Stormy Weather

There were raging arguments in the house last week. I almost couldn’t get my weekly essay finished, and am late on this one, because my writing domain at home is an office with a thin door that is almost splashing distance from the bathroom, where my son has been refusing orders to get clean. He fights getting into the tub when he doesn’t feel like it, and he fights all attempts to get him to clean himself in there. He will goof off in the water and wait an eternity for his dad or me to do the scrubbing for him, rather than lift a finger. Sometimes we give in, because who wants to hang around the bathroom for half an hour?

Often the struggle persists and carries beyond the bath and into his bedroom, which also shares a wall with my office. I’ll sit here trying to compose a paragraph or learn some new bars of a song on my keyboard (assuming that Daddy is on duty that night) when sounds of conflict waft into my space and get my heart racing. My jaw starts clenching and my fingers stop moving across the keys (either type of keys) as voices rise and my kid’s whining becomes more defiant or more desperate. I tune in to hear what the conflict is about and to make sure my husband is handling it correctly, because when he’s in the parental driver’s seat, I still have the urge to navigate from the back of the car. All the while, I feel resentful that my project has been interrupted.

Stress on top of stress: That’s what happens when you try to argue or rationalize with a small child. We have reached a boiling point too many times in the past week. My son has two extremely logical parents, tech workers, who have a hard time processing another person’s lack of understanding the reasoning at hand. It might be turning our kid into a pedant. As I wrote last week, he often tries to use his own brand of logic against us, and he’s very literal. When he took a break from video gaming the other day, and I paused his timer, which we recently introduced to curb his obsession a bit, I offered to restart it later. You better believe he called me on the word “restart” and insisted that I’d promised to start his clock all over again. I explained that what I meant was “resume”.

This did not land. He couldn’t let go of his interpretation, and I couldn’t let go of my frustration enough to step to his side and try to understand how his brain might be working. Without an understanding, I felt totally out of control of the situation, and that made my anger shoot through the roof. What’s his problem? I’m the parent; he’s supposed to listen to me no matter what. I’m the reasonable one here. Like a perfectly reasonable person, I slammed the door before walking outside to try to calm down.

I’m not proud of my responses lately. Objects have been thrown—harmless ones, but still. Steering wheels have been slammed. (My arm still hurts.) Words have been shouted. I know, I KNOW, that this does nothing but give him a poor model for handling high emotions. He’s been slamming the door to his bedroom, and he recently threw something at his dad. I don’t know what’s eating at me and putting me so close to sanity’s edge. Maybe it’s partly the state of the world, but that’s not going to improve during my lifetime. Maybe my son is shaping up to be just as smart as me, and lord knows I tend to find competition primally threatening. Either way, it’s time to get a grip.