This stuff is awesome. It's just so unpredictable.
Small children's moods skyrocket up and down within the space of a couple of minutes. We can go from laughing to tears and screaming and back again over something as mundane as who is standing too close to the heater vent, no that's my heater vent, not your heater vent! On any given morning I'm never quite sure if I'm going to encounter a couple of cheerful children, a couple of inexplicably pissy children, or one of each.
The up side is that when things suck you can bet that they'll probably change before too long. But the down side, for me, is that I find this unpredictability and moodiness extremely stressful.
I don't really do well with moody people. As a child it stressed me out a great deal, had me tiptoeing around always afraid of setting something off, something I could never predict. I felt like I was always walking on eggshells and I would literally tiptoe around trying to avoid being noticed, trying to be as invisible as possible, flying under his radar. And as an adult it still stresses me out. I had one boyfriend in college who was the moody type and it just reminded me way too much of how out of control I used to feel as a kid. You never know what you're going to get, and you never know what will set a person off. So you can't count on any particular day necessarily being a "good" day. The good days can be incredibly good. But the bad days can come for no discernable reason at all. It was too much for me.
Jake is a super even keeled person and this is very reassuring to me. It makes me feel secure and I feel like I never have to worry about what he's going to be like. Like any human, of course, he does have bad moods but they're not frequent and they're pretty predictable, for reasons that I can anticipate and that make sense to me. Also, Jake's behavior when he's in a bad mood is just that he gets quiet and a little withdrawn. That I can handle.
Once when I was teaching school, one of my fellow math teachers was a little short with me one morning. It was a very minor thing and it didn't even bother me, but then she said, "I'm sorry, I'm just in a bad mood today." And I thought that was awesome. I realized, oh! You can just be upfront about the fact that you're in a bad mood? That is totally great, it alerts somebody to what's going on, it makes them realize that it's not anything they did and it's not about them...what a great way to communicate! I loved it that she said that. (That college boyfriend would never have admitted that he was in a bad mood.)
Nora and Milo cannot, of course, express that. Or rather, they do express it, but in much less pleasant ways, like endless whining (Nora) or random throwing of objects or screaming outbursts (Milo). The other night Milo did something I've been trying to keep him from doing (he called Nora a "bad girl", which drives me nuts), and I stopped him and he just lost it and screamed, "I HATE THIS!" I could totally relate. I actually love that he said that, that he is beginning to be able to use words to talk about how he feels when he feels lousy, to communicate it in some direct, descriptive way. It seems like the more they can talk about it when they're not feeling so great, the more they'll grow up to be like that math teacher colleague of mine and less like that college boyfriend.
And me, I just try to roll with it and not get too freaked out over unpredictable moodiness which is, I have to imagine, part of the developmental sphere of preschoolerness, and doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be like this forever.
Maybe it's just good practice for the teen years.
No comments:
Post a Comment