Monday, December 16, 2013

Do I Really Have Any More Control Than a Two-Year-Old?

First published on November 24, 2008.

Some people do not believe in the Terrible Two's.

In a sense, I don't believe in them either.  By which I mean that I don't believe Jake has been rendered "terrible" by his newfound ability to flip from laughing, sunny child-of-mine to vibrating board of angry baby body in the blink of an eye—or the unfortunate utterance of some word he does not wish to hear.

But, truly, I have run out of any other explanation for those frequent moments when he starts making that whirring sound that signals the onset of a full-fledged tantrum unless the offending parent immediately stops what he or she is doing and gives him EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS RIGHT NOW.  He's not running a temperature or showing any other signs of illness.  He seems to have all his teeth.  He's sleeping well, eating well, and, yes, pooping well, as parents like to see and to tell people who really don't want to hear about it.  In short, he has no reason for being so cranky.

Except, of course, that he's almost two years old.  Old enough to have his own wants and desires. Old enough to communicate them with reasonable clarity.  But not, alas, old enough to control his disappointment when he doesn't get what he has so clearly communicated as a want or desire.

It's at the moments when I find myself responding in kind that I wonder whether, in fact, it is too much to ask that he control his tantrums when I'm not so sure I'm capable of controlling mine.

Is Level-Headed Parenting Just an Illusion?

In my seventh grade health class, Mr. Phillips asked us to fill out some kind of a survey with questions I have long since forgotten except for the one that asked us to list our best qualities.

Apparently I listed "patience" as one because for some reason his response has stuck in mind for the past thirty years:  "You are very patient!  You would make a great teacher!"

Interestingly enough, this compliment inspired nothing so much as anger and denial.

"Eeeeew!  Why would I be a teacher like Mr. Phillips?" I groaned with my other twelve- and thirteen-year-old girlfriends.  My peer group explains why I was so unkind in my response, despite being, even for a twelve-year-old girl, a pretty patient person.

But, as poor Mr. Phillips understood, patience is one of my best qualities.  And it has served me well as Jake traverses the stages of a child's frustration with his parents.  When he began trying to communicate his needs without words, I was quick to pick up on the external clues—visual, logical, desperate attempts at grabbing anything at all that he might want—and in the process to ward off frustration and, I'd like to think, inculcate a deep sense of self-confidence.  When he could form words only not form them well enough for most English speaking persons to understand them, I took it upon myself to learn his language, often shooting a flow of like-sounding candidates back to him:  "Mommy best?  Mommy vest?  Mommy hat?"  At some point, I flail my way to what he was saying and make great apologies to him for being such a numbskull for not getting it in the first place.

And so, as his propensity for sliding into full tantrum mode has increased in the past weeks, I have drawn deeply on my belief in myself as an endlessly patient person and even more patient parent.

Most of the time, I stand back as he lies at my feet kicking the floor and simply say, "Are you done?"  When he is, he tells me so and we get on with it.

Or I say calmly and soothingly yet firmly, "I can't give you what you want if you don't use words."  This one is generally less effective, but can work if performed in the first half-second or so of meltdown.

But sometimes it just becomes too much.  Sometimes I am barely out of bed, teeth unbrushed, eyes still blurry, and he is wailing about the world's injustice because I would like to change his diaper.  These are the times I can be heard to hiss, "Jake, you need to stop whining!"

I know this last method does not work.  I know it because I remember just how inclined I was to stop whining when my parents told me to.

So this morning I decided to let him wail and kick until he was done and we couls communicate again—or compromise or, let's face it, give him his way because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for setting firm boundaries even if my weakness will come back to bite me at some future impasse when he is a teenager and will take joy in using it against me.

But then it occurred to me.  Am I really any better able to control myself, even after all these years of yoga and low blood pressure and knowing that Mr. Phillips agreed with me that patience is one of my best qualities?

It's Not About Control—It's About Acceptance

So here's the big news.  I can't control myself.  You can't either.  So of course Jake can't.

What makes those of us who consider ourselves adults different from almost-two-year-olds who don't is that we have learned to channel our frustrations and, frequently, to deny them entirely.

