Better Make It A Double

velcro boys

N is still such an intense kid. When he’s feeling at home, he’s the kind of kid that fills up a room –full of funny faces, songs, climbing, dancing, and jumping. That’s not to say that he’s just bouncing around – he actually has quite a good attention span and can hold the thread of a game or narrative for long stretches. He’ll sit for a long time with a book. He’s just active, and animated, with a dimpled grin as wide as his face. Yet, despite his apparent social confidence when he’s with us, he still has a lot of trouble with separation, especially from me. When we were in Holland,J and I spent a day in  Amsterdam with my brother, leaving the boys with my parents. By all accounts the day went well for them, and N didn’t seem put out by it when we got back. In the past, he’s refused to look at me, sometimes staying mad for hours. But then, last night, I was rocking him, as we still do together most every evening after I put O to bed, and we were talking things over. We talked about the tears that morning when he went to the church nursery, and then, out of the blue, he said, “You left me in Holland with Omie for a long, long time.”  Oh, it broke my heart to hear that it was so hard for him, even with someone who he adores, that he remembers it and feels less than OK about it a week later, back at home. It’s almost as if the experience of my being gone isn’t so bad, but the idea of it worries him. The tears at church were hard to see too, as was the first day I went back to work after our trip, him looking me right in the eye with his giant dark-blue eyes and saying, with a note of true desperation, “Don’t go. Don’t go.”  The boy is such a fretter, such a thinker. When he’s at home with us, he actually likes a fair bit of alone time to putter around in his room. He’s so happy in there that I sometimes feel like I’m interrupting when I come in after his nap and he’s sitting up in bed “reading” a book to himself and singing. Usually, I tell him he can come out whenever he’s ready, and sometimes he doesn’t emerge for 20 minutes. Then when he comes out, he seizes the day like it’s his last, as long as one of the people who love him the very most is right there with him. Ultimately, I think he’s an introvert who gets his energy from being alone or with the people he’s most comfortable with. Lately, he’s been telling me at bedtime what kind of dreams he plans on having, and telling me what kind of dreams to have too, so we can see each other in them.

We seem to go in waves with this separation stuff, and right now is particularly intense. Actually, both boys are really clingy right now in their own ways, O more with the constant need for hugs and kisses, and even their games all seem to be about separation and togetherness. Compared to 6 months ago, the boys are kind of a mess. When did they get so big, so long and so lean? They’re super clumsy right now, full of scraped knees and bonked heads and running into each other and the furniture, and full of high drama over nothing. Their need for sympathetic attention is intense. Where did my confident “I wanna do it myself” 2-year-olds go?  I know all this stuff is pretty normal for the age, but wow. They are, on a positive note, playing more and more directly with the other kids we spend time with, and that is nice to see. Mostly, they are very sweet with other kids, though N is terrified of rough kids and bursts into the most mournful tears if another kid is unkind to him.

Preschool is only a couple of months away, and while I think O is a bit shy and might be a bit overwhelmed at first, ultimately I think he’ll love it. He loves new things, and loves the kinds of things they do at preschool. I’m a bit concerned about N, though, and part of me wonders if he’s quite ready.* I predict that it will be a rocky transition, even if it quickly gets better, and I’m trying to think through what J and I can do to help him with it. N has eventually transitioned to the church nursery, to having me right next door at our early childhood classes, to grandma and grandpa, aunts, and a babysitter or two. The babysitter thing has always been kind of tough for me – I have a hard time trusting that their needs will be met and that a teen sitter will be watchful enough to keep them safe. Maybe I should have pushed harder with this, but my gut always said that my need to go on a date or whatever isn’t worth the worry if family isn’t available, both for their safety and N’s distress about separating from us. We do have a good sitter now that both boys like, but since we’re trying to save some money, I’m looking at doing more swapping with people from church. At least that’s a stable group of adults that N sees every week, that the boys will hopefully grow up knowing. I ma encouraged by the close relationships I witness between the teens in church and the adults that have been a part of their upbringing.

