I can’t remember the last time I went to Target on a Saturday.
As of today, I know why.
It was supposed to be my break, part of the divide-and-conquer strategy Mike and I launched on this Saturday morning of oh-so-cranky toddler.
And, indeed, somehow, I needed a break, despite having spent all of an hour or so with Jake. All of it, mind you, “getting ready” to go to the park. This involved:
1) Three peaceful minutes of saving Daddy from his breakdown as Jake raised my hopes by agreeably taking my hand and walking upstairs to “put on clothes for the park.” As he rarely agreeably puts on clothes these days for any reason whatsoever, even the park, I believed my calm and motherliness had finally prevailed over what I still fervently wish to believe is the myth of the Terrible Two’s.
2) One medium-length crying fit as I objected to Jake’s preference for playing with the obnoxious-in-the-way-only-people-who-don’t-have-to-live-with-the-gift can be (a little driving console with steering wheel, radio, and turn signals that all make different and equally grating noises) over listening to me. Not only am I particularly up in arms about his recent penchant for steadfastedly ignoring me when I talk to him, but my frustration is compounded by the fact that I am usually striving to give him the choices that are supposed to mollify and mature a young child. Really, how much good is it letting him choose his outfit when this scenario consists of me kneeling on the floor with a selection of three shirts draped over my arm like a maitre d’ at a restaurant serving up a selection of Old Navy toddler tops while he hunches over his race car console drowning out my pleas for him to make a choice with the VRR-VRR-VRROOOOOMM of a toy whose battery just won’t die already?
Not much good, if, like me, you end up threatening to and then taking the toy away, provoking the tears that it seems it is my job to provoke these days.
This crying episode, however, ended surprisingly well, as Jake actually heard and understood me saying that if only he’d make a choice I’d give him his toy back. Or maybe it was sheer coincidence. At any rate, he chose a lovely red shirt and I gave him back his toy. All was peaceful. Until –
3) Five minutes of me looking for a pair of tennis shoes to celebrate our 60 degree weather while he insisted on going through my shoe boxes and trying on a pair of heels so high I’m surprised I haven’t broken an ankle in them. He was unhappy when I wrested them away and put them back in a box, but was fortunately distracted by the much safer Ugg slippers my wonderful husband bought for my perennially cold feet at Christmas. Minimal tears were involved.
Perhaps Jake was just saving up for:
4) A good twenty minutes spent in the bathroom as I foolishly tried to change out a load of laundry and put shoes on him. There were three flaws in this plan.
The first was that these days Jake is fascinated with turning on the faucet and wasting as much water as he possibly can. While I fancy myself able to choose my battles, I had the now apparent misfortune of living through a massive California drought at the impressionable age of nine. This means that I am hardwired to freak out at the prospect of wasted water. To the point that my lawn in St. Louis was constantly brown, even as the neighbors explained to me that there’s this little river called the Mississippi from which their abundant water supply came. Of course, we had a small drought a year or two after I moved there, and my brown lawn enjoyed some company, proving my point but at the expense of positively fixing me in a state of water-mania for the rest of my days.
While I might perhaps have been making some headway with Jake on the whole water-conservation thing up until this morning, we then hit flaw number two — while I was putting on shoes in the bedroom, Jake had come across the fishy-face mask of his Nebulizer and was now discovering the great fun to be had placing it under the faucet and letting all the wasted water run through the tube attached to its “mouth.” (For those lucky souls unfamiliar with the Nebulizer, it is a very loud machine with which one administers breathing treatments to their child with viral pneumonia or, in this case, a more mild but threatening respiratory bug. Said child is much more likely to tolerate the Nebulizer mask placed over his mouth and nose if he has viral pneumonia and is too sick and weak to protest.) This Best Activity in the World made it that much more difficult to suggest to him that he turn off the water already. And, no, he was not amused by the substitute game I made up, whereby I turned off the faucet, he made his way off the step stool he uses to reach the sink so he could walk around to turn the water back on and by the time he made his way back up the steps to the sink I had turned off the water again.
Yes, I understand why he was frustrated. But I was too.
And so began more tears. Because, remember, that’s my job.
And we’re not even to the third flaw in my plan: thinking he would actually put on his shoes.
This was not an unreasonable assumption. On weekends Jake gets to wear his beloved pink polka dot boots, banished from the gym at school.
“Do you want to wear your boots?” I asked in that cheery, upbeat voice I can put on even when cheery and upbeat are the last two things I am feeling.
“Nooo!” Jake wailed. “Shoes!”
“Really?” I asked, untucking his pants from his socks. “Okay, shoes.”
I got one on. Then, “Noooo!”
“What do you want?” I asked. At this moment Mike came up the stairs.
“Daddddyyyy!” Jake howled. I did not like this answer. “Daddy isn’t going to hold you until you have your shoes on,” I said grimly as he squirmed in my lap. Anyone who has had a strong, howling two-year-old squirm in her lap will appreciate how much more joyous the sensation is when you are eight months pregnant and don’t have a whole lot of lap to accommodate such squirming.
And so we entered into a match of Who Is More Determined. I was fixated on getting that second shoe on Jake’s foot at all costs — it velcros closed I reasoned, it can’t be that hard! — and he was equally determined not to let me. You know who won.
“BOOTS!” he finally howled. “I want BOOOTS!”
“Then let me put your boots on!” I yelled, sounding — I cringe to admit it here — like my own mother. I was embarrassed to have even my husband hear me talking to my child like that. Even though there is a reason that all parents yell at their kids from time to time, and it isn’t that they’re bad parents.
The thing about me yelling is — whether I am yelling at my own parents or my husband or, in my past, roommates or boyfriends — it can end only one way.
I cry.
And I cry even more when my son is clinging to his father for dear life. The same father who had used the very same tone of voice with him a mere forty-five minutes earlier. Which only proved that I had blown it forever, provoked one too many tantrums, wasted all that good will built up over nine months of in-utero care and twenty-five months of hugs and outbursts of great love.
So I sat in the bathroom for a while, crying and wondering where, exactly I am supposed to draw the line. What battles am I supposed to pick when every single thing in Jake’s life seems to be a battle these days? How, in short, do I know when to say no?
Continue reading ‘Knowing When to Say No (and Not Just to Target on a Saturday)’
