Category Archives: Child Wrangling

Dog or cat

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Since our sweet old cat died, the family has been embroiled in a convivial battle of “dog or cat?”

We loved our cats, but we might be dog people.

We adore dogs, but we might be cat people. (Okay, let’s be honest. We’re not cat people. But Spouse misses our cat and I miss our cat and we’re willing to accept that there might be one or two more cats out there somewhere who would be just perfect.)

The kids seem to like both cats and dogs, though they’ve been pressing for a dog. Peanut, our eldest, is an animal whisperer. Living creatures trust him, and he has the right balance of sincere gentleness and authoritative confidence with critters who are not his brother. Dogs love him, cats love him, sheep flock to him. He’s the kind of guy who can convince spiders to walk out the front door (ours is a no-kill house and we usually ask spiders to climb onto a piece of paper for the ride outside). I’ve actually seen cats hiding under a car come out for Peanut only after the rest of us walk away.

Butter, the three-year-old, is unpredictable. (That was redundant, I know. But I’ve heard there are a handful of three-year-olds who don’t calmly pet pets and then shriek and take off chasing them. Or, say, gently carry a duck’s egg for five minutes before pitching it like a baseball. Sorry, farmer lady!) I pity any pet who is near Butter if the wrong mood strikes. And since he’s three, the wrong mood always shows up at least…what…once an hour.

So during the process of getting ready to visit a few animal shelters today, I stopped fight number 8,314 with the reminder that we can’t bring a pet home until we can prove we can be friendly to each other. That pets are helpless creatures and they need absolute, inviolable kindness.

So the boys shaped up and played nicely and talked nicely and touched each other nicely. We didn’t find our new pet, but we got more information during the search.

And by bedtime the boys were at it again. Disrespectful to each other, saying hurtful things, reacting to hurt with fists.

I stopped them and reminded them that we have to be kind.

But Butter put his foot down. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t want any dog or any cat or any pet.”

I asked him why.

“I don’t like to be gentle and nice,” he insisted.

Fair enough.

So now I’m looking for a shelter that will trade a sweet dog for a sometimes-sweet preschooler. Let me know if you know of one. I’m sure they can adopt Butter out if they put clear guidelines on his kennel. “Does well with people and children and pets. Sometimes. Sometimes he’s a raging a**hole, so he needs just the right home where everyone understands that he’s not a bad guy, he just needs some positive reinforcement training to get some freaking manners.”

Any chance you have a pup you’ll trade for that?

Mother’s Day: A New Perspective

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I’ve written often about being torn between the Hallmark ideal of Mother’s Day and the “same day, same frustrations” reality of Mother’s Day. At length and too many times. So have friends.

But this year is different.

I have a healthy, adorable, smart, funny grandma who lives an hour away. I visited her today while the kids were in school. Being with her infused me with wise, cross-generational “aren’t we lucky, even though the first years with small children are challenging, they’re a blip in the grand stretch of your life” perspective. Being grateful to have her makes a pretty nice Mother’s Day.

I have a healthy, sassy, energetic, interesting mom who lives an hour away. I saw her last week and will see her again for Mother’s Day. That’s a pretty freaking big deal after having lived the first two years of my son’s life in an isolated pocket of Hell (Los Angeles). Being grateful to have her, too, makes an increasingly sweet Mother’s Day.

And I somehow stumbled onto the best idea ever for a Mother’s Day gift. Beginning a few years ago, I forced my husband to engage in this ritual with my kids:

Buy or find the prettiest, smoothest rocks you can get your hands on. If possible, send partner and kids to beach by themselves to collect rocks.
Take dictation from children in Sharpie on the rocks after asking them, “What do you love about Mommy?”
Keep writing their answers on rocks until they have no more interest.
Have children decorate a plain box (wood, cardboard, glass, whatever). As big or little as you want.
Put rocks in box and hand them over on Mother’s Day.

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Throughout the year and whenever I want, I can reach in and read a reason, in my sons’ own words, why I’m the best mom they’ve ever had.

And I can’t wait to see what they write this year. Really. That “thanks for cake” rock is begging for a “thanks for 1,092 healthy meals a year” companion. We’ll see.

Mother’s Day. It’s not about sleeping in (as if), or breakfast in bed (ew, the cleanup), or peace and quiet (insert uncomfortable laughter at the realization that it’s never going to happen).

It’s about asking your kids (and partner if you have one) to make the present you want. And need.

And since they can’t build a Krasinski/Rudd/Fiennes/Gosling four-sided hologram, have them build you a box of love notes.

How? Seriously. How?

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I woke early because the boys were fighting about whether one of them should be allowed to cough at 5am.