Did your 3-year-old go through an especially clingy phase? How did the transition to daycare or preschool go for your (similar-aged) kids, and what did you do to help them? Am I worrying over nothing?

Right now the prospect of leaving them both at preschool leaves me with a giant lump in my throat.

*I am fully aware that many people have no choice in this matter much earlier in their children’s lives, and that most of those kids do just fine if they have good caregivers. All the same, we don’t have to send our kids to preschool; we are sending them entirely for their own presumed benefit, so it makes sense to ask the question.

 

in the backyard

It wasn't raining that day, but O was prepared anyway.

As you can see our back yard is still the source of lots of fun. Right now, the boys can pick peas, strawberries, lettuce and herbs back there, and they are eying the green raspberries, which look like they'll be plentiful this year after a good layer of chicken compost this spring.

Every year, we go to an awesome local nursery and buy a bag of a couple of thousand lady bugs. They are beneficial in that they eat aphids and some other bugs that would otherwise eat our vegetables since we don't spray. We let a few hundred out at a time for about a week, and keep them in the fridge in between releases. For the third year now, the boys have thoroughly enjoyed this ritual. I'm thinking that next year, I'll have to have the cousins over to see it too.

And it all washes off at the end of the day...

home

We’ve been back from the Netherlands for a few days now, and updating here has started to feel like bit of a daunting task. It was a complicated trip, emotionally speaking, and there are just way too many unformed threads floating around in my head to write coherently about, at least yet. There were wonderful times –seeing the boys connect with people and enjoy close to every waking minute of the trip immensely (and they were so good, overall, even on the plane), me catching up with cousins and old friends, an all-too-short family reunion on a gorgeous summer solstice evening. I feel compelled to add that I am aware how very lucky we were to be able to take such a trip.

But going back to one’s homeland, to a culture and landscape that is always a part of you but that, upon returning to, you cannot help but feel removed from, is overwhelming. When in the states, I almost always feel invisibly Dutch. I speak perfect Midwestern English, and other than my name, (which, incidentally, is not really Emmie, which is a nickname) no-one that doesn’t know me well ever suspects I wasn’t born here. But I was almost 7 when we moved; I could read, I can remember much of the several years before we left. Leaving was devastating, and the beginning of a lot of very isolated nuclear-family pain that reached its peak just before I left home at 17. Yet, when I go back home I feel ever American, like a bumbling foreigner who just happens to know the language. And what is that word, home, anyway? It has too many meanings to me to really mean anything at all anymore. In either direction across the ocean, I am supposedly going home. In either direction, I feel alienated from where I’ve come and where I’m going. Add to that many layers of complicated and often painful family history, differing interpretations of that history, and lots and lots of seeing people I see once every 5-10 years for all-too-short periods while chasing 2 active preschoolers through antiques-filled houses, and well, I’m shot. I am SO tired, and I don’t think it’s just the jetlag. I feel, well, almost kind of sedated, in a fog of unrealized emotion. I find myself weeping, in the shower, onto my pillow, but feeling close to nothing. I think I am perhaps the only ¼ of my nuclear family who can feel this numb without the benefit of large and consistent amounts of alcohol, a fact that hit me again and again, like a silent box to the ear, as last week I watched my brother knock back beer after beer after beer and grow only increasingly quiet. I confess that I truly didn’t want to know this fact that I can do nothing about. My little brother, the one who I left behind, the brilliant one, the artist, drinking himself into a still-respectable haze every night. We are so good at this, my family, no falling down drunks, we, no, just a whole lot of dollars spent on alcohol every week, shopping carts and recycling boxes overfilling with clinking bottles and rattling cans, a tendency to spend evenings sitting perfectly still and staring off into space while listening to music or watching television, maybe sometimes an unfortunately loose tongue or a hint of a liquor-fueled mean streak.

