I’m told it's easy enough to understand why toddlers rage. Choice/control/will. Tonight Margaret didn't want to get into the bath. I tried to reason with her for a while and found it useless so just picked her up and plopped her in the tub. Screaming, flailing, water splashed into mouth, choking, parental and toddler distress ensued.
Was it choice/control/will? Or was it feeling misunderstood/ignored? She was telling me she wanted to go downstairs. I was trying to tell her I’d take her downstairs after the bath. I wonder, what would have happened if I’d just taken her downstairs to see what she wanted. Over time would that turn her into a willful spoiled brat, or just make her feel heard?
When I dropped Battle off at daycare today there was lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I decided to harden my heart and leave quickly. I drove to work. Staff meeting for an hour. Then drove back to pick the twins up, drop them at home with the nanny, and started to leave again. More wailing and gnashing of teeth. This time, I told him I was going to leave in a few minutes and hugged him as he cried. After about three minutes he looked at me and said, Mama go to work. No more tears. Cheerful waving even.
I don’t know if the rage is about wanting control, or just wanting to be heard. But I tend to think it is about being heard. I think that parents tend to try to tell kids they want what they don’t want, feel what they don’t feel, etc, from a very young age. I think that’s a big part of the answer to Hess’s question:
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
I want to give Battle and Margaret the freedom to live in accord with the promptings that come from their true selves. That is my goal as a parent. Not to shape them. Just to love them, to create a safe environment for them to express their true selves.
That doesn’t give me any guide to whether I should have spent the time to take Margaret downstairs; or just plop her in the bath and say “tough shit, it’s bath time honey.”
Children and adults need a witness to their joy and their rage. I’d rather witness joy, so I’ll try to create the environment for joy as much as possible. But if I get rage, I’ll deal with that too. Not be afraid of the rage.
But my real question yesterday was not about toddler rage. It was about my rage. How is it that Frankl could control his reaction to being put into a concentration camp but I cannot seem to control my tongue when my son throws blueberries on the floor?
The reason for my rage is that I have a deep fear that if I don’t watch it, if I don’t fight for my life, my whole life is going to get eaten up by tasks like cleaning up blueberries. The real reason for my rage was that I wasn’t going to be able to go and write during naptime. Instead I was going to clean up blueberries. The real reason for my rage then and almost always is that the minutia of life makes it really hard to stop and think. And it’s when I stop and think that I feel most fully myself.
My sister, when she read yesterday’s post, pointed me to David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech. He claims
It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
My tenth grade English teacher pointed me to this quote when I was wrestling with the same thing back then.
"within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it."
The main way into that sanctuary for me is through the written word. I don’t think I can find my way there when I am in a consumer hell type situation. I can find my way there when I clean up blue berries if and only if I have had some time to read, to write, to think.
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