The Writing Mamas Daily Blog
Each day on the Writing Mamas Daily Blog, a different member will write about mothering.If you're a mom then you've said these words, you've made these observations and you've lived these situations - 24/7.
And for that, you are a goddess.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Witty, Wild and STILL Only a Child
What has not been investigated -- but needs detective work-- is why is it as a child gets older, her sense of comprehension does not catch up.
Judging by the messy room, trying tantrums and inability to listen -- it seems to worsen.
Why is it when a child is supposed to be in bed at a very generous nine p.m., at eight fifty two she is saying, "But it's not nine, yet."
The concepts of getting into jammies, washing face and brushing teeth before nine have not figured into her math. Pity for she is already showing a propensity for numbers. Just not for the ones she does not like.
Maybe there is some secret childhood rite of selection going on. A progression for what she likes, such as eating copies amounts of chocolate, versus leaving a plate filled with vegetables, which she despises, behind.
My favorite is our pre-arranged agreement that when we go into a toy store we will ONLY buy a gift for the birthday boy, not the little girl who is giving the present. Agreement. Even a pinky promise! Every child knows those are never broken.
Mimi breaks them with regularity. "They're just fingers, mama," she points out, digits flared straight into the air.
In the Pokemon aisle, where the latest toys reside, a gift is selected for her friend. Then a tantrum ensues over why she can't have a tiny, "baby recession" toy. While she is slowly grasping the basic economics of the recession, she's just not getting the real math behind it. But then -- who amongst us truly is? Perhaps she is just not the mathematical whiz I thought she might be. Or, she acquired my mother's and my sister's talents for manipulation. Sometimes I feel I have my mother above, my daughter below and my sister behind me, all three pulling my strings.
The other day I asked my my daughter for a favor. A favor! A mother is NEVER supposed to ask a child for that! Everyone knows it's the other way around. Without nearly a second passing between my request and her reply she said, "You left out a word and it starts with P and ends with E."
"Please?" I guessed.
"OK, let's start from the beginning, starting with that special word."
I call it the Willig Wit. Willig was my mother's maiden name. My mother entered college at barely 16. I have no idea how bright my daughter will be. I do think genes are on her side.
Before she was born my husband asked, "Do you think our baby will be beautiful?"
"I said I didn't know if she was going to be beautiful, but with her Asian and Jewish genes, I thought she would be smart."
Right now it's hard to tell. She wants to be rock star but is torn between being a lead singer or one who sings lead and also plays guitar.
"The guitar is a lot of work," she explains.
And she also wants to take care of animals, and be an artist.
I don't know what she will be, other than I hope she will be content. As well as clean her room, eat healthy, listen to what others have to say, and display good manners.
That includes saying please whenever it is appropriate.
By Dawn Yun
Labels: By Dawn Yun, guitar, independent children, listening, math, please, singing, tantrums, vet
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Saturday, December 20, 2008
Kicks, Screams and Tantrums; Just Another Day For Mom
This was me last week as I left the once peaceful Goodnight Moon children’s store in the Town Center in Corte Madera. The fit happened over trying on clothes and I was unable to get her back in her original attire, so I had to take her out in only a diaper.
Upon exiting, I remember seeing an older man cringe irritatingly and put his hands to his ears as the cacophony of screaming child competed with the classical music. Shortly after, on that interminable walk to the car, a woman with whom I take an exercise class spotted me. She said, “You look great.”
I remember thinking: did she really just say that, under these circumstances? I contemplated handing her my stroller, or better yet my flailing child. At this point, just getting to my car was my main focus. With aching arms, I tried to put Samantha in the stroller, but just as I started to walk, she arched her back, dragging her little toes on the ground. I picked her up again, feeling incredibly guilty about her scraped toe. This was starting to get painful, and at the time I thought that I must be the only mother in the world who had ever experienced such a scene.
It was a tantrum to compete with all others, one that could go down in the Guinness Book of World Records under two-year old fits.
As I sat in the car crying with Samantha and feeling the kicks of the baby against my ribs, my first inclination was to blame myself for being a terrible mother. Maybe I hadn’t been strict enough. Maybe I’ve bought her too many things or have tried too hard to please her. Perhaps I wasn’t sensitive enough to her mood or to the fact that she gets overwhelmed by too many choices. The next train of thought was to wonder why my daughter exploded in such an uncontrollable manner and how I could have prevented it. I wondered if I should look into a parenting class since clearly I was failing miserably.
I’ve told this story to other mothers, all of whom identified with similar experiences of their own. One mother even had a scar on her face from where her daughter scratched her when she was throwing a tantrum. When I find the time to share with other mothers, I am always surprised by how much we have in common and how really similar our children are. It doesn’t help that I spend a great deal of time alone with my daughter, totally absorbed in my own world, and therefore have few means of comparison. Slowly I began to realize that Samantha’s fit was rather commonplace, even if humiliating and exhausting.
I have recovered somewhat from the horrible episode at Good Night Moon, but even so it will be a while before I take my daughter clothes shopping again. And as for those parenting classes, I have one marked on my calendar to attend entitled “Controlling Toddler Tantrums.” I better sign up soon, as this promises to be a popular class.
By Rebecca Elegant
Labels: parenting classes, Rebecca Elegant, scream, tantrums
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Four
My daughter had a bruising day yesterday. From the moment she woke up, her emotions were overheated, misread, and dragged her behind them like a freight train.
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar Stumble This Post
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar
Labels: daddy, four-years old, guilt, mommy, tantrums, tears
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