I, rarely drinking at all and religious to boot, am a foreigner within my own nuclear family. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe it ends here, in Minnea*polis, in our little house full of people who wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Maybe it will end with two little boys growing into men who want to feel the lives they are leading. It would kill me to entertain any other possibility.

This, my grandmother’s home, feels as much like home as any place ever has. It’s been almost completely unchanged for my 34 years, bantam chickens running around the grounds, dark antiques filling the interior, the same dishes, glasses, bedspreads, everything my WW2-occupation survivor grandmother set up right the first time, well worn, but of quality. The same scents of wood oil, cut grass, and roses, the same tiny cookies served in a tiny chipped bowl with strong tea, her same hearty laugh, looking past us, like a private joke was almost shared but then not. She’s lived there 50 years this month, and may not live there another. She’s 88, and our embrace by her kitchen door last weekend may well have been our last. I suspect that while the logistics of the next trip will be easier, the rest of it will be much harder. Not coming home to my grandmother, or even just not to her home, is impossible to imagine.

 

we're off

Well, we're off to the Netherlands after "one more sleep". Pray for us (or wish us luck, anyway).  We're taking the boys, but leaving the  ladies. By the time we get back, they should be able to stay in the run without being able to escape through the chain link like they did yesterday.

home

In a few days, our family is hopping the pond to the for a family reunion. I was born there – we moved to the U.S. in 1981, when I was seven. We’ll be gone for 9 days, staying in a cottage resort not far from my grandmother’s house, about 40 minutes outside of Amsterdam. I am already a bit emotional about this trip. It is a bit of a pilgrimage, as my grandmother is in her late 80’s, and has declared that she’s to spend the rest of her life on her side of the pond. It’s extremely expensive for us to go there, and I’m not at all sure I’ll ever see her again after this. We’ve been planning this trip since the boys were born.

On the night of the summer solstice, we’ll all be celebrating together in her house—all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and spouses. The boys and one cousin’s baby girl will represent the fourth generation. In the fall, my grandmother will probably move into a retirement home in town. She will undoubtedly mourn the loss more than I, having spent 50 years there, but I also cannot imagine not having that house and garden to come back to. With the exception of one family friend, it is the only home that’s been there my whole life. My earliest memories are of going carefully down the winding staircase, of feeding her hens, and of looking out the screen-less windows from the little upstairs room I often stayed in over the gravel drive. My grandmother’s house is a classic Dutch house, with timber framing, red and white checkerboard shutters, and a thatched roof. I can easily understand why my grandmother is so attached to it, with its friendly, open kitchen, large windows, and sprawling garden. She insisted on staying after my grandfather’s death in the mid-eighties, but no-one thought she’s still be there today.

Things are kept simpler there than they used to be, but once, there was a sprawling vegetable garden neatly encased in a rabbit-proof fence. There were egg-laying hens (her flock is now reduced to a few aging pet bantams that don’t lay anymore), elaborate gardens containing many hiding places, and in the small woods, even a little wooden playhouse. There is a pond that I skated on, with double-ridge skates, leaning on a child’s chair at age two. Every time I’ve been back as an adult, I realize how seeing a place again helps to preserve our early memories of it. I barely remember our other houses, but I have so many early memories of this one. I loved it then, and now I can see better how she did too. She doesn’t have a yard, she has grounds. My own gardens are tiny compared to hers, but somehow I spend my summer evening time very similarly to the way she always has. I make rounds around the house, examining all the beds, weeding a patch here and there, making mental notes, harvesting vegetables, checking on hens or calling them home to roost be scattering a bit of scratch. When I was little, I tagged along to those very activities whenever I visited my grandmother, which was often.

