As a work-from-home mom with three children under the age of five, I often feel as if I’m failing on both ends—I’m not as productive in my work as I’d like to be, and I’m not as good of a mom as I’d like to be. I’ve tried to rectify this with schedules, better time management, and foregoing sleep in the interest of being more available. It’s to little avail. What am I doing wrong? How can I make this better?
Today, my four-and-a-half-year-old is wearing a princess dress and is continually reminding me that “she’s not a little girl.” Today, she’s been Princess Belle, Princess LaLa, and a few other names in between. She can remember who she’s pretending to be, but she can’t remember to flush the potty. She didn’t used to have this problem; it only started after we had her little sister just before Christmas. I realize it’s a reaction to the new addition who she otherwise couldn’t be happier with. Her bathroom habits also regressed when we had her almost two-year-old sister in January 2016.
The two-year-old, by the way, is maternal and loving with the baby, but her emotions have flown off the charts. She’s more physically needy and demanding now that the new baby is here, and she is shrill and whiny most days. She’s also my picky eater, and I struggle with worrying she’ll be hungry and with acquiescing and giving her nothing but “snack” food (by that I mean Annie’s organic crackers or organic golden raisins). Occasionally, she’ll add something new to her repertoire, but such deviances are few and far between.
Right now, I worry that my daughters feel abandoned on some level because we have a new baby. I worry about their tender little emotions and try to assure them (somehow) that my heart is big enough for all of them to occupy the whole thing at once. For the most part, I think they realize this.
While trying to guarantee my children’s emotional security, I’m also trying to raise decent, respectful human beings who will be meaningful contributors to society…ideally without damaging them.
I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s. My dad was a traditional, salt of the earth, hardworking man. He was the provider; he was the designated bad cop. My mom gave him little choice in this regard. She was the pacifier, the nurturer. Punishment was delivered in a, “Wait until your father gets home,” type of fashion in formative years. Later, she implemented timeouts (she called it restriction) and such, which were more amusing than anything. My brother and I had rooms that were caddy corner to each other, so if we were put on restriction, we’d sit and roll a ball back and forth or engage in some other play until the 15-minutes of “punishment” was over. It was ironic since our playing-turned-fighting was usually what got us in trouble in the first place.
When dad walked the beat, the results were traumatic and not because we were spanked—it was still legal then to spank a kid in the grocery store, which I assure you, was one reason to behave yourself. It was the yelling that did the most damage. Now that I’m a parent, I understand; when your kid, who you love more than life itself, refuses to listen for the millionth time when you ask them something seemingly simple like, “Can you put your shoes on?” or when you’ve asked upwards of 25 times (literally) for your child to pick up their toys, and you find them playing or worse yet, getting new toys out, you become irrational. You take it personally. You yell. And then you feel bad, and, at least nowadays, you worry that you’re damaging them.
You worry more when they start to give you sass. My 4 1/2 -year-old recently told me that I’m a “poochie.” It’s a word she made up, but in the context and given how upset she was with me, I feel it’s synonymous with bitch. Now when I ask her to clean her room (mind, it’s a reasonable request, and I’m not particular about perfection on this forefront), she stomps away. She grits her teeth when we remind her to use her manners (thank you, you’re welcome, yes ma’am, no sir, etc.). She pretends to be tired when there’s some task that she doesn’t feel like attempting like eating her dinner or cleaning her room. She has almost outgrown deliberate, outward defiance, like when you ask your kid to not touch something, and they, ever so lightly, touch it just to provoke you (this would drive my husband nuts). Recently, she’s started lying, which is another can of worms all together.
She’s a smart little girl. She does things that she knows will upset you, so I’ve at least learned to detach. My husband isn’t as good at this. His feelings would get genuinely hurt when she’d say, “I don’t love you,” when she was mad at him. Bless his heart.
Here’s how a typical showdown between my oldest and me goes.
“I need you to put your toys in buckets.” I am specific with the request because I read that’s what you’re supposed to do. Give a specific direction instead of a vague “clean your room”.
“Well, I’m not going to love you. You’re not allowed to hug me ever again,” she retorts, visibly upset. (We have long since learned that this response to being to told to clean her room simply pertains to the fact that she doesn’t want to be told what to do particularly if that thing is undesirable.)
“I love you no matter what, but this isn’t about that. This is about you needing to pick up your things,” I reply levelly.
I look at her. She glares at me. I hold her stare. She clenches her fists and teeth, and then the dam breaks. She bursts into tears and hugs me. “I love you, mama,” she weeps hurrying over for a hug. It’s exhausting.
I have anxiety when it comes to picking up because even though we’ve just had this little showdown, she won’t actually pick up. She will spend the better part of the next twenty minutes or so looking at her things, semi-playing, semi picking up. She doesn’t understand that she can still play with her things if she just puts the things that she’s not playing with away even though we tell her this all of the time. She will procrastinate the task further by running in to the kitchen or the bedroom, wherever I am doing whatever it is I’m doing –feeding the baby, changing the baby, folding laundry, making dinner, working, etc. to tell me that she loves me. I hug her and assure her that I love her too…and then I ask her to finish picking up.
I try to be understanding because her two-year-old sister is a bull in a china shop. She smashes around leaving mess in her wake, which is fine for a two-year-old. If she sees my 4 1/2 -year-old picking up, usually, she’ll help; however, because my oldest usually turns pick-up time in to a sort of playtime, I don’t think the little one can differentiate.
Enter my husband. He isn’t the bad cop; we both walk the beat. We’re both the good cops and the bad cops. He’s been home on paternity leave, so he’s gotten a taste of what it’s like to be a work-at-home mom. He’s been enforcing pick-up lately, and it’s killing him. To his credit, he asks her to clean for hours before he loses it and screams. Then he feels terrible. Even when he sits down to help her, she dawdles. He takes it personally.
