Growing Pains

Occasionally, in my ample free time, I like ponder Life’s Great Mysteries.  Lately I’ve been stuck on this:

How is possible that two people who essentially follow the same routine EVERY SINGLE DAY after school have such trouble remembering it?

I mean, these are not complicated steps.  Remove shoes, deposit shoes in shoe drawer.  Use potty.  Wash hands thoroughly with soap.

After that, the world is your oyster.  Play, build, read, beg mommy for video game time.

OM MY GOD WHY MUST THIS BE SO COMPLICATED AND TAKE SO LONG???  And, I’m sorry, but TEARS?  Really?

Every.  Day.

Babygirl is going through a challenging phase.  I won’t go into gory detail here, but suffice to say she’s four years old and therefore by definition sort of irrational and unregulated.  Plus, stubborn, vocal, and also impossibly cute, which it turns out is a terrible combination.  You try arguing with those eyelashes sometime.  I pity her future Middle School boyfriends.

Anyway, Babygirl apparently decided that four years old was a good time to try being thirteen, so whenever she gets in trouble these days, she crosses her arms, turns her back, slams her bedroom door, then hurls something out there along the lines of “You’re a bad mommy!” or “I wish I wasn’t even in this family!” or “You never do anything nice at all!”

This is obviously awesome.

Except that it is — kind of, in a very backhanded way — because it is in these moments that I realize how far I have come as a mother.  I mean, LittleMan used to say stuff like that too, when he was four and testing out the power of language, and it would break me.  As in, I would have to go on time-out and lock myself in my room and sob and grieve for all the ways I was failing as a mother because my own children don’t love me and are obviously going to run away someday.

Nowadays, when Babygirl does it, I’m like: “Whatever, you go in your room and cool off and I’ll go in the kitchen and cool off and we’ll talk again when you want a snack in five minutes.”

Let me be very clear.  I ADORE BABYGIRL.  And I don’t like hearing her say that she wishes had a different mommy.  That really sucks, for lack of a better word.  But I have the advantage now of a kind of flash-forward machine in LittleMan, and I can see that it’s going to be okay.  LittleMan has probably hurtled insults my way 100 times, but you know what?  Little tiny humans don’t really know what their words mean!  They think that the worst thing you can say to a person is “You aren’t invited to my birthday party!”  Mommy insults are so far down their list of hurtful things.

In fact, LittleMan actually loves me, like, a lot.  We snuggle and have our own little language and rituals and we are totally square.  Similarly, Babygirl, when she isn’t screaming, actually clearly kind of wishes that she and I were still physically attached with living tissue, like back in the good old umbilical-cord days.  (Seriously, that child needs to be touching me at all moments.  It’s crazy-making but also cute.)

I am so grateful for this perspective.  It is a gift that time and age and the wisdom of far more experienced mothers have given me: that however it feels right now, this will pass and we will all be okay.  I am grateful for it not only because I sleep better and am generally happier, but also because for a while there, I was feeling motherhood so deeply — all of it, the joy and the love and the fear and the despair — that I harbored a genuine concern that I might not survive it all.  It just felt like so much, whiplashing through the barrage of emotions of first-time motherhood.  How does one live like that?

One doesn’t.

Instead, one grows and learns to feel deeply when it matters: to breathe in those snuggles, to carefully consider the power of words and the pros and cons of disciplinary measures, to hug fiercely and often, to laugh and listen and counsel.  But one also learns to step back: to say, This is a test, this is not fact; these little humans are fickle and riding a tide of emotion, and it’s my job to rise above that. 

The more I think about it, this isn’t just a gift: it’s a responsibility.  I mean, how can I teach them to be reasonable if I’m not?  How can I teach them that sticks and stones are one thing and hotheaded words are another, if I let those words undo me?

I never stops fascinating me, the ways in which we are all growing up together, all the time.  The learning, evolving…it never ends.

What a gift this is.