I know that my grandmother is burdened by her house now, that she doesn’t feel safe there anymore, rattling around all by herself. She had a fall recently, and she’s increasingly forgetful and confused about things like the day of the week. I am grateful that she’s leaving at her own initiation, and that we all have a chance to mark those 50 years with her, that even my boy will have a chance to run around under the trees and through all the little paths. I’m grateful that my decidedly non-religious family—my grandma and I being the sole exceptions —we seem to have found some way to ritualize this very rare reunion, as well as the passing of an era. My grandmother is the family matriarch, and I, her eldest grandchild, live furthest of away from her. Nonetheless, I feel that our connection is both timeless and eternal, beyond a place to come back to.

weather

The morning started with me leaning over the toilet, still in my nightgown, my arm reaching down into the bowl, up to my elbow in the thankfully clean toilet water. I was desperately trying to retrieve some fingernail clippers that had fallen in, trying to grab a tip of them before they slipped in further and forever clogged the plumbing. In desperation, I finally threaded an Ethernet cable down the toilet until the hooked tip caught the clippers and pulled them up. It was quite possible the weirdest on-the-fly solution I’ve come up with in a long while, but it worked.

Then, at our Early Childhood class, while the parents were in the other room, O earned himself a time-out from the teacher for being uncooperative – a bit of a trend he’s had with authority figures lately, always testing limits with a smile. Nice way to end the year. A good part of the parents’ conversation was all about new (and highly unlikely) ways we hadn’t thought our kids could die, which, sorry, but I find that unhelpful at best.

I got to work, covered the front desk for a bit so everyone else could eat lunch, and was treated to a distantly heard earful from three of my co-workers about those awful people who spend all that money on infertility treatments when there are starving children in the world. I learned a lot. Did you know:

• That it is so unnatural, and those kids can be really deformed and shit
• That there are waiting children just waiting to be dropped off at my home (and that they wouldn’t be starving if not for people like me)
• That the health care crisis is because of all those test-tube babies (and shit)
• That you need to accept your destiny, and that not everyone is meant to be parents
• That lots of the time you end up with septuplets (also and shit)

And somehow, I’m home now and sitting here perfectly OK with how my day went. Maybe it’s the fact that I did eventually get the damned fingernail clipper out of the toilet, and the relief was good for something. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s probably OK that O learns to cooperate from other people, because I don’t really want to do that alone. Maybe it’s the fact that the thought of me and my family being responsible for the health care crisis, coming from a bunch of smokers and/or morbidly obese women who obviously don’t know their ass from their elbow on this issue, is at least as funny as it is offensive.

I think, oddly, that it might be the weather that’s sparking a bit of extra resilience within me this week. We’ve had a lot of heavy wind, thunderstorms, and even some exciting hail and rainbows. This morning was that “cabin weather” I love so much – dark clouds with lots of blue sky between them, bright sun followed by dimming clouds, gusty wind high in the trees, raindrops through sunshine on only one side of the street. I cannot help but love this particular Minn*esota weather  even as I feel for those who were affected by the worst of it today. It feels exhilarating and freeing, making me feel alive deep in my bones. The boys seem to like the weather too, running around in their boots and singing “It’s raining, it’s pouring”, watching the lighting and counting for the thunder.

After the rain, I walk the garden, pick up small fallen branches, munch on parsley, see the growth that came from a deep drink of rain, and the dumb annoyances of the day roll off of me. I go back in and hug my kids, make dinner, get a shoulder rub from J, and can’t stop smiling, even on a day that starts out elbow deep in toilet water.

sheltering/letting go

My boys, at 3 years and 2 months, are on the very edge of having real playmates besides each other. They have great fun with their little buddy J, who they’ve known since they were babies, and it is so much fun to see them all shrieking and talking to each other about this and that imaginary plot. With most kids, they still hang back and play with each other or alone, but I can see that this is changing fast. They’ll start preschool in the fall, but I predict that even by the end of the summer, they’ll be in a whole new social universe.

 As fun as that is to watch, I confess to also being a tiny bit sad about it. Until now, the boys have been fairly sheltered. I don’t plan to shelter them from everything their whole childhood, but for ages zero-three, that has felt right to me. They haven’t had much (really any) media exposure, save for a bit of YouTube Sesame Street  when they've been sick. They don’t even know how to spar like pirates, or pretend to shoot a gun. They wouldn’t even recognize a gun.