We stumbled grouchily through our morning and got everyone to school in clothing with food in their bellies. The principal cornered me to ask if I’d proctor one of the loathsome State Standards Tests mandated by No Child Left Behind Or Lovingly Taught Much Other Than Tests. I was in a fog trying to catch up of errands on this, my child-free morning, and finally got to email at noon.

Please pay your bills, please comment about this idea about the soccer team pizza party, please reply to the doctor’s office about whether your kid’s new allergies are responding to the new medication, please buy stuff at our exclusive, super special sale, please offer to proctor the state test, please proofread this white paper, please edit these case studies, please subscribe now to the children’s theater season, please submit emergency contact forms or your kid can’t come to camp this summer, please sign this petition, please double check your automatic order before we send it, please pay for preschool, please share this committee plan, please go to the Board meetings, please send the school money because we’re underfunded, please respond about your preferences regarding the temporary buildings, please look at this budget so we can talk at the next budget meeting, please read this thread so we can position ourselves for the next funding round, please send a proposal that includes high level strategic work as well as simple deadline-crunched writing, please read this book, please sign up for soccer for Fall by Friday because fees go up next week, please use your reward points before they expire, please bike to school tomorrow a part of the massive community effort to minimize local car trips, please plan Mother’s Day so you’re not doing it last minute again, please look over the lease and sign it by Friday, please return or renew your library books, please return or renew your kids’ library books, please let us know when you mailed your Netflix disc, please upgrade your software, please take care of our cat while we’re away for a week, please rate your experience…

That list of emails, which was tame for the middle of the week, put me in a major, shoulder-slumped funk. I certainly don’t have to answer all those requests, and those that need replies can often get a “no.” But a lot of the things on my list I actually *do* need to do.

Please tell me how people do all this? How do they or you or I fit it all in? I want to do a good job on the projects I’m being paid to write or edit. I want to do a good job rewriting my book. I want to submit a proposal for a conference because I’ve had a paper brewing for four years and still haven’t written it. I want a clean house and don’t have the option of making someone else clean it. I want to run several times a week and go fencing at least twice a week and do yoga at least every other day. I want to actually play with my kids when they’re here. I want to prepare and cook good food for at least three meals each day. I want to see my friends and read a book and watch a movie or two. I want to reply to letters written me by dear friends. I want to take the kids to museums and play word games and develop their science and math skills and remind them about gratitude and teach them patience and kindness. I would like to learn another language or two. And I want to sleep more than four hours a night.

So tell me. How do I do that?

How do you do it?

Ballerinos

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Before I had children, I believed that gender was a construction and that the ways in which boys and girls relate to the world, design their play, react to stimuli, and spend their growth energies had more to do with nurture than nature.

Boys, I knew, could play with dolls and nurture just as girls could play with trucks and be rough and loud and scatalogically amused. These are equally true of men and women.

My first son bore out this hypothesis, adoring ladybugs and glitter, talking incessantly, and nursing his dolls.

My second son tends toward trucks, physical over verbal games, and enjoys rough play way more than I ever thought possible.

They both like pink, dancing, and music, though. So we spend a fair number of hours leaping around the living room. For science.

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Yesterday both boys had earned new ballet slippers (by growing, not by any particular behavior; I’m trying not to base our family’s existence around rewards and discipline) and put on their leotards for a dance party. After I helped the little guy into his, I went to the kitchen to get something and heard:

“Now that you have your leotard on, try to hit me.”

I reminded everyone that dancing in our house means hands to yourself. (I’m thinking very clearly with every parenting choice about the rules we’ll have in high school, so dancing with hands to yourself starts now, with your brother. Otherwise, Kevin Bacon wins.)

“Okay okay, okay,” my oldest reassured me.
“Butter. Use your ballet slippers to try to kick me.”

I’ve spent a lot of time during my life with a lot of ballerinas, from tiny rec center trainees to honest-to-goodness professional metropolitan company members. And I have heard a lot of sentences begin with “Now that you have your leotard on…” and “Use your ballet slippers to try to…” but these particular hitting and kicking constructions are new to me.

Let me note the obvious caveat about sample size and repeatability of results. None of this is enough for an actual hypothesis yet.

But the evidence is leaning me toward a “ballerinos are an entirely different group of artists” theory.

Win. Seriously.

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A few weeks ago I read Carinn Jade’s post about gratitude. She has lovely things to say about teaching children to think about their lives in perspective, to teach ourselves to find the bright side by living in thoughtful meditations on gratitude.

After reading it, I decided I’m a terrible parent appreciated the reminder that I should be focusing the family on gratitude. We have always, every night, talked about what each person’s favorite and most challenging parts of the day were. We’ve used it as a way to learn evaluative skills and to hear how other people address challenges.

