The five stages of being a horrible parent
Maggie’s hit the terrible twos. I think I might have handled this better if the terrible two week old wasn’t in the picture keeping me awake at odd hours, but even then I don’t think it would be anything to write home about in terms of stellar parenting.
It started out today with fights about running in the street, and then went on to fights about eating, a completely distracted toddler who wants to run and do stuff and is filled with joy until she’ll collapse or freak out because she’s exhausted and starving.
I tried the five stages of grief on her tonight, DENYing that she has any reason to be ANGRY, BARGAINING with her to eat so many bites of food, DEPRESSION at how much remaining awake time we are squandering on these petty fights, and finally ACCEPTANCE that much like the five stages of grief, this is all some sort of bullshit that someone cobbled together and can be overridden somehow.
It was horrible. I tried nicely bribing, I tried explaining what had to happen, I got socked in the eye and just had to walk out, my ears are ringing still from the wails of a sad and angry toddler, and what’s terrible is she’s not appearing to be against me and always is devastated by some action I take that has to be taken.
Walking out after she hit me was abandoning her, forcing her to sit and eat and pay attention to one thing was denying her the freedom of life, keeping her from being crushed be cars was suffocating her, putting her into bed was imprisoning her, I could do nothing right.
Neither could mom, who had a class to go to and got to skip out on a good hour and a half of horrible.
At the end Maggie had five screaming fits, all different, all within a four hour period, all involving tears and liquids escaping from the face. At the end she hugged me, I asked her to get some sleep and tomorrow to help me work with her through the things she’s having problems with.
After she went to bed I came out, was amazed the three week old was still asleep, stuck a bottle in her and started reading because my TV is blowd up (brand new backlight blew out.)
Maggie’s been asleep about two hours now and I just want to wake her up and play with her.