So far, their little buddies are also pretty gentle little kids who aren’t yet caught up in aggressive TV characters and competition and violent play. But it will change, and I will need to be tolerant of their finding their places in a complicated, media-driven culture. More and more, I also feel that my role as a parent extends beyond my family into a covenant with other kids and their parents, even if those families act differently, play differently or have different rules and standards. Nurturing those connections, within preschools and classrooms, on the playground, and with neighbors, requires putting aside your own perfect ideals for what kids are exposed to. The reward is less alienation and more connection, mutual understanding, and a healthier community in general. These things are very important to me, but so far, nurturing those connections hasn’t had a cost because my kids are so young. That’s changing, though. It doesn’t take more than one kid to teach your own kids all about fighting, and winning, and scripted media worlds. It seems like all the moms of older kids I know are at least a little bothered by the subject of their kids’ play.

Really, part of what’s hard for me to let go of at the moment is simply the fact that I so very much enjoy the subjects of their current play. They pore over books about reptiles, and bugs, and every kind of transportation. They make cities out of blocks, catch and identify bugs under a magnifying glass, water the garden, pretend to be baby birds. They kiss their “babies” (mostly stuffed animals) and put them to bed. They turn a pair of mittens into a game about snowmen, a colander into a trip to the moon. They run back and forth in inscrutable games, dragging their toys behind them with strings begged off their daddy.

They do fight some, but their conflict centers on having two ideas about how the same game should go, or both wanting the same toy or object, not competition: not comparison or wanting to best each other. They become jealous of each other’s piece of my attention, but they don’t engage in one-upmanship to garner it. I know this will come, but we haven't seen it yet. It bothers me that so much of the 3-and-up media and even literature I see seems bent on promoting competition over cooperation. Some of the 3-and-up books we bring back from the library are all about one kind of race or competition. It’s like once they turn three, the jig is up-time for the “real world”. Won’t they figure all that out without our tutelage? Are any kids really in danger of not competing enough? Kids are certainly in danger of not learning how to resolve conflict. The whole world is suffering from our not knowing how to resolve conflict, share available resources, and show love for people we don’t know first-hand. Do the writers of that kind of book or movie think that’s all 3-and-up kids are interested in, because if so, I beg to differ.

Last night, after we met our church playgroup for a park outing, the boys and I stopped by the ball field, both boys sitting in our red side-by-side double stroller. They watched intently, asking questions, trying to figure out how the game is supposed to work. I tried to explain, that there are two teams, the object of the game, and so on. It was useless, because they don’t yet understand that for one team to win, the other must lose. They don’t know what winning and losing are.

I know that I can’t shelter them forever, and really, I don’t want to.  We don’t have a TV, and that will probably be an issue for them at some point, so we don’t plan to worry much about what they watch at friend’s houses as long as it’s age-appropriate. I believe that play is an important way of working through what kids are exposed to in their environment, so even “war play” probably won’t be censored in our house (though I don’t have to have it in my face either). There are probably some things I won’t shelter them from that a lot of parents would. We often go to the Wednesday peace vigils on the bridge here to protest the war, and I talk with them in frank terms about what all that means. We talk about how killing people is very sad, that it isn’t what God intends for his people to be doing, that we all have a purpose in life—we are all gifted with a way to contribute— and that someone who kills or is killed is not getting the chance to live out that purpose. We talk about how people sometimes have to use their loud voices to stick up for those whose voices have been made quiet. The boys take me literally, run up and down the bridge with their tiny hands stuck in a bona fide peace sign, screaming “Peace! No war!” at the top of their lungs, and I am kind of a mess when I see it, because they are sons, they are boys, and war is always a possibility for my children’s future. But so far, they are little peacemakers, good at conflict resolution, not yet caught up in a world of competition, materialism, and violence. So far, their games don’t make me cringe, their playmates are sweet and fun to have around, their orbit is still our little house and family. Forgive me for being utterly grateful for how long that’s lasted.

