I have been slain by Nora's illness and have been up sick all night, miserable all day, in a cold sweat all weekend. Nothing a little rest and maybe some 7-up with crushed ice wouldn't cure (where the hell is my mother?). But I don't get to rest in bed with 7-up and crushed ice, because if Nora knows I am in the house but not playing with her, picking her up, and doing all of that sheer physical stuff involved in parenting, she goes ballistic. Seriously, we're talking standing at the bottom of the stairs, banging on the gate, screaming and crying "Mama, Mama, Mama" over and over again. Which is not very restful for any of us.
Poor Jake.
Nora's histrionics get Milo going, and the next thing you know it's a weekend of two kids yelling and screaming and crying nonstop. Are other people's kids like this? Do our kids yell and cry an unusual amount? I just don't have the energy to deal with it this weekend.
Today when Nora woke from her afternoon nap I could hear her crying (unusual) and saying "Mama, where'd Mama go? Mama, Mama." So I went in there, and Nora just proceeded to lose it. For an entire hour. Seriously, she spent an entire hour screaming and crying, sometimes outright tantruming, kicking and flailing. She wanted me to hold her that whole time and damn it, I did because I had this weird suspicion that Nora was freaking out over me being unavailable most of the weekend. Like she'd reached the end of her rope and she just couldn't handle it anymore, she hated that I wouldn't walk around holding her, she hated it every time I wanted to sit down or lie down, she hated not having me be normal like she wanted me to be, and I feel like maybe she was testing me by being as horrible as she could possibly be to see if I would stick around or not. So I held her but every second I was second-guessing myself, wondering if I was doing the wrong thing by indulging this behavior, teaching her to be an absolute pill. Like maybe I should have put her in her room and told her that I would hold her when she was done crying?
I had this flashback to this one time when I was in the car with my dad and stepmom and my younger sister was about Nora's age, and my dad was going on about how the reason a child cries is not the first thing to attend to. The first thing to do is correct the inappropriate behavior (stop the screaming), the reason doesn't matter, what matters is that the child is screaming, which is inappropriate. Only when the child has calmed down is it then okay to deal with the reason behind the screaming. At the time this struck me as cruel but now I think, well, that sister is now all grown up and is a perfectly lovely person. So maybe he was right -- what if I am doing it the wrong way and Nora is going to turn out to be a giant jerk because I am overly permissive?
1 comment:
YES other people's children do the exact same thing!!! Mine do anyway. It's not AS bad these days, but still happens. And about the dealing w/ the behavior before the reason.. hmmm. When you are feeling like you are on death's door you do what you can do to survive and you will know when the time is right to deal w/ the behavior before the reason. It's okay. Hope you are feeling better today!
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