Tantrum, return trip

I wanted to show this but I’ll tell it, that’s what I can do right now. My daughters let my wife and I know when they want and don’t want something. They let us know clearly. Loudly. And if need be, they will let us know with their bodies, arms flailing, legs kicking. They want what they want and they stick to what they believe is right despite personal discomfort. They aren’t deferential to authority. These are excellent qualities for adults to have. As someone who sometimes has to manage them, as someone who is an authority in their lives, these qualities are a pain in the ass. I often say my wife and I are victims of our own success. I get tired of this. I remind myself that easiness for the parent is not a measure of child’s well-being. But damn, sometimes it’d be nice. To be fair, they have easy moments, and there are many awesome times. But any time I try to force them to do something, because something has to happen or can’t happen, I can expect friction. And unfortunately one of a parent’s roles is to be the lever for the larger world, the line along which ‘what has to happen or can’t happen’ is transmitted into the household and into the child’s life.

I remind myself that I find these situations more upsetting than my kids do. Or rather, my kids’ intensity of upsetness is higher but the duration of mine is longer. I will remain unsettled by a tantrum much longer than they will. Partly this is simply a matter of my being an adult and them being kids: they move on faster than I do and we love each other differently. I was surprised by some of this when I became a parent. I experienced my parents as unilateral and powerful, I never realized how much power children have to affect parents until I had my own.

Some of the worst moments are when I am tired and lose my cool. Parenting is complex, involving many skills and skills degrade with exhaustion. Sometimes I feel too tired to successfully finesse a solution to a situation with my children. I wish it were otherwise but sometimes I feel to tired to try. I resort to forcing a resolution, giving an order or threatening to withhold some desired thing. My children don’t respond well to pressure and this is also just not how I want to parent. Parenting is not about me getting my way and the times when I need to get my way, I would prefer not to have them happen because I made my children comply unwillingly. This isn’t a big deal and I am a good parent, but these are some of the sorts of moments I wish most didn’t happen.

One skill I’ve learned in parenting has been coming back, reconnecting after a particularly imperfect turn of events. This means encouraging my kids to want to reconnect with me, trying to find ways to make that happen, and it means getting into that frame of mind myself. I have an impulse by disposition to hold grudges, my anger smolders a long time and it rarely feels like a choice I’ve made. I suppose it is a choice I made, to be or to remain angry or upset. Certainly I know I can make choices to speed up the process through which I cycle out of anger and begin to reconnect and become open to reconnecting. This has been a fine thing to learn. Specifically one thing my older daughter and I have done sometimes (credit where it’s due, my wife suggested this after reading about it in a book she found) is have a pillowfight. We say ‘bomp!’ each time we hit each other with the pillow, and it’s evolved into mostly hitting each others’ pillows. The first time we did this it was like all the built up unpleasantness - it’s not like there’s tons of simmering resentment or anything, but my kid and I get mad at each other sometimes and if that goes undealt with then it remains - came pouring out in laughter. We just cracked up so hard right away and for a long time. We went from angry and tense with each other to laughing together to hugging, fully reconnected. It was really nice.
Reconnecting and letting things go is something I’ve worked on and that I try to remember to keep working on. I’ll try to just admit how I’m feeling and what’s annoying me, and then start to make an effort to let it go and move on. This means first I have to notice what I’m doing. When I’m the grip of an emotional response that I don’t fully realize is happening, that’s harder. Of course when I’m angry I know I’m angry, but often I start off thinking angry thoughts, I need to then become more self-aware, thinking “I’m angry about this!”, so that the object of my attention become my anger and my behavior when angry, rather angrily having my attention on whatever I feel like has made me angry.

There’s no magic to this. I don’t always manage to make this series of decisions, and when I do my daughter doesn’t always make similar decisions, but when it does work it’s really cool. The other night my older daughter woke up hungry very late at night/early in the morning (and when she’s hungry and tired she’s crabbier) and got really mad about something and woke the baby up by shouting at my wife. When I got up with my daughter I was angry because tired and also tense due to worrying about what my day would look like if I was (once again!) really tired. I had an impulse to try to force compliance by making threats about no dessert or whatever, but somehow we got to talking about something - baby poop maybe, I don’t remember, something silly anyway - and then my daughter was asking me to tell her a story while she ate a snack, and could she sit in my lap while she did so? That turned into some quiet laughing and cuddling, and after that she was very cooperative about brushing her teeth and going to the bathroom, which isn’t always the case around going to bed. I asked her if she wanted to dance with me while I sang to her, the way she used to go to sleep all the time when it was my night when she was much littler. She said yes, and it was really lovely, she snuggled into my shoulder while I swayed and sang her some Weakerthans songs. After a few minutes I carried her to bed and she fell asleep almost immediately when I put her down. That was a much nicer way to end the night than the two of us being mad and tense with each other.