When we had their dedication in church, when they were almost four months, we promised to let them go where God calls them, to the ends of the earth if need be. That wasn’t an easy promise to make even then, and making it on that day was largely symbolic, an abstraction, almost like our pastor was sealing the deal before we read the contract that is raising children. It isn’t until they get a bit bigger that we can even begin to comprehend what that kind of promise means. It is a promise that I have to make in tiny ways every day, in more and more complicated ways. It is a promise that I really might have to keep someday in its entirety, as some of the parents in my church have recently, letting their teens do relief work in a Third World country for an entire summer, swallowing hard as they put them on the plane with their Ipods and giant duffel bags.  Risking life and limb for a greater good.  The ends of the earth.  

God help me to be self-less enough to let them do what they are called to do in the world, today and beyond, to look at parenting as an engagement with a community and not waste my energy on creating some sort of personal laboratory of ideal circumstances. God help me to remember that my children are citizens of the world, and trust enough to let them find our way in it, to be their base, and their foundation, but let them go, today just a little, someday, to the ends of whatever parts of the earth their gifts are most needed.

Last night, we had another milestone around here: I discovered that my boys are really ready to enjoy the Shel Silverstein books. There aren’t too many pictures, so it requires that they’re sophisticated enough to really listen to the words. Oh, how we laughed at Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, and Captain Hook, and the man who lost his head and thought it was a rock. I have many memories of reading these poems to my brother when he was just four and I was eight, not long after we moved to the United States.

New to a foreign country, he and I played all kinds of games alone together, many of them competitive and full of shoves and angry words, but we also played a game called “Hug-O-War”, where’d we hug and roll over each other until we both ran out of breath. It was rough, and physical, and probably loud – the kind of game that my mom probably told us to take somewhere else, saying, as she often did in her native Dutch, that “this will end in tears”. I don’t think it did end in tears often, though. What I remember anyway, is that the two of us clung and rolled down our grassy hill, chanting the poem as loud as we could, squeezing each other as hard as we could, feeling the sensation of being squeezed hard by gravity and arms, grass rolling right over our faces, laughing and holding on for dear life.

Hug O' War

by Shel Silverstein

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

spilled milk

J and I have been trying some different strategies to deal with the complete 0-50mph meltdowns we’re seeing a lot of lately with our three-year-olds. It is SO aggravating to deal with meltdown after meltdown over nothing. Often it seems like it’s just out of habit, because if we ask them to “try again”, to for instance, say, “Oops, my milk spilled! May I have a rag?” instead of screaming, “Waaaah!! My miiiiiilk!”, they often do it without a problem, changing their entire demeanors back to reasonable from seemingly inconsolable.

Whiny kids are a trigger for me – I’ve always hated whining. I even considered looking for a different job once because I hated being around a whiny co-worker that much. My kids’ whiny, drawn out tone when they request something makes me cringe every time I hear it. It feels like hearing nails on a chalkboard.

I wish I knew how to prevent this whiny stage with children, but with the possible exception of kids with an especially sunny and optimistic temperament, I’m no longer sure it’s entirely possible. We sure tried, though. They’re not exposed to whiny TV characters or whiny older siblings. We don’t respond to whiny requests or demands. We give them better words to help them try again to get what they want. They’re well-rested, and get plenty of positive attention. We catch them being good and highlight it when they are. Still, the meltdowns over nothing.  All the time. It’s just this age, isn’t it? Seriously, if you have kids the same age or older, I want to hear one of two things from you: “it’s the age”, or what to do differently.

