September 22

While some things like school mornings and bedtimes have mostly become easy, there are still moments where Sarah and I struggle with each other. While I know in theory that what kids do is push buttons and challenge parents, it mystifies me when Sarah so often chooses to make a moment difficult when she could make it easy. When I am cooking sometimes, she will come into the kitchen asking to help, but not waiting for my answer about how she might actually help. Instead she starts touching lots of things, such as pots on the stove (so far she does this safely or when they aren’t actually hot, but they could be hot for all she knows). Or she starts knocking her fist against my spoon-rest that is a piece of pottery I made. Or she opens the cabinet and lightly taps her fist on the glasses proclaiming in a sing-song voice that she will break them. I can tell her calmly and in a normal voice that I want her to stop or do something different and why. I can do this many times to no avail, as she incrementally escalates what she is doing or just continues and ignores my words, possibly laughing a fake laugh as she does so. This then escalates to me speaking more forcefully or suggesting that certain things that I know she will want later might not happen if she doesn’t do what I’m asking. Eventually this leads to me needing to physically stop her from doing something that might break something or hurt her (that is my panic anyway) and then she is screaming/crying/spitting and I am yelling at her to stop. Around and around we go. This week I decided one helpful step might be to physically take away whatever thing she has that I don’t want her to have, doing so calmly before things escalate. This works for some things like the spoon-rest, but it doesn’t work for glasses in the cabinet. The spitting is so frustrating. She spits on the floor. Or yesterday she did so over a porch railing at a party as people were walking by. As this feels so frustrating and unchangeable, I am reminding myself that school mornings and bedtimes used to be intensely difficult and then somehow they evolved to being easy. Maybe this other struggle will just evolve too. She often will apologize later and it sounds sincere and she says she won’t do whatever it was again. That is perhaps a little progress. That seems to be when Dr. Sarah Jekyll has returned and Mr. Sarah Hyde has retreated. I know I’ve written of this before and my weariness of it all is the same as ever. It is in these times when I can feel sorry for myself and compare to what my life might have been like if… Because I do not have these struggles with Amy at all. Not that things are completely harmonious at all times, but mostly they are easy. 

The challenge with Amy is if she is sick, as she was on Wednesday, and I have to fight her to make her stay home. I love how much she loves school. She did know she needed to be home, but she was so sad for much of the day, especially once we realized it was our half birthday. Not that we normally celebrate anyone’s half birthday, but still. Then she had to miss gymnastics but Sarah got to go.  Amy felt this was supremely unfair.

Schedules this past week felt challenging because Carl was out of town, swimming was at a new location that was farther away, it was Amy’s first Girls On The Run so timing to swimming left no time to spare, I was working every evening, and then having one kid who can go to gymnastics and one who can’t and neither parent available… ack! Thank goodness for sitters and family. Even when I wasn’t the one actually driving kids to their things or feeding them directly, I still was managing the whole situation and felt a bit anxious about the whole thing. 

I was a bit under the weather myself so spent what time I could sleeping. That helped me get better quickly, but it didn’t help the order and cleanliness of the house. That tends to be fine, fine, fine, until it is absolutely NOT! And then I can’t stand the mess and I am mad at my family members for the mess that they make and I resent every stray dish, tissue, and sock. So that was my main mode for a lot of yesterday. On the plus side, I also got the girls new snow pants, fall and winter coats, hat, and gloves. All that is left is to get boots. They were so excited about their new gear that they wore some of it despite the fact that it was in the 80s.

Now I’m concerned that Sarah might not be feeling the best. So then I’m starting to wonder if my tomorrow can happen as planned. Any healthy vibes are most welcome.