Worry

I'm worried about Nora. I'm not sure at what point something is just a normal phase, or a rough patch, and at what point there's an indication of a real problem that needs real help. Nora's behavior is just terrible all the time, and she is melting down constantly. I mean, constantly. On Wednesday by the time Jake got home I told him he needed to take the kids outside IMMEDIATELY because I had just spent the past 10 hours listening to Nora either whine, cry, scream, or yell. I mean that almost literally. She had been doing it all day without any breaks.

(And when he took them outside, she proceeded to scream bloody murder until we finally relented and let her back inside with me, so that she could proceed to whine and fuss in the kitchen while I tried to prepare dinner.)

Today I came home to see that Milo had a giant scratch across his face where Nora had attacked him.

She's clearly not happy. She seems happy about school, and when I mention her teachers Nora will smile involuntarily. She's always cheerful and having a good time when we pick her up from school. She doesn't seem to have issues with going to school, and she's cheerful on the car ride there, looking forward to going. So I don't think school is the problem. Unless it's more that it is very, very taxing on Nora to keep it together all day long at school and behave for so long, and maybe she needs to let it out at home or something.

Maybe it is just too many changes at once, and she is reeling. They lost their nanny, they started school, they went into separate bedrooms, they switched from cribs to beds...all of this happened in the past couple of months. Nora does seem very insecure right now. It's like when she was a baby and wouldn't let me put her down ever. We're back in that situation where I can't even go to the bathroom without a meltdown. She's almost 3...it doesn't seem normal to be so clingy at this age. I'm worried that she seems so anxious.

Is this a symptom of something nefarious? What if Nora is being abused at school or something unthinkable like that and this is how she's communicating it? But if that were the case, she probably wouldn't want to go to school, right? I wish I knew whether this was normal. Milo has never behaved this way. He has meltdowns and so forth, but they seem like normal toddler stuff. He melts down, he gets over it, the end. He's generally cheerful. With Nora, she can start the day off on the wrong foot and then spend the entire day all messed up, she never recovers.

This is hard on me and Jake and Milo. It is upsetting and stressful to be in a house with so much yelling, screaming, crying, and whining. It wears on all of us. We are all exhausted and Jake and I are feeling like we're at the end of our ropes.

I am worried that life is going to be hard for Nora, that there is something about her constitution that makes things harder to handle.

I have to travel again this week, and then again the next. I'm also worried that this is bad timing for me to travel and Nora can't handle it right now. I feel bad about everything. Like maybe what Nora really needs to feel okay and secure is to just be with me all day every day. Like if I didn't work and spent 24/7 with her, then she would be okay. But because I work and travel, she is constantly insecure and feels like she can never let me out of her sight. It's so sad.

I wish I could take a year off and just give her that.