I actually may have some answers for myself, though. This weekend, I kit upon something that was kind of interesting to me. I realized that my kids have no idea yet how to distinguish between something that’s a big deal and something that isn’t. They act much the same whether their milk spills or they’ve been painfully hurt because in the moment it happens, it all seems like the end of the world. It’s about resilience, or more specifically, self-talk. It’s about the ability to recognize and say to say to oneself, “This is not a very big deal, I can deal with this.” Or, if it is a big deal, it’s being able to say, “I can find the resources I need and have enough faith in myself and my people to handle this” (even if that means wailing in mama’s arms, which is perfectly legitimate sometimes).

And really, don’t we all struggle at least a little with this every day? I sure do. Watch me as  I do my nightly chores in a funk only because I’m grumpy at being out of chocolate, or harbor a grudge because J crabbed at me an hour before, or lament over the hour-and-a-half lost in a fruitless Tech Support maze. (I’m still not over that last one). My ability to get through the day effectively and happily don’t have as much to do with chocolate or crabby spouses, or aggravating details, or even identifying feelings as they do with my ability to put things into proper perspective and move on. It’s about resilience.

To that end, I’ve been thinking that what my boys might need to move past this stage is some coaching in how to put things into perspective. It’s rather tricky, because I’ve been quite on the side of “honoring kids’ feelings” up until now. I grew up with (and still deal with) my parents telling me to basically get over it when anything goes wrong, that my feelings didn’t matter and weren’t legitimate. I really, really didn’t want to do that to my kids, and have spent a lot of time and energy on learning strategies that are respectful of feelings and teach kids that ALL feelings but only some actions are OK. It sounds so good in principle, and my boys are indeed very good at labeling feelings by now (especially for boys). However, that strategy – saying, “I hear that you’re very upset”, may have some limitations I wasn’t aware of. I think I may have been unwittingly encouraging them to throw a whiny fit in order to get me to say that they’ve been heard, and to be too dependant upon me saying I hear and understand them in order to feel like I do. These days, they have a lovely habit of insisting upon being heard (and right away), and scream if I haven’t acknowledged whatever they just said. I always make them repeat it more politely, but I wonder if maybe I haven’t had a hand in creating this problem. I wonder also if it wouldn’t have been better not to essentially mirror their over-reactions in the service of honoring their feelings. This also applies to separating – I’ve never wanted to tell them how to feel about my leaving or them having to leave me, but I recently realized that sometimes they need me to model more confidence than they can muster, even if it feels awfully close to the “you’ll be just fine” I’ve tried so hard to avoid. Sigh. It’s so disheartening to realize that you’ve been overcompensating for your childhood. For you parents of babies – I know you’re exhausted, but do you have any idea how much simpler babies are than older kids?

I’m still not going to tell my kids to “suck it up and get over it” when they cry (though I’m perfectly willing to tell them to take it elsewhere if they throw a fit by whining or screaming), but my strategies are changing and evolving. I don’t spend as much time labeling feelings as I used to. I’m working harder to use optimistic language, to say “I have faith that you can handle that” or “I know you’ll find a great way to solve that problem” instead of “you seem very upset” a lot of the time. Sometimes I do both.

This weekend, we spent a lot of time talking about what is a “Big Deal” and what is a “Little Deal”. I tried to do it in a fun way, and not just when we’re in the middle of an issue. I know that it can feel like a Big Deal, ad that it’s not always for me to say what is and what isn’t, and we talked about that too. We talked about it more as kind of a game, a game that was very interesting to them. I’m also trying to be more conscious of what I model, to illuminate my own putting things into perspective and problem-solving.

There is one related area that I think we’ve really gotten it right so far. Since the boys have been really small, we’ve pointed out how their efforts in learning something new paid off until they succeeded. We say, “You kept trying, and you made it work!”, and this has turned into a bit of a mantra for our family. The boys even say it to us, themselves, and to each other. They try hard at new things, and are proud of themselves when they succeed. I’m trying to use our success in that area as a model for the kinds of interactions we have around whining and throwing fits. I need to use that same type of language when it comes to being other kinds of resilient, when it comes to dealing with powerful and overwhelming feelings. Identifying and respecting feelings matter, but so do resilience and the ability to put things in perspective.