Tag Archives: child

A Hole in His Head

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L turned 5 just two short months ago. Yesterday, he lost his first tooth. Is he a) dentally precocious? b) mature? c) advanced? or d) did he try to open a container of Play-Doh by himself?

The answer is obviously d. Unable to get the top off, he decided his teeth would provide the needed leverage. He was in for a surprise.

At first he tried to hide it. He jumped up from the table where he was playing with Play-Doh and announced, “I have to go to the bathroom!” and into the bathroom he ran. Great! He’s finally listening to his body.

“Uh, Mommy? My tooth is bleeding.”

“OK. I’ll look at it when you’re done in there.”

“No, Mommy. It’s really bleeding!”

I can hear panic creeping into his voice. I go and check it out. I react badly. This causes full-fledged panic in L. He’s now completely freaked out, bleeding, and apologizing to me. He thinks he’s done something terribly wrong, and I’m not entirely sure that he hasn’t. I try to calm him down, mostly by giving him a wad of wet paper towel to keep him quiet chew on to stop the bleeding.

The issue is that his tooth wasn’t really loose. It was sort-of-beginning-to-seem-like-it-might-one-day-soon-possibly-be-loose. This tooth was not meant to come out yesterday.

Turns out, it’s OK to rip a tooth out of your head a bit prematurely. I finally calm L down with Tooth Fairy promises. We take excited pictures of him exaggeratedly grinning despite his tear streaked face. We talk to grandma and daddy to share the “good news.” Grandma says, “I wonder if you’re even on the Tooth Fairy’s list? You’re only 5. Maybe you need to write her a letter.”

L immediately gets to work dictating the following letter:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I know that it’s not time for me to lose a tooth, but I losed [sic] a tooth today. And it surprised me. I hope you get me a toy Power Ranger. I know I’m not on the list because I’m only 5. So I’m writing to you to put me on the list. I hope you put me on the list. I love you, Tooth Fairy.

Love, L

Luckily, the Tooth Fairy found his letter where he left it on the front porch for her. She delivered him a matchbox car which changes color when plunged into water. Apparently, it’s OK that she couldn’t find a Power Ranger toy in the supermarket last night. He came running into my room this morning at 3 (3!!!) to show me his new treasure.

The new gap in his smile is a reminder that my little boy isn’t going to be little much longer. Soon he’ll probably knock out his other teeth too.

 

Motherhood: A Horrible Carnival Ride

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The absolute worst and hardest part of parenting is the emotional toll it takes. For me, it’s a constant roller coaster and I just want to get off; I don’t like roller coasters. I’m tired of all of the negative feelings – frustration, anger, embarrassment, self-pity, guilt, recrimination. These all center around L and I’m certain that not everyone has to go to such extremes.

If I had two kids like S, life would be good. I’d have it so easy. I’d deal with “normal” child issues like crankiness, hunger, frustration, boredom. But they’d all be low on the Richter scale. L is a huge earthquake. He is more than I bargained for. It feels unfair. Why am I the mom who constantly has to physically drag her 40 pound child up the stairs for a time-out? Why do I have to break a sweat just to get through the process of putting him to bed? I made the same choices as another mom who only has easy kids. Why did I get such a hard one? <——-This paragraph is all about self-pity.

Next comes guilt. So many people have real problems to deal with. Sick children. Children who can’t feed themselves, will never walk, will not live to see adulthood. Those parents would give anything to trade their problems with mine. I have a perfectly healthy little boy.  <——I’m very good at guilt.

Next up, recrimination: I shouldn’t feel this way. L clearly is struggling with controlling his larger-than-life emotions coupled with his ridiculously high energy. My job is to help him not resent him. If I were a softer landing-place for him, he’d probably thrive. I am not a good enough mother for him.

The truth is, L is exactly the child I deserve. I was not an easy kid. I was outspoken and hated how little control I had over my life. I longed to be an adult. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I have had a huge problem dealing with authority. I do did not like being told what to do, where to be, how to act. And, unfortunately, I felt it was perfectly within my rights to say so. This got me into more than my share of trouble.

I should be able to understand L and know what he needs because I went through such similar feelings as a kid, right? Somehow, it’s not working out that way. What thing did I need to hear from my parents or teachers to help me accept their authority and my place as a subordinate? I think the answer is probably “nothing.” Childhood was just something I had to wait out. I wouldn’t go back for anything. I do like being an adult and in control of my life. Now that I am the authority figure, I don’t think authority is so bad.

