Scattered thoughts from an Easter Sunday
Some days I can stand in front of a room full of rowdy children and command their complete attention with nothing but my words. Other days it is all I can do to quell my desire to flee from the children because they are noisy and constantly touching me. On the second kind of a day I don’t even bother to aspire to excellence. I just aim for “good enough” and hope to hit it. Today was a “good enough” kind of day. I always feel bad when I have a good enough day on a holiday because holidays call for extra effort. Somehow we muddle through and the boiled eggs get colored and the plastic eggs get hidden. The day was made worlds better by the fact that Howard let me huddle in bed for an hour after church while he cleaned the kitchen and made dinner. I emerged with my headache gone to find a lovely meal ready to eat.
Patch lost his first tooth this morning. This is the last first lost tooth for our family. It is one of many last firsts in Patch’s life. I sometimes ponder at the differences in experience between my older kids and my younger ones. When Kiki lost her first tooth, I shed a tear that she was getting so big. I worried about what was ahead. For Patch I shed a tear not so much for what is ahead, but for what is permanently behind. From the kids’ point of view, Mommy cries either way, so Perhaps there really isn’t all that much difference. I can’t be the person for kindergarten Patch that I was for kindergarten Kiki. I’ve changed. Our lifestyle has changed. The structure of our family has changed. Contorting myself to try to make the experiences match up would be en exercise in frustration and futility. All I can do is do my best to meet the needs that I can see. This means that six-year-old Patch still gets to fall asleep in my bed some nights, when Gleek and Link were not allowed at similar ages. It also means that six-year-old Patch has far more responsibilities and chores than Kiki did at a similar age. Their experiences are different, but this is okay because we are trying to answer the needs rather than create some rigid ideal of fairness.
Today at church Patch decided to turn himself into a human barnacle. He wrapped both of his arms around my waist and could not be persuaded to let go. Leaning sideways like that, threw his center of balance off, and so his weight depended upon me to keep him upright. As we stood there, I realized how difficult it was for me to stand stable and straight with him clinging to me for dear life. His constant balance adjustments and dependence upon me to hold him up, threw me off balance. A couple of times I even had to put out a hand and steady myself on a nearby chair. Much of parenting is like this. The kids reach out and grab me, depending upon me to keep everything from falling into a heap. But their clinging needs can pull me off balance as well. They need me to stand tall and straight at the very moment when they are pushing me off balance. So I do the best I can to keep my feet and get us all through. The time will come soon enough when they will stand on their own more often than not. When time came to go to class, Patch detached himself willingly and left without complaint. He just needed some extra contact before he was ready to go.
I’ve been fretting lately over Link’s regressive behaviors. Link is not thrilled about growing up and so he has been talking in a baby-talk tone of voice and doing other things as if he were 6 instead of 11. It has been driving me crazy. Today I suddenly remembered some basic psychological theory that I’d somehow forgotten. If I want to extinguish a certain attention-getting behavior, I should actually ignore that behavior, not reward it with any attention. Instead I should be seeking out examples of the behaviors that I want to encourage, and make sure that I shower those behaviors with praise. All my scolding and telling Link to act his age, made him anxious. His anxiousness increased his desire to be little rather than big. So my attempts to correct the behavior were actually worsening the symptoms and poor Link simply could not win. I nearly smacked myself in the head when I was finally able to see the bad feedback loop. Hopefully I can start doing better.