But other than Thanksgiving, we don’t spend a lot of time using the words grateful and thankful. I’m rather embarrassed about that, because I know full well that reflecting upon that which makes life wonderful creates a cycle in which gratitude makes us see events and people in a better light, which makes us more grateful. I’ve been reading Secrets of Successful Families and Raising Happiness, and both point me in the same direction Jade’s post did: get everyone in the family thinking about life’s gifts, and appreciate them together. It helps.

So we started. I intended to circle the gratitude wagons at dinner, but meals are a reasonably raucous time of “please don’t call each other buttface,” and “please don’t call each other poopface, either,” and “please eat the food or leave it on the plate; food is not a toy,” and “yes, you can have more, but please finish what you have first,” and “did you say that to make him feel good?”, “dear gawd am I ever going to eat more than two bites without someone asking me for something?” moments.

But I finally remembered to ask what the boys are grateful for as we walked to school.

I told them I am grateful I have three wonderful guys in my house to see every day.

Peanut, who is seven, said he is grateful for friends.

Butter, the three-year-old, said he is grateful for cake. If I’d thought of it, I might have started there, too.

I said I am grateful for the way Spring smells and feels and shines.

Peanut said he is grateful that we have enough money to live in a house.

Butter said he doesn’t want to do this any more.

I said I’m grateful we have so much wonderful family to visit and play with.

Peanut said he’s grateful for tigers and leopards and he wants to try to save them.

I judge myself pretty harshly, readers, about the job I’m doing parenting because my kids fight a lot and Spouse and I are not patient enough. But it seems to me that if my seven year old is grateful for friends, his home, and his place in the world, I’m doing an okay job. A genuinely okay job.

And I’m grateful for that.

Supreme Leader of Himself

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Butter has an announcement he’s been pushing through various media sources.

I am not his grownup.

This is generally only an issue he presses when I want to tell him something, ask him something, or remind him of something.

Me: Butterbean, what do you want for breakfast?
B: Mommy! You not my growmup!

Me: Butter, please hold hands.
B: Mommy! You not my growmup!

Me: Butter, time for bath.
B: Mommy, you ‘toopid. You not my growmup!

(I have not mentioned to him yet that it sounds as though he thinks that grownups are secretly one part adult and one part muppet. Because then I’d have to introduce muppets.)

I asked him who is, in fact, his growmup.

“Nothing. No whobody.”

Okeedokee.

I will keep you apprised of his ongoing campaign for independence and emancipation, scheduled to run from now until about the time he’s 22 and graduating with a dual degree in Theater and Public Policy.

Daddy say…

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My three-year-old, goddess love ‘im, is a compulsive liar.

Yes, I know there is no lying before about age seven. I know kids tell their version of the truth for a variety of reasons, most of which is wishful thinking.

But I have never met a toddler who does it like this kid.

Him: Mommy, I want a keekoo.
(He still makes me want to kiss his face off with the speaking backwards. Keekoo=kookee. Cookie.)
Me: Let’s eat breakfast now and have a cookie with lunch.
H: Noooooooooo! Daddy say keekoo now.

Right. I’m sure Daddy told you that cookies are fine at 6:45 a.m. But I’m gonna override him on this one.

When I tell him it’s time to wash hands, he climbs onto the counter and into the sink and tells me that Daddy says that’s the way to wash hands.

When I hand him a cup of water and he pours it all over the floor, I remind him that water is for drinking. Water on the floor is a mess and people fall down. He then reminds me that, with all due respect to the towel I’m handing him for the cleanup, “Daddy say pour, pour, pour, leave right there, no touch.”

Fine. If Daddy says you should pour water all over the floor, leave it, and not touch it, why then you go find Daddy and he can help you clean.

“Oh, pumpkin, did you fall? Oh I’m sorry. You slipped because there was water on the floor. How did that get there?”

“Daddy do dat.”

He’s probably waiting for me to make Daddy clean it up, but I know what will happen if I do. Daddy’ll blame the cat.

To the moon and back

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You know what I love about long distance with children?

1. Their severely curtailed sleep means there are literally dozens more hours to spend with them throughout the week.

2. And their misfiring, sleep-deprived brains say very silly and adorable things. When they’re not screaming or whining or sobbing about something.

3. The newness of being in an unfamiliar place means their naturally scientific brains will see and absorb everything, from impressive technical facts about mollusks and brown pelicans to the precise copy from a barely overheard erectile-dysfunction ad playing on a television two rooms away.

