Things that are hard about this:
1) Patience. I hate losing my patience with my children more than almost anything in life, because patience was in short supply in my own house growing up and I learned to resent it. However, I am human. I do lose patience when it takes an hour for someone to put on a pair of shoes.
2) Persistence. It's not just Eva who loses out when her behavior means we cancel fun things like playdates and library trips, but Silas as well. And me. I needed that ten minute drive to the library this morning-- ten minutes to listen to music and just drive and have the kids stationary in their car seats-- but I didn't get it, and well...see #1.
3) The terrific collision of this particular sunflare of craptastic behavior with the difficulty I'm having lately putting as much love and energy into stay-at-home parenting as I should. Before this even started I was beginning to need peptalks to reset me every morning. Now I need bourbon. (Just kidding, thus far.)
We will get through this, of course, but it helps to have a reminder of better days.
To that end, I logged into my old MySpace blog and cribbed this entry from January 5, 2008-- the day Eva turned two months old:
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"This morning, Eva woke up earlier than usual after a difficult night and had trouble settling down. (Mr. Milkweed) volunteered to take her for a bit, and when I came downstairs, he was walking her back and forth, back and forth, from the kitchen to the living room and the dining room.
"This is all she wants," he said, with a wry smile. "Nothing else suits her."
I stood in the kitchen as he turned around to start the circuit again, and I got a glimpse of her riding high on her Daddy's shoulder, her face half-buried in it, only her eyes showing above the top of his henley. Her cheeks were slightly squinched up by her position, and she was so incredibly cute I asked him to stop so I could give her a kiss.
"Hi, Eva!" I said in that ridiculously high baby voice that I'm powerless to stop. "It's Mommy!"
And she lifted her eyes from her Daddy's neck, looked into mine, and smiled at me. Even though her mouth was below his shoulder, you know how I could tell?
Because her eyes filled with light.
It would be the most vast understatement on the entire planet to say that I love my little girl."
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Read. Re-read. Wash, rinse, repeat, because just like that little baby is in there somewhere, that same love-drunk, enthusiastic mother is hiding in here, too.
5 comments:
Hmmm, I think we got the same talk about Maggie when she first started preschool. And this was a kid who had been in daycare since she was about 8 weeks old. It took us a while to figure her out -- what was the punishment that worked best? Getting sent to her room by far because Maggie HATES to be apart from the family (which is why she gets "lonely" at 3 a.m.). Just keep reminding yourself that "this too shall pass" and there will be some other issue that will make you long for this one :)
When Elanor was 4 or so, I had a huge problem getting her dressed in the morning. She could dress herself; she just didn't want to. So, finally, I told her that from then on, if she wasn't dressed by the time we had to leave, she was leaving the house in whatever she had on. It took one instance of her going to daycare in her underwear before she realized I wasn't bluffing. (And I had given a heads-up to her daycare provider that I was going to try that, and I live in AZ where she wouldn't freeze.)
Anyway, I sympathize. I hate dealing with kid-parent power struggles. I thought your 2008 reflection was beautiful!
Wendy-- we're still trying to zero in on her "currency." We've switched from time-outs and losing books before bed to putting toys in "toy jail" and sending her to her room-- the jury's still out on if it's working, though. And you're right-- one day she'll be downloading herself onto the Internet or sneaking out via Virtual Reality or something and we'll have to deal with that. *gulp*
JoAnna, welcome to my blog!! I've missed hearing about your crew since I've been less frequent on BNaBBT!! Congrats on #4! Awesome job carrying through with the getting dressed thing. She'll probably never forget that.
A friend of mine was saying last night that kids can tend to go through some sort of insance hormonal/growth stuff on their half-year marks, and I'm thinking that's going on here.
Behavior aside, she's obviously confronting some heavy issues--
Last week she sobbed on my shoulder because when she told Owen at preschool she loved him, he didn't love her back. Just yesterday she asked me who was eventually going to die, and I had to tell her everyone, and she started sobbing so hard I stopped the stroller and had a heart-to-heart with her in the middle of the street. I told her all about heaven and told her that sweet lie about how she wasn't going to have to worry about anyone dying until they were very, very old, and she kept asking me if there would be a big yard like ours in heaven and whether all her preschool friends would be there. It absolutely killed me.
Ugh, I'm sorry. This parenting gig can be so hard. I feel like you just have to be constantly re-evaluating yourself as a parent, you know? And they do go through horrid, horrid phases. They usually pass fairly quickly, though. Hang in there!
Thank you, Ser. Constant re-evaluation seems to be the thing...
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