“She doesn’t respect me,” he growled a few nights ago.
“She doesn’t even know what respect means,” I said. He consistently references that “when he was that age” and what he and his siblings did or didn’t do. He recalls knowing of the consequences for acting out. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve left a store where the kids acted like kids, and he’s said, “When we were kids, we’d have gotten spanked for acting like that.”
The man can’t remember anything concrete from his childhood before he was seven. His dad also had a hair-trigger temper and disciplinary techniques that if implemented today would probably result in some kind of court order if not prison time.
Of course, I know when he’s talked to his mom and he’s inquired about our daughter’s behavior, he’s been told that “they never” did whatever it is she’s doing. I’m dubious to believe the narratives our parents feed us about our own behavior. According to my mother and my husband’s parents, we were all perfect little angels. The underlying implication is that we, as parents, are doing something wrong because our children have discipline problems that their children (us) never had. Memory is convenient like that. I don’t believe that in the past 30 years that children have genetically become less inclined to listen and more inclined to behave like pint-sized wildebeests. I’m of the inclination that our parents, who struggle to recall the logistics of basic plans (“Wait, who’s house are we meeting at?”), cannot accurately recall the minutia of 30 years ago.
None the less, it gets into your psyche, winding its way around your brain like tentacles. It compounds our worries that we’re doing it wrong with, that we are being judged, and that we are underperforming; the result is neurotic parents who are tugged in 40 different directions in terms of what we should do to raise our children in a fashion that doesn’t guarantee they will need therapy as a result of our parenting.
It was this series of events that compelled me to look into a little activity set for helping my child mindfully deal with her emotions. It’s all about teaching kids to emotionally regulate with index cards and stuff like that. I saw it during a particularly low moment while pilfering around on Facebook after the kids were in bed.
I watched the videos, which of course showed the children in a carefully constructed environment responding to the system exactly the way its designers envisioned. I was pretty cynical about the thing because these videos never show kids in context. Show me a kid who’s in the middle of her defiant, teeth-clenching fit of rage and then whip out the emotional-regulation card and try to talk about feelings. I envision my kid ripping that card up with her teeth while angry tears spill from her eyes. Maybe after that we can talk about her feelings, when she’s coming in for the hug, the affirmation that she’s loved. And we do. We don’t need a card to do it.
I closed the webpage. I get tired of trying to be sold a solution for the simple problem that my children are little humans, and that being a little human is harder than we like to admit (as adults, we remember how fun our childhoods were and neglect to recall the challenges in learning to use our bodies and our vocabularies or in having to ask for everything snack, every TV show, etc., which leads us to wonder why the hell our kids aren’t having more fun (don’t they know what a sweet ride childhood is?).).
Parents today are so bombarded with programs and strategies and games, things that will hopefully make toddlery easier for children. Let’s make cleaning fun. Let’s turn bath and teeth time into a game. Make obligatory tasks fun for kids, so they don’t realize they’re doing chores!
I find that this doesn’t help them regulate their actions or their emotions, nor, in the long run, does it make it easier. At what point is life ever truly easy? I was sitting in my office watching my daughter slowly “pick up” her things. After sorting them and inspecting them, she carefully put them back in the pink striped bucket I let her pick out one at a time. For a moment, I felt really bad. I felt like I should be helping her pick up, maybe somehow turn it into a game when it dawned on me that our overwhelming desire to make everything palatable for our children would ruin them, perhaps more than our ill-suppressed frustration when they ignored our authority.
I envisioned a future of indulged 20-somethings who refused to perform basic, undesirable tasks like dishes, laundry, picking up their things, cleaning toilets, vacuuming, changing cat litter, whatever because it wasn’t fun…because they’d been raised to believe that everything needed to be fun…because they’d been raised to believe that the only emotional state they should function in is a calm one, far removed from anger or frustration…or because they’d been raised to believe that life shouldn’t be hard.
Anger and frustration happen, and they’re a natural response to stimuli. I don’t need special cards to teach my children to regulate their emotions; I just have to model emotional regulation. I don’t want to negatively stigmatize any emotion, even anger, which I feel is relatively useless as far as emotions go (I’ve found that little good comes from anger particularly if we physically react on it).
It doesn’t hurt my daughter if I can’t help her clean because I’m nursing the baby or because I’m also working. It doesn’t hurt her if things are a little harder than she’d like. It doesn’t hurt her if she realizes that her not listening compels me to a state of frustration. It doesn’t hurt her to see me calm down if I do get overly frustrated and raise my voice. It doesn’t hurt her to hear me say that I’m sorry when it’s appropriate. It doesn’t hurt that none of this isn’t fun for any of us because there’s a lot of life that’s not fun or fair. Rather than deceiving her into thinking that everything is about her enjoyment, I’d rather her learn now that it’s about all of us, and when we all strive to do our part and to take care of each other, then we can have fun.
As finish this writing, my daughter, who’s wearing a pink Sleeping Beauty gown with a black witch-hat headband and whose name is now Princess Sebastian, brought me an orange, asked me to peel it, dutifully got a tea towel at my request. She said, “Mommy, you’re supposed to put it (the peel) on a napkin,” and then took the peel off of my desk and put it on the napkin. “You’re right,” I agreed. “I’m sorry.” I smiled at her, and she smiled and leaned in for a kiss. I finished peeling her orange, and asked, “Will you put the peel in the trash?” She obliged without incident. It was a lovely moment…the kind of moment that leaves a mom thinking it’s going to be okay.
Vonnie York is a writer, a mother, a wine-lover, a runner, and a bit of an over-thinker. Like any work-from-home mom, Vonnie’s just trying to have it all.
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