4. Of course, vacation can mean wonderful time with extended family. Being surrounded by loving adults can make anything better and can help you see clearly. In fact, it can help you see how even twice the number of adults does not make parenting small children any easier. Seriously, evidence is starting to suggest that it would take twenty child care experts (or kindergarten) to get me a semi-regular shower. Or a run. The tally of shower-free-days to reasonably-scented-days on vacation is even worse than at home. (I did get to go bathing suit shopping, though. That experience is actually much easier thousands of miles from home. I highly recommend you shop for your most loathed piece of clothing when you’re far, far, far from mirrors you recognize.)

5. Children on vacation have delightful appetites and a charmingly predictable neophobia that means all they’ll eat is crackers. Crackers are good, quick energy for explosive volume and wild beach play. Yay for cracker-exclusive dining. Nothing but good can come from a week of an all-cracker diet, I’ve heard experts say.

6. Frantic children, geographically displaced by well-meaning adults, allowed to write their own sleep schedule, and fed nothing but crackers run around like wild monkeys, desperate for outside activities. This means a wonderful opportunity to teach frequent, thorough sunscreen application. Because vacationing children don’t have time to wait for adults to wash and sunscreen their own faces, extended vacations are a delightful reminder why paraben-free mineral sunscreen is a terrible idea for middle-aged skin. Lots of sunshine with children is a quick and easy path to enormous, painful breakouts. Thanks for the reminder, Spring Break!

7. At the end of the journey, flight attendants are highly trained and extensively experienced in handling exhausted, carbo-loaded children. They offer, with subtle glances and measured words, a lifetime worth of child-rearing assistance without even being asked. Hurray for unhelpful unsolicited advice! It makes us at once shamed and hopeless about our parenting.

But every parent knows reentry is the toughest part of vacation. No matter how long you’re gone, the first two days back are characterized by turbulence. Nobody’s well rested, well fed, or well adjusted. One part wanting to go back, one part relieved to be home, one part sick of being together, and one part daunted by jumping back on the treadmill you had forgotten is set permanently at 12 mph.

This means the very best part of a long vacation with a transcontinental flight is that those amongst you who still use a car seat will sleep on the plane. Nobody else will, including those who’ve graduated to a booster. So Day One of reentry will be characterized by exhausted, snippy people calmed by a somewhat reasonable three-year-old. Let me say that again (so I’m the only site on the Interwebs that will include the statistically significant phrase “somewhat reasonable three-year-old”): Somewhat. Reasonable. Three-year-old. So relatively rested, in fact, that when his older brother falls and cuts a gash across his face in the middle of Day One at home, the three-year-old will fetch the ice pack while you’re trying to decide whether to see the doctor (yes) for stitches (no, thankfully).

See? Travel with the whole family. Think big. The upsides are huge. Learning and perspective and crackers.

Aaaaaah. Three.

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Some of you might not know that Three-Years-Old is the portal to the Seventh Circle of Hell.

I’m here to tell you, again, that it is.

I know about Threes’ seven-layer dip of insanity, lack of impulse control, emotional immaturity, irrationality, impatience, illogic, and incontinence because I still have PTSD from my eldest’s year-long bout of The Threes. The day he threw furniture at the closed door that signaled “Mommy Needs A Timeout to Keep from Beating You.” The day he assaulted me, apologized to get me closer, then attacked again. The day he raged because I wouldn’t go out in the rain and drive alone to the store to bring him back mushrooms, a food he didn’t like. The day he peed in the cat box because he didn’t like my rules.

Three. The “at-least-it’s-good-for-a-laugh” antithesis of good times.

I’ve braced myself for Butterbean to turn Three. I’ve girded and steeled and all other architectural metaphor-ed. I’ve prepared.

So when he spun into a tantrum because I dared to say that being grown up means I won’t, in fact, get taller, I tried not to laugh. He screamed for half an hour that I have to get taller right now.

I wish, buddy. But you are not the first to try nonsense tactics. And you will not win. Not only do I not refuse to get taller right now, I refuse to talk about it.

When Butter recently threw himself out of the stroller and writhed and yelled and tried to hit me as I asked how I could help, I dispassionately plopped him back in the stroller and kept walking. And repeated one house later. And another, and another, each time offering to carry him, cuddle him, or let him push the stroller as long as we kept going. When it didn’t work I just kept breathing and tossing his enraged body back into the stroller. Because I know what happens when you negotiate with Three-Year-Olds. All of this blog from 2009 is what happens when you negotiate with Three-Year-Olds.

But a new calm has come over me. I can outlast Three. I have done it before. I can survive earthquake and fire and oncoming traffic that smashes my ride at 106 miles an hour. And graduate school. If I am still standing after all that, I can survive another three-year-old. I’m not alone in my plight, and there are experts whose advice can help.