Think, for example, of the difference between how you respond to the son-of-a-grr who cuts you off while you're safely ensconced in your car and how you respond to the son-of-a-grr who cuts in front of you in line to pay for holiday gifts.  Chances are, when the person cuts in front of you in line you will not throw yourself on the floor in front of the other shoppers and start kicking your feet and screaming incoherently.  Instead, you'll try to sound reasonable and smart (plainly he has mistaken you for an idiot) and like someone who understands that maybe he just didn't see you standing there and obviously didn't mean to offend you.

Do you bother to put on the same show for the person in the other car who can neither see nor hear you?  

Either way, you're angry, frustrated, and only inches away from a two-year-old on the evolutionary scale.  The only difference, of course, is in how you react to what you're feeling.  Because, as adults, through hard, hard years of practice, we have learned the various and variable acceptable responses to anger.  And, too, we have learned that it is unlikely that anyone is going to be so kind as to stand back and say, "Tell me when you're finished" before giving us pretty much what we wanted in the first place.

Knowing this—knowing both that I am as prone to sudden shifts in temperament as my child and that, unlike him, I have choices about how I deal with them—grants me two important gifts.  The first is just a little bit more room to be patient with my child and to let him express who he is without saddling him with the burden of trying to be more grown up than he really is.  The second is a place to better understand myself and what to do with the emotions I'd otherwise be prone to sweep under the rug.

Deepening Rather Than Denying

Isn't the first step always just admitting you have a problem?

It is on television, when people go to one AA meeting and find their lives transformed, saved, or at least the small ray of light at the end of a wrenching fifth and final season of The Wire.  (Thank you, thank you, David Simon, thank you, for letting Bubs live to see a better day.)

Okay, television is rarely where I turn for yogic philosophy, but the underlying point remains:  it's through denial that we lose our path to wisdom.  Or, in terms more familiar in yoga:  Life is full of pain, and trying to pretend it isn't, or pretend you can make it less painful, doesn't change anything.

Instead, we strive to face life's obstacles with grace.  We accept that they exist.  We accept our limitations.  We accept those times we respond to a two-year-old's tantrum with a forty-two-year-old's I'm-louder-and-bigger-than-you one.

Once you accept that you're kind of angry too—unreasonable though it may be to feel angry with your toddler for, well, being a toddler—it's so much easier to let it go.  No need to feed it, to replay it in your mind, to lie awake at two a.m. thinking about it even if your child has just awakened you and demanded to sleep in your bed.  (Not, I am thrilled to say, that that has happened for THREE WHOLE NIGHTS now.)  Accept it, embrace it—"My name is Melissa, and I am a mother who is mad at my son for something he can't help"—and let it go.

So much healthier than denying it, explaining it away, using structures of learned civility and skin-deep sentiment to pretend it doesn't exist.

Yep, I get mad sometimes.  And then I get over it.  Just like Jake.

Garudasana—Eagle Pose—Embrace It and Let It Go

A balance pose seems like a rather cruel offering when we're talking about times of frustration and anger.  Like trying to stand on one foot while twisting up like a pretzel isn't good enough to inspire its own fair share of frustration and anger even if you were feeling perfectly good before you started.

Garudasana, or eagle pose, is not, I assure you, my strongest asana.  After years of practice, there are those days when I get it—when I feel like an eagle perched high above myself, gazing down serenely at what lies below.  But there are plenty of times when my hips tip in one direction and my shoulders in the other and I wonder angrily why this teacher is so stuck on including garudasana in every frickin' class she teaches.

Sometimes, however, garudasana doesn't have to be about balance.  You can easily modify the pose to allow the toes on one foot to rest gently on the floor next to the balancing foot.  And instead, you can make it about acceptance and release:

Try it with the intention of concentrating on hugging into your core, wrapping everything up tightly, embracing your frustration over trying to balance or trying to deal with a two-year-old on a hair trigger or the storm window people who have yet to call you back even though you are huddled over your laptop freezing in the arctic breeze shooting through the windows over your desk.  And then, once you have embraced what you're feeling, unwind, open your arms, and let it go.

No comments: