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It was only after the fact — as I recounted the incident to Jake’s preschool teachers this morning — that I saw the humor in it.

There I was, seven-plus months pregnant and clad in a thick black winter coat bulging at the zipper, crouched in the back seat of my CRV as I straddled my struggling toddler and he piked out of his car seat while I held him down and huffed through clenched teeth, “I’m pregnant and I’m tired and I’ve had enough.”

It’s true that I had had more than enough.  It had been an emotional morning:  The bellowing, outraged tears when I insisted on changing Jake’s diaper before washing his hands.  The same welling up of true hurt when Lilah the basset hound happened to wander by his chair as he was eating breakfast.  And don’t even get me started on the performance he put on at the top of the stairs when his father left for work.

There was a big part of me that just didn’t have the reserves to deal calmly with toddler tantrums.  I have been completely depleted since yesterday afternoon, when I was looking forward to my first few hours alone in the house in the three weeks there have been workmen sharing it with me (weatherproofing, thank goodness, so I shouldn’t complain too much.  But, then, I am.).  Instead of a cozy hour in front of the new season of Damages folding the multitudes of laundry that gather seemingly daily, I found myself huddled over my laptop at the dining room table, clad in my winter coat and sweaty yoga clothes, as the guys put a big, noisy blower in the back door and ran around the house for a couple of hours finding all the places it still leaks.  I, in the meantime, found that there is only so much one can do when one is not allowed to close any doors (say, to the bathroom where I was longing to take a shower) and doesn’t really have full access to the kitchen and is slowly losing one’s mind due to the constant HUMMMMMMMMM of the blower.

Certainly, the overwhelming sense of displacement that suddenly hit me goes a long way to explaining the fact that I yelled at Jake — I didn’t raise my voice; I YELLED — when he pulled the I’m-not-sitting-in-my-carseat stunt in the preschool parking lot when I picked him up from school at the end of my trying afternoon. And my ability to ignore his cries of despair as I washed his hair with him standing in the bathtub — the closest I’ve managed to get him to water since another poop-in-the-tub incident last week.  (Mike and I handled the most recent one with such calm that I can only imagine how much our first reaction must have traumatized him to find us back to coaxing him into a tub in his swim diaper.)

But somehow, this morning, it got even harder.  Because each time he built himself into an orgy of sadness I could feel the same emotion building up in me.  I could remember what it feels like to cry with the jagged urgency of being all alone, rejected, denied, unloved.  And it just plain killed me to hear him that way.

While, at the same time, it killed me to have to listen to it yet again.

Hence, my moment of straddling my crying child in the car this morning as I cried too and kept crying right through his two-year-old’s recovery, ignoring his comments about what we saw as we drove past, and, oh so cruelly, informing him upon his query that, “Yes, Mommy is going to work after I drop you off.  And not a moment too soon.”

Oh, yeah, he understood just what I was saying, poor guy.

Continue reading ‘How Much Influence Do I Have on My Toddler’s Tantrums — and the Tantrums of Others?’