In fact, my newly crowned Three’s tendency toward batshit insane actually has his seven-year-old brother taking a turn for the avuncular. Battles of wills are being dropped rather than pressed, sharing is increasing, and feelings are being calmly listed more this month than in all of last year. Today Peanut explained to his brother what to do when you’re really mad and draw back to kick someone. “Change your mind,” he said, “and talk about how angry you are instead.”

Maybe there’s an upside to Three. Or an upside to Seven. Or to the synergy between them.

I hope so. We could really use an upside or two or Three.

And….scene.

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I am proud to announce that I am now mother to a seven-year-old and a three-year-old.

Feels weird. The youngest is no longer a toddling disaster waiting to happen, though he is about as fully Three as a young human can be. If you don’t know what a scathing epithet “Three” can be, please search the interwebs and ask your friends. Three is so adorably horrible it…ah, what the heck. I have all year to tell you. And an archive full of 2009’s Three-based rants to tide you over.

In addition to morphing of young Mr. Needs Attention All the Time into Mr. Needs Attention Most of the Time, 2013 has brought to our home a full-fledged seven-year-old person with all manner of ideas and stories to tell. And mischief to orchestrate. He’s delightful. When he’s not surly. Or ignoring simply requests. Or antagonizing his brother and parents.So I might be able to spend five minutes a day actually focused on this young man, now that his brother is less hazard than attitude problem.

But several moms this week have told me that nine is really he beginning of puberty and its signature mood swings, detestable behaviors, and frequent parenting moments.

So I have two years to enjoy the delightful creature whom I’ve basically ignored for two years while his brother has been tearing around like a Tasmanian devil. I have to make the most of every single moment, for after those two years, the creature formerly called Peanut will become hormonally-altered, and I will be shut out forever.

(Have I mentioned I’m a huge fan of hyperbole? Probably not, and since it’s potentially not obvious from my hysterical rantings, I’ll mention it here. Hyperbole is the best thing ever!)

And I have two years to guide the little tea kettle of irrational lunges toward independence before he blossoms into a lovely, individual creature who will privilege his peers’ opinions over mine and relish his long hours at school without me. As we now know, most five-year-olds fall in with the wrong crowd and ignore their parents for the rest of their young lives.

A crossroads. One is in the middle of his best four childhood years. And the other is in the middle of his toughest childhood years. In 730 days they will transition into the initial phases of teenager and the initial phases of elementary schooler.

730 days. That’s all I have. After that it’s…well, it’s…it’s another 1460 days before things get really dicey, with a teen and a tween. And then only 1095 more days until one is driving and both are shaving. And then only 730 days before one leaves for college.

Sob!

My baby is going to college in 4,198 days! I have to go make sure we have enough soap and shampoo and extra-long twin sheets to get him there!

Hang on. How many leap years between now and 2024? I have to go do some research. I’ll get back to you soon with how long I actually have before I start sobbing and taking on new hobbies and…wait. The other one will still be here. I won’t be alone and depressed and needing seven new hobbies until at least 2028.

Just when I was thinking four years was a crummy spread because one is always in a challenging phase and so consuming my maternal energy I miss the other’s delightful age…

No problem. 2028.

I can hold off panicking until then.

Phew.

Now I have time to panic about getting through Three.

And Seven.

New rule.

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When I used to post every day it was much easier to collect my thoughts. Now it’s as though I’m going through negatives from rolls of film I shot last year…very few images are as compelling as they were when I framed them.

[Now that I’ve lost most of my readers by mentioning film and negatives, I can continue without the same level of self consciousness.]

Here are some rules I invented this week, the official week of “I give up, I’m going to toss out at least half of my old rules because I can’t make it through another Three Year Old without caving in a good percentage of the time.”

1. Though we never, ever buy unplanned items at the store, making a policy, instead, of taking a photo of your desired item and putting it on your birthday list for grandma, this is your birthday month. During that month all rules are suspended, I freaking give up, and you can talk me into anything. Because if we see it today and  you know we’re buying it because there isn’t time for the regular photo-email-grandma-purchase-wrap-mail cycle, I’m not going to make you wait for two weeks just because you happened to finish gestating on a particular day. Here. Happy early birthday. Again.

2. When you find a very new special rabbit friend in the Jelly Cat aisle, I will propose that you need her today because you have a new bed and new beds need new friends. That should set you up for a life of knee-jerk consumerism and awesomely promiscuous behavior. Three cheers for my parenting. You’re welcome. Only because you have a new bed and a new love. Remember that.

3. I know we’re all whole grain and organic and protein at every meal, but as long as there’s no good reason, if you want a chocolate croissant for a snack and rice cakes for lunch and two lollypops, one for you and one for your new bunny, why then I think half a peanut butter sandwich is enough protein for the day. You don’t want that, either? Fine. How about some cheese puffs? Just because, remember. Just because.