So we know where L gets his audacity and stubbornness from. But that energy? That’s not mine. That’s beyond what I can even tolerate. It’s like being on a racquetball court with balls bouncing all around everywhere. All I can do is duck, cover, and wait for it to be over while I’m pummeled all day. The energy is from T. But he didn’t have the defiance to go along with it. It’s the combo that’s a killer.

So I guess this means that I just need to duck and cover for another 20 years or so and then L will come into his own. I see right where this revelation is leading me. Straight back to self-pity as my roller coaster begins its slow ascent again.

Please let me off. I’m feeling a bit sick and dizzy.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

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We all know that kids parrot what they hear. So if you swear, be prepared for embarrassing situations with your toddler. If you say mean things about relatives, your spouse, or your boss, be ready for those things to come right out of your child’s mouth at the most inopportune times.

When you have more than one child, the younger one doesn’t just have you to learn bad things from. This is a problem. Sometimes S says things in public that I’m certain people assume I say in private. But I don’t. She’s learned them from L.

For example:

One of S’s favorite things to say to me when she’s mad is, “When we get home, I’m going to hit you!”

This totally sounds like something a parent might say to a child in a moment of teeth-clenched public rage. But I never said it! I do plenty of bad things as a mom, but I don’t hit my kids. Or threaten to hit them. (I have pinched though.)

This is something she’s learned from L. He says things like this to her all the time. Because he’s a menacing jerk. But he doesn’t usually follow through. He just likes to make her scared and cry. (See previous menacing jerk comment.)

How can I make it known that I did not say this to her? I feel like I need a t-shirt that says, “Please excuse my daughter. She has a bad big brother.”

 

PDF: Public Display of Failure

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The Scene: the lobby of the dance school where L takes his acrobat class

The cast: me, L, approximately 20 other parents and maybe 10 other children

The situation: L doesn’t want to go into his class

The time: 4:30 PM

The scene unfolds in nightmarish fashion. The sounds are too loud, echoing off of the high ceilings and hard floors. L has made his case and now stands an the other end of a long row of seats, all of which are occupied by onlookers. His thumbs are in his ears; his fingers wiggle at me tauntingly; his tongue is out.

I step to the right. He counters with a step to the left. I move left. He moves right. This is a stand-off. This is a stand-off with an audience.

This is what I hate most.

He is loving this. He’s pushing is favorite button. He’s laughing. He’s laughing at my impotence.

“L, you come here right now, please. This is not OK.” I try my most serious tone of voice. One that tells these other parents that I DO NOT take this kind of blatant disrespect lightly. One that tells L that when we are alone I might just strangle him.

“Haha!” He taunts back in a tone that lets the other parents know that he runs the show. A tone that lets me know that he does not give a flying crap about what I think, say, or do.

I will not run after him and give him the gratification of a chase with an audience. I edge to my right, he to his left, soon we are facing each other across the depth of a chair rather than the length of the row. I growl quietly, “If you do not get into that classroom immediately, you will not get any Chinese food tonight.” Thankfully that works.

I am left mortified. At a loss. I’ve never seen anyone else’s child do something like this, which leads me to believe that some part of L is broken. Some part that makes him inherently respect and fear me. How can he be so brazen?

45 minutes into his hour-long class his teacher comes out with L in tow. “Sorry, I just can’t keep him in there anymore. He refuses to practice the routine and he’s running around and tripping the other kids.”

OMG. He’s a monster.

Again, I’m in front of this audience. “You did WHAT? Sit down right there until you’re ready to be nice.” I plan on ignoring him. I want him to sit for the next 15 minutes until he can apologize to the teacher when the class is over. He breaks down into tears. Big, sobbing tears.

“I hate myself. I always get in trouble at school and here too. I’m just so starving. Please take me home for dinner. I’m so so hungry.” He tries to wrap himself up in my arms.

Damn. He did complain about being hungry before class. I didn’t pack him the greatest lunch today. He probably is really hungry. He hates himself? A piece of my heart breaks.

“You don’t always get into trouble. Your teachers always tell me how good you are at school, and this is the first time you’ve ever gotten into trouble here. But what you did is not OK.” My arms are now around him, despite myself.

“Please, please take me home. I’m just so hungry.”

I took him home. I fed him dinner which he ate with gusto and zeal. 3 servings. He was hungry. I told him that his behavior was not acceptable, no matter how hungry he was. I relayed the whole story to T, including how disappointed I was. More tears.

What am I doing wrong? I feel like I’m not a pushover, but maybe I am? Maybe I shouldn’t have given in, made him sit there for 15 minutes? At the time I felt like punishment wasn’t what he needed. What he needed was dinner. I try to balance being tough on him with being empathetic and caring. But I must have something off for him to challenge me the way he did. Right?

