Toddler taming
About the time Himself and I thought the idea of a second child was a good one, Yer Man had been going through a good phase. For the first time in two years, parenthood was resembling Pippa O’Connor Ormond’s Instagram, or at least there were glimpses of the kind of domestic bliss and harmony that crop up on the oracle-of-living-beautifully’s feed.
Occasionally, Yer Man would oblige us by sleeping all night, and we started to feel (mistakenly, it transpires) that we had a handle on this parenthood thing.
And so we embarked on a bout of baby-making, naively secure in the knowledge that, well, we got this! About three months into the pregnancy, Yer Man’s Reign of Terrible Twos began, and I officially realised that I don’t “got this”. I will never “have this”. At best, all I will have is a tension headache for the next 18 years of my life, and the unnerving knowledge that I am an animal, capable of screaming at an innocent child.
This is the thing I’ve realised about myself since becoming the parent of a full-tilt tantruming toddler: I am a bigger baby than he is. When the child is in the throes of a tantrum, most of the time I wind up acting more childishly than he does. Of course, this is not something that I am proud of, and I am constantly trying to come up with better strategies for dealing with myself during a tantrum, never mind dealing with my son.
Suffice it to say, none of my ‘strategies’ are very measured, or even particularly sane. Screaming into a pillow is probably not social services’ idea of a good mother, but I try to comfort myself with the notion that there’s something about your own child’s tantrums that brings out the worst in you.
At least I’m not as bad as those parents in America that actually named their baby Adolf Hitler. As Yer Man throws a level-10 shitfit because I cut up his grapes wrong, I gaze upon him impassively with deadened eyes and say, “Well, at least I didn’t call you Adolf Hitler.”
I try to comfort him out of the tantrum by hugging him against his will. He doesn’t like this, and I find having a small child trying to fight his way out of your arms is quite hard on the selfesteem.
How do our toddlers wind us up so effectively? No one else in the world can make me as angry, except, perhaps, my mother. Then it hits me: he is so damn good at pushing my buttons because he basically is me, or at least a smaller, beautiful, less rational, more volatile, male version of me, with better hair.
Ignoring his tantrum and re-framing the relentless shouting as an auditory head massage can sometimes work, but if he’s not getting a satisfactory reaction out of me, he’ll change tack and go the hair-pulling route. Also, I can’t ignore Yer Man, he’s too precious. Wait, did I say precious? I meant persistent.
Keeping us both fed is one strategy that kind of works, so I always have emergency snacks like these spiced apple crisps on hand for when the red mist descends.