4. When you propose using your own money for something relatively inexpensive and promise to pay me back, including tax, when we get home, I reserve the right to ask for the money, take the money, then give it right back. Because you’re adorable and I can handle a $9.99 plus tax much better than you can. Plus, you offered to pay for your own and gleefully suggested I buy a companion model for your brother. You never once noticed that’s not fair. I love a guy who is so caught up in making active and thoughtful choices that he doesn’t worry too much about everything-equal versions of fair.

5. The times you kindly remind me that Leega isn’t my new bunny, and that your brother gets to decide if he wants his bunny covered in sand and dirt and muddy grass; and on the occasions you then eat your entire burrito and drink your whole smoothie, you clearly need chocolate. Have some. No, have a lot. In the name of the bunny you defended. And the smoothie you…oh, hell, I have no good reason. Have some chocolate.

6. Because you’re both such troopers and you try so hard, despite fighting like cornered rats about everything under the sun, I’ve started adding lemon balm to my daily quart of chamomile. Because while you make your way, the last thing you need is an uptight, shrewish guilt-gifting mother.

Enjoy your lolly, new bunny friend.

Just one, sweetie. I know they’re good, but it’s important to have growing food, not just treat food…ah, hell. Sure. Have four. And some chocolate. You’re already a mess.

leega

Plan of Attack

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So I posted a couple of weeks ago that I can’t handle the sibling interactions up in this joint. And with some suggestions from readers, some ideas from parenting books, and some long hot showers (okay, just one, but still…), I’ve come up with a plan. Well, not so much come up with as cobbled together. On the fly. Okay, I’ve MacGyvered a plan.

1. Kindness gets noticed and rewarded. Every kind word or action, every moment of gentle voices or gentle hands, every shared toy and shared moment garners positive reinforcement. Not only do I point out and thank the perpetrator of kindness, I also add a cotton ball to a mason jar in the kitchen.
A full jars wins a family celebration. Glow stick walks around the neighborhood before bed, a trip to the museum, a gorgeous hike, a trip on the train. Something to celebrate the accumulation of goodness that doesn’t involve treat foods. Because if we gave up chocolate until we were all nice the world would end with my chocolate collection intact. Nobody wants that. So, food-independent celebration of kindness.
Lesson: practice being nice and you’ll have a happier family.

2. Nastiness is shut right the hell down. Talking nasty, teasing, and namecalling are rebuffed with a reminder that we don’t talk that way, that we are a family and have to live together, and that we’re all teaching each other how we want to be treated. The second reminder involves removal from the situation. Any physical violence, threatened or executed, results in removal from the room and removal of any toy involved in the situation.
Tomorrow is a new day and you can have the toy back, but if you practice unkindness, I practice removing you from the situation.
Lesson: practice being nasty and you’ll be alone more. Alone is good for restoring and finding kindness. Come back when you’re ready to contribute not destroy.

3. The direct link between sibling tension and my adrenal glands is being severed. They can disagree and find a solution, and they need to be given the tools to do that. If they fight and call names and hit I can correct their behavior without biochemically equating it with being eaten by a tiger. Their emotional health is tied to my ability to keep cool. For years I couldn’t keep cool if they were terrible to each other because I felt, physically, that meanness portended a terrible end. End to what, I don’t know. I just know I absolutely freaked out each time one of them screamed. Or called the other a name. Or grabbed a toy from the other. I didn’t necessarily yell or overreact or lose it in front of them. But biochemically and physically I freaked out. And holding onto that adrenaline all day was destroying my ability to function.
So now I try really hard to visualize the chemical link between one child’s screams and my adrenaline response; and I pull up the drawbridge to that pathway. I try hard not to let their discomfort with being unable to get their way shortcircuit my patience or logic or love.
Lesson: I am not the repository for their conflict. I can teach, lead, guide, and function better if I stop the adrenaline before it flows.

The first two are much easier than the third. But practicing niceness will make them nicer, shutting down nastiness will make us all function better, and eventually allowing conflict to ram up against crappy solutions before finding the best way forward will not keep making my blood pressure spike. Because twenty years is a long time to have my shoulders up around my ears, my stomach clenched, and my muscles ready to fight or take flight.

So. Three part plan to sibling kindness.

Week Two, the only part that’s working so far is that I’m more detached.

Win?

Oh, HAIL no.

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I just got home from volunteering in Peanut’s first grade class. I’ve wanted to do this all  year, but my schedule hasn’t allowed it. Until now. I’m giving his sweet little face and adorable friends an hour of my time every week. They’re reading to me. I could eat them up.

Most of them.

But right now I’m so freaking mad.

Not at the teacher. She’s heaven and perfection wrapped in a package of cuteness. She might actually be the world’s most ideal first-grade teacher, but I don’t want to sway the judges in case she’s actually second or third best.

I’m not mad at the school, though I always have complaints. Shocking, I know. Naptime Complaining is the name wordpress always offers me when mine’s about to expire.

No, it’s not the institution that has riled me. I’m enraged at whoever is raising those two boys who debated with me today in class.

One came right out, apropos of nothing, and told me that girls can’t play soccer.

Um, yes they can. May I introduce you to the tale of the US women and the 1991 World Cup? I’m sorry, what, punk? Did you just say no to me? How about a little thing called the women’s Olympic team? No? Never heard of it? Hmmmm. Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain have a little something to tell you, boy, about the four gold medals the US has won playing against seriously talented female soccer players from all over the world.

His tablemate joined in. “Yeah. Did you know girls can’t play with boys’ toys?”

Ah, hello, 1940. Yes they can. “Well,” I said, “that’s not true. What do you consider boys’ toys?”

“LEGO,” he said.

“Girls play with LEGO,” I said. “I play with LEGO, my nieces play with LEGO, our neighbors play with LEGO. Building is not just for boys.”

“Sure it is, he said. “Girls can only play with LEGO friends.”

I’m assuming those are the asinine pink LEGO sets I railed against when they were introduced…until I found out girls loved them and were introduced to building and physics and architecture and spatial relations due to pink LEGOs. So I shut the hell up and found another cause for my feminist-consumerist rage.

Never once did it occur to me during this classroom bickering, by the way, that they were taunting me just to get my goat. First-graders don’t pick fights just to get a rise out of someone, right? That’s what husbands are for, I’m pretty sure.

Who is raising these little misogynists? I told my son, who was reading a soccer book, that the jerk boys at another table said soccer isn’t for girls. I didn’t say jerk boys, since I’ve told him repeatedly to stop calling those two particular boys jerks, a parenting practice I will now cease.

“Well, here’s one,” he said, pointed to a girl playing soccer in his book. “And C, D, and N and O all play soccer.”

“Right,” I said. “And there are professional women’s soccer players and Olympic women’s soccer players.”

“Yeah,” said one of the friends who has been to our house once and now gets a permanent invitation. “Women play soccer really well. All over the world. The American team was even in the World Cup.”

“Damn skippy,” I totally didn’t say. I probably “Yeah”ed him, but I don’t remember. My affirmative replies are funnier when I write them in Jazz-era-colored hindsight.

I can’t stand it. I want to go fight with those six-year-old boys. I want to call their parents. I want to write a letter and a school-wide presentation and host a sit-in.

Seriously. What the hell? Who still believes women can’t play soccer or play with blocks?

Of course this is coming from their parents. But are they isolated cases of ignorance and small-mindedness or are there whole cultures who still believe this? There were four boys who chimed in about grrl power. There were two boys who insisted girls can’t do what boys can. Aside from knowing whose mom I need to take out for drinks and whose dads and uncles and brothers need schooling, how do we change this? Do we hope the four educated boys talk some sense into the misogynists? Do I make it my goal—instead of going back to work, finishing my books, publishing my academic articles, and learning a few foreign languages so that finishing my doctorate is a real option—to teach all of the school district that boys and girls can both do anything they work hard for? To reassure both genders that they don’t have to compete, but to recognize each other as individuals? To build teams that are gender-blind but that reach to cover the whole gamut of talents, from interpersonal skills to knowledge in hard sciences to sportsmanship to verbal acumen to creativity to mathematic excellence?

Do I need to take up the standard that the Third Wave has shrugged off because they have ten million other things to do (and because seriously with the all-or-nothing guilt, First Wavers). Do we need to have more open talks in this country about race and economics and gender and assumptions and hatred and ignorance and teaching your kids some manners when talking to a delightful school volunteer?

The teacher overheard one boy and asked me what prompted his statement about girls being less than equal. I explained. Her eyes widened. “Oh, we have a new book to read after we get back from the library,” she insisted, promising with her tone that the rest of the day would be about grrl power.

Damn skippy, I say.

Quality of Life

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You know what, six-and-three-quarters-year-old? If you tell the toddler he’s wrong every time he does or says something, he’s going to be mad. And he’s relatively inarticulate. His defense mechanisms are few. So when he feels bad because you’ve told him he’s not Bob the Builder or he’s not actually a big guy or his truck can’t build a new road, he’s going to hit you. It’s not fair, it’s not nice, and I’m working on stopping it. But may I just state for the record that you totally have it coming.

