don’t panic

Balance. Do you ever feel as if you are precariously balancing your whole reality on your head, and that if you stop concentrating for just a single moment, the whole thing will come crashing down around you?

I’m spread thin these days. Being “thin” is when there isn’t enough emotional “you” to cover all fires that are threatening the fabric of “family”. Pressures, like deep hidden swells on the open ocean, are moving silently under the surface, rolling inexorably towards a stable beach, where they will rise up, and then come crashing down in violent fury. This is parenting.

You think you have it under control. You think things are stable. But stasis is death. A static child has stopped growing, mentally, and growth is key. You can handle ANYTHING, so long as you see growth. Growth is hope. Change is good. Balance.

When do you push? When do you set limits and FORCE them to grow up? When do you instigate change? How do you push without hurting them? How patient should you be? How much of your own frustration do you write-off, or bury deep inside to deal with later?

Tonight I won a battle with my daughter.

It didn’t seem like it at the time, but I realize now that it was a victory. It was at dinner. The dinner table is a constant battlefield for our family, with my wife and I on one side, and my daughter on the other.

We want her to get enough food into her body to keep her alive. We want to prepare ONE meal, not one meal for us, and one meal for her.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re patient.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re empathic.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re compromising.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re strict.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re tired.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re determined.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re angry.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re MORE patient.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re frustrated.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re snapping.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We’re FURIOUS!

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We yell.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We bannish.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We try again.

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We try again…

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

We try again, and again, and …

She wants a Fruit Roll-Up.

This is dinner… every day.

Tonight, we didn’t give in. (For all of you reading this without children who are saying, “she’s like that because you keep giving in…” All I can say is – you don’t have children.) The Bit went to bed without finishing her dinner, and WITHOUT a roll-up. Change. It nearly killed _us_, but she will probably be better for the whole ordeal. Balance.

But balance is post-corrective. You don’t realize that you’re off balance until you ARE off balance.

I may have won a small victory tonight, and can shift my attention to my quickly crumbling wife, but I just know that the first words out of her mouth tomorrow morning will be:

“Roll-Up, please…” (more…)

I spend a lot of time complaining in this journal. It’s true. I say, complaining is good for the soul. The people around you may want you to go away and die, but YOU’LL feel better.

And I complain about everything from So-Cal drivers to the weather. But one of my favorite things to rant about is parenting.

I have one child. I thank God daily that I have one, and ONLY one child. Any more, and I’m pretty sure it would kill me. Granted, my little girl is a bit of a hellion, but what child isn’t? My brother-in-law was raised in a family of ten. TEN! What were his parents THINKING?? All I can say is that they have a strength that I do not yet, and will never possess. One is plenty, thank you.

I was having an email conversation with a friend of mine recently about having children, and I listed all the things I missed about BC life so that he wouldn’t feel so bad about having waited to have kids. BC is “Before Child”. Later, I realized that such arguments are meaningless. There’s simply no explaining what having a child is like to someone without. Bill Cosby describes the desire for a couple to have children as temporary insanity. It doesn’t seem like that at the time, but when you have spent the last two hours having (and losing) an argument with your four-year-old over what they consider “eating” their dinner, you begin to think he might be right after all.

My daughter is developmentally behind. There are all sorts of clinical descriptions and terminologies as to WHY she is behind, but in the end, she is who she is, and we work with what we have. Still, it’s sometimes daunting to have a two-year-old mind trapped in a four-year-old will. It’s all about communication, and when you can’t trust any single thing she says to be in any way connected to reality, well, you often find yourself at a loss, especially when it comes to discipline.

Even as I write this, my daughter is in her room, in bed, with the light on (another argument I lost), having an ongoing whining session that has been going on for over an hour. She simply doesn’t see why she should have to go to sleep. She also doesn’t see why I shouldn’t be sitting in there with her, reading her story after story until we have gone through every non-adult book in our house. Since we have half the children’s section from Barnes & Noble scattered about our home, this is quite daunting, even scary. My wife and I decided early, that we would always allow our daughter to stay up as late as she wished, so long as she was reading. I think this rule will really work later in life, but right now, we’ve hit one of those many parenting loopholes that your kids discover and exploit more expertly than Microsoft lawyers and taxes. The problem is that for her, “reading” is a gray area right now. She doesn’t actually “read” books yet, she just “studies” them. She even makes up her own stories to go with the pictures. But she also knows that most of her books are very short, especially when you thumb through the pages in clumps and aren’t hindered by things like plot. In no time at all, she has breezed through every book within reach of her bed, which means that to continue reading, she will have to get OUT of bed to get more books. Or better yet, she can call the live-in room service to fetch them for her. Over, and over, and over.

After an hour of her calling, “daaaadeeeee,” in an effort to get me to come back into her room yet again, I am beginning to get miffed. But what can you do? “Put your foot down,” you say. Sure. “Be stern!” Uh huh. And then I get to spend the next half hour listening to her cry because I had to yell at her for something I TOLD HER was alright to do. To another adult, the problem with all this seems so basic and simple. But I’m not dealing with an adult. I’m not dealing with a rational human at all. In fact, the ONLY time that I will win the “bedtime battle” is when she finally conks-out at ten after nine from plain old exhaustion. She’s sleeping peacefully, like she was born to be nothing but cuteness incarnate. Whereas I feel like I just lost an extra year of my life.
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