I feel like I’ve tried everything. I feel like I’ve said that I’m at my wit’s end a thousand times. I am so tired of having to live out scenes like yesterday’s on the public stage.

 

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It’s 11:40 AM and I’m tempted to keep L up in his room until T comes home tonight at 5:30. The last couple of days he’s been astonishingly rude and obnoxious, culminating in a playdate (with a little girl he loves) where he told her he wished she would die, that he never wants to play with her, etc. I drove 25 minutes to a park that we spent 10 minutes in before I had to drag him out. Poor S was so happy at the park. Poor me was looking forward to having actual conversation with another mom.

He told me I’m the meanest mother. He told me I’m the worst mother in the world. Truth is, maybe I am? I must be to have raised this child.

He’s been doing so well lately. I thought we turned a corner. Is he never going to get easier?

I don’t know how to just move on and face the rest of the day with him. I feel so angry and disappointed and frustrated. I don’t think I have it in me to play with him any time soon. How long is too long to punish a kid for being a colossal jerk? Me disliking him seems like the only natural consequence, but that can’t be what I’m supposed to do.

Somehow I’m meant to compartmentalize things. I’m meant to not take things personally. I’m meant to not feel emotional responses to his outbursts. Who can do any of that? Are we supposed to magically become automatons when we have children? I’m a person and when I’m not treated well, when I’m embarrassed, or ashamed, or frustrated I feel it. I don’t know how to turn that off.

Letter to L on His 5th Birthday

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Dear L,

You’re 5! This past year you’ve shed any lingering babiness and turned into a bona-fide kid. You’re tall and muscular and look so grown up. It’s hard to remember how little you still are sometimes, but you remind me with your cuddles, endless curiosity, hilarious interpretations of the world, and even your emotional instability. (Feel free to outgrow that last one any time now…)

Watching you take in the world around you is one of my favorite things. You are insatiably curious and come up with your own explanations of how things work. These are usually strange, non-sequiturial masterpieces of illogic. Your mind works like an MC Escher drawing and it sometimes hurts my brain, but it’s always interesting.

The inner workings of L’s thought processes. Explains a lot.

If I have as much excitement and joy in my lifetime that you find every day in ordinary things, I would consider myself lucky. Your emotions are big. Huge. This means that you experience more joy and happiness than the rest of us. On the flip side, you also feel more angry, more sad, more frustrated. Every year you get better at coping with these overly large feelings. My job is to help you along the way. It breaks my heart when you’re struggling with these things, but you are getting so much better at handling them. I will try to remember that you are grappling with feelings that seem too big for you, and I will try to not get as frustrated.

You’ve completely exceeded my expectations on this trip to New Zealand. You’ve shown maturity, kindness, patience, and understanding that I didn’t know you possessed. I’m so proud of you. You’ve looked after your sister, suffered extraordinarily long flights, waits, & car rides, endured tiresome visits with strangers, and accepted strange foods, people and places all with good nature and ease. (Well, mostly anyway.) We expect a lot of you as the big brother, the oldest child. And you deliver.

I expect this next year to be one of huge growth for you. You’ll start school and pull away from me in new ways as you grow. I’ll try to let you go. Happy Birthday, L. You are more than I ever expected, more than I could have ever imagined. You are a tiny version of the wonderful, exceptional man you will become, and I could not be prouder to know you.

Love,

Mom

S-isms

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Do you know WTF my 2-year-old is saying?

  1. Gop!
  2. Gatka da yee-ess gor off?*
  3. We bik dee gitty oh walkie woal. (Hint: this one is sung, not said.)
  4. Ging eekie eekie gong. (No, I’m not kidding.)
  5. Me go how put gope on.
  6. It’s too gunny ow guys.

*I’ve been writing these down as they happen. This one I didn’t translate at the time and now I can’t for the life of me figure out what it means.

 

S-isms

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Some kids are great verbalists. Not mine. L couldn’t pronounce his own (totally uncomplicated) name until he was well over 3, and he still erroneously begins words with the letter B (“becited”), and mispronounces several words like “hostible” and “resternaut.” I love these mispronunciations and am probably doing the exact wrong thing by not correcting them.

At 2, S is a chatterbox. She almost never stops talking and almost none of what she says is remotely understandable. I get about 70% of what she says. Luckily, L understands more like 85% and often acts as translator. When neither of us is around, she’s probably constantly frustrated and misunderstood. With good reason. Here are a few gems that she said just yesterday:

Me eek keys in the boo-koo-montney?

Me want more bup in my cup!

Me all done beeking!

(singing) Cakey car ish kittniss!

Any idea what she’s talking about? I actually was able to understand all of them. There was plenty she said that I couldn’t understand but I thought it might be fun to put these out there and hear your guesses. I’ll translate tomorrow.

I Can’t Take Me Anywhere

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Sometimes I forget where I am. And I’ve been told I have a loud voice. (I wonder where my kids get their loud voices from?) Yesterday I had one of these moments. I looked up from an interaction with S, which ended with me saying, “How do YOU like it?” while tugging on a bit of her hair, to find 6 moms watching me. Whoops.

So this begs the question: do you parent differently in public? (OK, so it also begs questions about me pulling my 2-year-old’s hair.) Can your kids get away with more or less when you’re at someone else’s house? In a store? At school drop off? Waiting outside big brother’s acrobat class?

The scene: L’s acrobat class is from 4:30-5:30 on Thursdays. S and I wait in the lobby of the dance school with the other parents and siblings. Everyone seems perfectly happy except S who is abjectly miserable for the entire hour. She begs to go home, to be fed dinner. She runs, climbs, cries, hits, pushes, throws things, cries more and drags me to the tiny toddler toilet 110 times. On this particular Thursday S was even more unhappy than usual and nothing distracted her from her reign of terror. She poked a girl in the eye, pulled a boy’s hair, yanked toys away from happy children and threw them at unsuspecting adults.

She asked to be picked up. I picked her up. She squirmed to go down. I put her down. She cried. She asked to be picked up. I picked her up. She squirmed to go down. I put her down. She cried. It was in the middle of one of these tiresome hell-cycles that she grabbed handfuls of my hair.

My discipline during this hour was a mixture of stern admonishment, sympathetic affection, distraction and ignoring. Basically just what I do at home, but without the help of my pantry and TV. So I acted as I would anywhere when I pulled her hair and noticed my audience. No one said anything. They looked at me. I looked at them. And then they looked away. Are they thinking I’m a child abuser? Or a normal mom doing normal mom things? Are they wondering what I do behind closed doors if I think it’s perfectly fine to pull my daughter’s hair in public?*

*Just so you all know, whether or not it’s perfectly fine to pull my daughter’s hair, it’s the same thing I would do behind closed doors. 

Should I be ashamed to show my face again?

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A Morality Tale

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L really doesn’t need as much sleep as we need him to have. We need the full 12 hours of rest from him and that’s why we put him to bed at 7. His natural time to sleep isn’t until about 8:30. That’s problematic because his parents’ natural time to sleep is 9:30. One hour of wakeful reprieve is simply not enough. So, we put S down at 6:30 and tell L he’s staying up late when he gets that extra 1/2 hour until 7. Then we slog through a bedtime routine full of more manipulations, chases, battles and tears than I care to think about. By 8:00 we’re ready to be on our own, relaxing. We expect our fully wakeful son to just stay in his room relatively quietly until he’s ready to go to sleep on his own. He does not do as we expect. (Which, really, is what we expect.)

All this is a long way of saying that when he comes out of his room every 22 seconds to tell us of an urgent need for water, a last hug, a toy he forgot downstairs, a band-aid, some itchy cream, etfuckingcetera, we are displeased. Instead of hearing a cute little voice in that annoying fake-sweet voice he puts on, we hear the manipulative little devil that he is.

But last night, I had a decent amount of wine. I was in a good mood. Also, yesterday I had 7 full child-free hours! So, I was in a really excellent mood. Instead of just yelling upstairs, I went upstairs. Instead of just unceremoniously marching him back into his room, I smiled at him, held his hand, and sat on his bed.

He then explained to me that he and his two teddy bears are lions. The big teddy bear is his brother lion and the little teddy bear is his baby son who he has to take care of. And they are a family. But they had no food to eat. And they already ate all the sticks. But they were still hungry. So they ate his brother, the big bear. They cut him right here and here and drank up all his blood, because that is what some people do. He then lovingly set up a bed at the foot of his own bed in which he tucked the small bear, his son. He sang a lullaby, kissed him, and gently covered him with one of his own lovies. His own lovey, people! 

After this whole strange scene I left thinking, “What a loving, caring and imaginative son I have!” Normally, I’d leave a scene like this fretting about my blood-sucking-sociopath 4-year-old. But like I said, I had a decent amount of wine.

Moral of the story? I think the moral is that I should drink more, but that seems like a weird moral. I’ll have to look further to see if there might be some other moral in there somewhere.

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