This weekend there were a number of things working against me. It was cold and rainy for the first time after a lovely but too-short summer; our dinner party was a raving success and so inevitably we are coming down into that post party-nothing-to-look-forward-to slump; the boys have converged in the most annoyingly simultaneous whiney stages; I have a really excellent book to read which I’ve waited patiently for along with the other 873 people who wanted to read it in the Multnomah county library system; I’ve been really busy at work; we haven’t been grocery shopping since before the dinner party so the fridge has only baggies full of bizarre foods like pâté and beets with goat cheese and ginger beer, which translates into unhappy kid meals.
Which is all to say that this weekend I was terrible to my kids.
The oldest wanted more water in the bathtub after letting the water out of the bathtub in successive gulps as a part of an elaborate game he plays with the tub drain stopper. I said no. He whined. I roared.
The youngest is perfectly capable of fitting his elastic laced shoes onto each of his chubby feet, mostly even on the right chubby feet. But this weekend (and mostly every other day) he did not want to put his own shoes on. I explained that he could and would put them on his own feet or else he wouldn’t be coming to dinner with us. He screamed. I screamed back.
James was not immune either. I yelled from the living room couch (where I was trying to read that very excellent book) for the youngest to stop yelling in the back yard. James asked me to stop yelling and then had an elaborate wrestling match with the boys to their very hysterical delight. I said he was just trying to make me look bad. He said to join them when my attitude changed. I read my book and sulked.
I know this is not acceptable, especially for the working parent who should have a surplus of patience. But I rarely have a surplus of patience. I feel like I often walk into or am minutes away from some kind of melt down from one of the kids and it’s sort of disappointing. I have this secret expectation that I will spend these quality hours after work with my well behaved, clean shirted kids, that this will be special time. And that somehow they should understand that this time should be special, non-whining, unmessy time spent with me–that they are supposed to be my ideal kids. But they do not realize this because they are 5 and 3 years old. I’m just an occasional accompaniment to their whiney, messy days. They are not ideal but these days, neither am I.
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I think of myself as a much better parent than I actually am. In the past when I saw frustrated mothers wrenching the arms of petulant children in the aisles of grocery stores, I shook my head disapprovingly and thought how I would do it differently, how I would use words to explain why the world works the way it does and how I would instill feelings of compassion and goodwill in my children by example. But that was all before I actually had a two year old who drives his trucks forcefully over his newborn brother’s head, who runs out into the street in the flash of an eye and screams to eat grapenuts cereal when I give him kix (silly me). As the author of the book I just finished said about her two year old, she must constantly “foil his attempts to kill himself” and I might add, foil my own attempts to wring his skinny little neck. Because obviously grapenuts will not kill him but the process of explaining to me that he wants one thing over another gets him and me worked up into such a lather that one of us ends up screaming and crying. And in these moments, I am irrational. I yell and snap and have even been known to wrench an arm here and there. Because thinking of a way to explain to him that he must not propel himself down the ravine of our backyard atop his riding truck takes too long. I must snatch him out of danger, not explain to him how to make good decisions so he keeps himself firmly planted on the cement of our back patio. No one warned me about this part of parenting. I thought that if you are a level-headed relatively laid back person in regular life, that you might be mostly that same person as a parent. Not so. I mean, I do have my good moments where he and I excitedly make connections between the ducks on the stream near our house and the ducks in the books that we read or that Grandpa Tom Tom does indeed have an RV like that one on TV and many others. But I am not the parent that I pictured I would be. I am the type to breathe a sigh of relief when they are both asleep because I am no longer on lifeguard duty or give in and feed him chocolate easter eggs because I don’t want to fight him and explain the nonexistant nutritional value of the candy coating. In short, I am more impatient and lazy.