You know what, two-and-three-quarters-year-old? If you walk up and slug your brother because you don’t like what he’s said or where he is or what his plans are for the day, he’s going to get mad. You’re lucky that he now just screams like his head’s been severed and stomps away and says he won’t play with you. For at least two years he’s gotten used to shoving you or hitting you back. That he now withdraws his friendship is well within the bounds of reasonable. And it’s what I taught him to do. (Minus the screaming. Jaysus with the screaming.) Howsabout you do what I’ve taught you, and tell him, “Stop it!” rather than hitting.

You know what, both of you small boys? You’re beating me down. I don’t need much, but I need you to be kind to each other. I’ve done some research. Seven-to-eight sibling fights an hour is normal. You fight less than that. But even one fight a day where one of you hurts the other or one of you says something mean is too much. Knock. It. Off.

Because you’re breaking my spirit. I’m about to be the mom who won’t get out of bed in the morning because whether I do or don’t, you’re screaming and hitting within 5 minutes of waking. Yes, the first four minutes are adorable. You’re quite lovely to each other when you stick to the script. After that, all bets are off. And I talk kindly and explain why you should, too. But I kind of don’t see the point anymore.

Why do you play nicely until I dart down the stairs to go to the bathroom? Or ask you to put on shoes? Or try to cook? Why you gotta be like that? The second my back is turned you’re hurting one another’s souls, guys. Why with the calling names? Our mantra here is “It’s never okay to do something to make someone feel bad.” (Mad props to the friend who taught me that one.) That goes for retaliation hitting and scratching and biting. That goes for namecalling. That goes for demeaning someone or their imaginary world. That goes for excluding. That goes for talking nasty when a gentle explanation will do.

At least once an hour one of you is genuinely kind to your brother. And I tell you how nice that feels or sounds. I tell you to be proud of how you used your words and your kindness to make him happy.

And at least once an hour on or more of you is terrible. Horrid. Criminally nasty. And I tell you that your behavior is unacceptable. That you are a good person practicing being mean, which might make you grow up mean.

Why does this not work? Why are you not fixed? Why can’t you be mostly nice and withdraw when you need time alone? Why can’t you go without hitting or yelling or psychologically punishing each other for just one day?

Don’t give me that “because we’re small children and need your constant guidance, without which we falter and can’t possibly be kind to each other.” Mama has to pee, guys. And read a book, some day.

This steady rhythm of sometimes-nice-but-often-shitty-to-each-other is wearing me down.

And summer is coming. Lots of together time. Lots.

Please. Help a mama out. Stop being nasty to each other.

[To all those out there whose children get along famously, please go give them an extra kiss tonight, because their contributions to family harmony are deeply important. To those who’ve successfully guided asshole children to kinder and gentler ways, please comment below. Ayudame. Por favor.]

 

It could be worse

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Sunday afternoon, after a friend made a gorgeous brunch for us, my beautiful little guy starting puking. Strawberries. All over a gorgeous house.

And I cleaned it and cuddled him and apologized and went on with my day. He asked for a blueberry smoothie. Happy that he felt better, I made one. And he barfed it all over the car. And the house. And his bed and my bed.

My friend, whose family probably bleached their whole house after we left, was sympathetic.

There’s nothing worse than a puking kid, she said.

Actually, I thought, there is.

I remembered the ear infections from hell.  And how food poisoning and pregnancy has luckily struck only the adults in our family.

Today, as the second child started peppering our floors and furniture with regurgitated blueberry smoothie (you’d think I’d learned my lesson and make only pineapple and banana smoothies), I smiled and cuddled and laundered and tea-steeped. Because one puking kid is bearable.

Then Spouse came home with similar symptoms. The older child was tossing cookies (water, really, since he hasn’t eaten for twelve hours) every 30 minutes. And the little guy kept whining the petulant cry of the tired and sick, between grossly congested coughs.

Between them, they’ve been in bed four hours and woken, crying and asking for me, eight times.

It’s going to be a long night. But this is better than so many things that could be wrong. It will end soon, it’s something different, it relieves me of fixing snacks or meals, it lessens the pressure to come up with constructive projects and educational games, and it’s basically a vacation from the tasmanian-devils-on-speed energy we usually have around here. We’re lucky to have laundry facilities and running water and They Might Be Giants science DVDs.

But we’re running out of towels. And sheets. And Bio-Kleen. And I’m going to have to miss a reunion with a friend tomorrow so I can clean vomit off the floor and walls because my kids aren’t old enough to just run to the toilet or sink or tub or something not right…there. Oh, it’s okay, honey. It’s not your fault. This is what Mommies and Daddies are for. Just feel better, pumpkin.

Wanna place bets on how long I look on the bright side, and on what officially flips me to the “I will pay the next door-to-door solicitor to stay here for a while so I can run screaming through the streets” camp?