possibly in and couldn't be anywhere near España. We stopped trying to convince him, and anyway Agustin had run to the end of his pre-school geography curriculum.

Not until the owners of "España" (known to the rest of us idiots as the apartment in Zaragoza) arrived, and Julian asked them where he was and they looked incredulously at him and said "you're with us!" was he ever happy.

And that's why God invented grandparents.