This past weekend was really difficult. My kid seriously tested my patience, without really even intending to do so. FYI, patience is a virtue that's almost impossible to maintain when you're dealing with a toddler who has no concept of time. Really, though, in the end the battle was more with myself than my kiddo.
Basically, there were a couple events this weekend where we needed to be relatively on time. I struggle with keeping a stricter napping schedule on the weekends, because it's the freakin' weekend, and we all want to sleep in a little. But if that happens, then everything gets pushed back, including nap time. Normally this isn't a big deal if we have nothing on our calendar for the evening, but this weekend we had places to be around the five o'clock hour. Incidentally, that's usually the time the kiddo gets up from his nap. And all you parents out there already know that it takes at least six hours to get a toddler up, ready and out the door. You do the math.
I won't go into painstaking detail about the incidents, because we all know what frustration feels like. But what I struggled with the most, and ended up sobbing about in the car was containing that frustration and impatience and not taking it out on a two year old who has no idea what time management is yet. I am ashamed to say that I was quicker to anger than I normally am, and I ended up yelling; yelling at my kid, yelling at the dog, yelling at myself, yelling at the slow driver in front of me. Even as I was shouting, I was also telling myself that yelling wasn't making the situation better, and all it was doing was showing my kid that it's ok to have a volatile reaction to something. But I couldn't pull it back and snap out of it. I was at the end of my rope and tired of every little thing being a battle with my kid: diaper changes, washing hands, putting a jacket on, throwing food and toys, picking up thrown toys. I. Was. Done.
And so I yelled. I yelled at my kid that we didn't have time to walk up and down the steps ten times. I yelled that if we didn't get our diaper changed, we couldn't go to grandma and grandpa's house. I yelled at my kid to pick up the magnets he started taking off the fridge and throwing. In anger, I grabbed the markers out of his hands that he had decided to start drawing with while in the midst of avoiding the diaper change. I yelled while he threw a tantrum and tried to escape my arms when I picked him up to put him in his car seat. I yelled into the void just to try and release some of the frustration and helplessness I was feeling.
And then I cried like a baby. I cried because I lost my cool in front of my kid over the fact that he was just being a kid. I cried because I was tired of trying to reason with a toddler. I cried because I'm tired all the time. I cried because I felt like a failure. I cried because I felt guilty for not keeping my composure. I cried because even though he could've started screaming at me a few times in the midst of *my* temper tantrum, he had tried to talk to me and even make me laugh.
As luck would have it, today was a pretty good day. It didn't start out great; he refused a diaper change and since I was still entertaining a low threshold for patience from the weekend, I left him with my husband and went downstairs to fix breakfast and heard him screaming in protest as I walked down the stairs. But, when I dropped him off at school, even though he didn't want me to leave, there were minimal tears and no screaming from him. He ate well at all his meals and didn't put up too much of a fight when it was time to wash hands. Diaper changes were easy after he got home (ok, the tablet gets credit for that). Pajama time was easy (again, thanks to the tablet) and when it was time to put the tablet down and head into the bedroom for story time, he did so on his own without putting up a fight. And bedtime was easy as well.
So, just like that, we had a couple of bad days followed by a really good one. Thus is life with a toddler, I suppose. But the real question I have now is this: what do I need to do, as the adult, to try and improve my attitude and expectations for these difficult moments that I know are always going to pop up? What should my homework assignment be so that I can work on not being so quick to anger next time my kid tests my patience? How do I do better next time? It's helpful to remind myself of the mantra that my OBGYN instructed me to say to myself in times of stress: everything is a phase.
So today, I again found myself in a time crunch, needing to get on the road to get the kid dropped off at school and my ass to work, and my kid wanted to play with his basketball in the yard. Knowing that picking him up in a hurried rush would backfire and probably cause him to start screaming and flailing, I chose to merely communicate that we needed to leave and that we had to get in the car. I then offered him to opportunity to climb up in his seat by himself, which he always wants to do now, and much to my surprise he took the bait and got into the car. No running away, no tears, no screaming. It was awesome. I patted myself on the back for the feat of not getting frustrated and losing my cool with the kiddo, knowing full well that tomorrow will most likely be a shit show. But every mom knows that you gotta take the small victories when you can, and so I did.
