Open Doors

This past weekend was the return of Doors Open Milwaukee.  We weren't able to venture outside our own neighborhood for it this year, but it was still fun.  Although the day got off to a rocky start.

Ian has been out of town for a week doing Army things.  I'm surprised how much the stress of that can still get to me.  I think of myself as a fairly calm parent, not prone to fits very often.  But a lot of my ability to be that way has to do with sharing the burden and having someone to laugh with and getting a break.  Remove the other parent from the equation and my mind becomes a constant scramble of responsibilities, always sure I'm forgetting something, and I become far less patient.

The weekdays with Ian gone have been complicated.  Last Thursday in particular was impressively tricky where I had to work, I arranged for the kids to walk themselves to the violin store after school rather than be picked up, I would feed them there, we'd head to the school for the open house right after work, then go straight from there to the Y for Mona's swim team practice.  Sure the dog wasn't getting walked until pretty late in this scenario, but it was the best I could do.

About the Yelling....

I know many really good parents.  All of them confess to yelling at their kids at some point.  All of them regret it to some degree.  It feels out of control and inappropriate.  Yelling at your kids makes you feel ashamed.  We want to be better than that.  Since we know we don't want to be that and we do it anyway we feel like we've failed every time it happens.  Arguably there are moments that's true.

I yelled a lot more back when Ian was deployed and I was doing everything alone and under great stress.  I wrote about it on Babble when I was blogging there, and got a lot of interesting feedback, mostly from other moms who were relieved to know they weren't alone. 

However, my kids are now 12, 10, and 7, and I want to share something I've learned about the yelling:  Your kids train you to do it.  Most of the time we do it because it works and that's that.  We don't yell because we are out of control, we yell because it's efficient.

How do I know?  Because yelling only works with one of my children.

The Value of Not Getting Mad

It feels good to get mad.  I will admit that freely.  The energy that accompanies anger is exciting and there is nothing like a good vent, a well timed swear word, or the feeling of chucking something across a room.  I think many of us live in such orderly, civilized little worlds that there isn't enough opportunity to let loose and expend a lot of the energy we have pent up, and when the opportunity strikes and we feel justified by unfairness or frustration to lash out, it's hard to resist.

I confess that on more than one occasion when my kids' rooms have become such horrible, ankle-deep messes and it takes me hours to dig through it and sort it out, that I have yelled and screamed and thrown things against a wall.  And then I feel terrible and stupid and not at all like the grown up I am supposed to be.  It's just hard to not be listened to over and over and over, and sometimes it's too much.  The repetition of pointless feeling tasks when there is so much I'd rather do tries my patience like nothing else and at certain moments I lose it.  I tell my kids (by which I really just mean Aden, who is now 10 and is at least improving in this area) that if they just do what I ask when I ask I would not be driven to yell.

I've never lost it to the point where I've directed any physical anger on anyone--just at some unfortunate legos or pieces of a train set--but the yelling still isn't good.  And except in rare circumstances it doesn't really help.  (For those times it does?  I've stopped feeling guilty about those.)

During Ian's deployments, when I had to do everything alone and the lack of sleep combined with stress was taking a dangerous toll, I flew off the handle more frequently.  Small infractions felt intolerable.  Now that Ian's home and I'm able to not only share the chores but retreat to my store regularly, I feel much more sane.  A break, some help, a little distance from the constant neediness, makes it possible for me to pause and think instead of simply reacting too quickly.  I'm a better parent when I have the space to consider what I'm doing instead of getting mad.  That's an obvious statement, which I suppose is why I feel so guilty when I yell.  Because I know better.  But knowing and being able to do are sometimes very different things.

So I was pleased at the cottage recently to have a rare parenting moment where I got to see the value of not getting mad.  It made enough of an impression on me that I am going to try to keep the experience toward the front of my mind for the next time things get to be too much and I'm tempted to lose my cool.

Aden is a very sweet and sensitive person.  She hates to disappoint me.  Her biggest flaw is her penchant for being distracted (meaning I can send her into the next room for something and she ends up playing with the dog or watching TV and I have to call for her to get back on task).  She doesn't always tell the truth and she hides evidence of small transgressions, but she's better than I was at her age so I don't worry about it.  Overall she's incredibly responsible, a good big sister, and a sweetheart.

But when you put people with their peers they can change.  I know I still get to be one version of myself with my high school friends that isn't exactly who I am normally.  There is a freedom that comes with that context.  So I understand that when I see it in my kids.  It would be odd if they interacted with their friends the same way they did with me.  When I see Aden take on a different laugh or a new cadence to her voice to entertain someone she's hanging out with for the afternoon, it's okay.  But I always pay attention because sometimes we can be inspired to change too far.

Aden has a friend who lives about 90 minutes from our cottage.  They don't get to see each other often, but when they get together they have a great time.  On the last day of our spring break we invited Aden's friend to come up for a sleepover.  For the most part it was fine.  But something about Aden's friend being a little older and bit more cavalier I think caused her to make questionable choices.  Aden was caught in a state of wanting to impress and please her friend, and I didn't like what she was up to.

The details aren't important.  Suffice it to say Aden took something I told her not to, and when she feared being caught, hid it.  I knew she'd done it.  I was angry, but the cottage just isn't a place that fosters anger and I dialed it down to annoyance.  I decided it wasn't worth discussing while we had a guest, and I let her think I didn't know.  The kids played while I made dinner, and I left them to eat while I took a break to read in my bedroom.  Then Aden knocked on my door.

She came and sat next to me on the bed, had trouble looking me in the eye, and said she wanted to tell me something even though she was afraid I might get mad.  I promised her I would not get mad.  I told her I might be unhappy about whatever she had to say, but I would not get mad.  I gave her time to get the words out.  She started and stopped a few times.  Her eyes filled with tears.

Eventually Aden confessed to what she'd done.  She was ashamed.  She wasn't sure why she'd done it, and when I suggested that maybe it just felt exciting to be in cahoots with a friend she agreed that sounded reasonable.  And I didn't get mad.

In fact, I was able to tell Aden, truthfully, that her being brave enough to come to me and confess made me very proud.  All of us screw up.  All of us do things we regret.  And it's easier to mask those moments with misdirected anger or other complications than it is to be vulnerable and come clean.  It's hard to expose ourselves as less than perfect to the people we care about most.  It's hard to really say you're sorry.  And Aden was sorry.

I hugged her hard.  I told her calmly what she already knew about why what she did was wrong, and then I focused again on the bravery it took to tell me about it.  I made her promise to remember in the future when she worries about telling me something that I did not get mad.  All she ever has to do is to remind me up front to not get mad and she shouldn't be afraid to tell me anything.

I told Aden that one of my biggest concerns as a parent is my children not being able to tell me something important.  They should be able to tell me anything.  They can only do that if they feel safe.  Getting mad, yelling, the harm in those things is they create fear.  I want my children's respect, but I never want their fear.  I want to be the safest spot in the world for them.  And in that moment at the cottage I was that for Aden, and I felt like the kind of mom I aspire to be.

I will probably yell again.  I won't pretend I'm better than that because I'm human and life is rough sometimes.  But it means a lot to me that Aden and I had a moment where we got to work through a situation as our best selves.  It was a good lesson for both of us.  Which is what the best parenting moments are really about.

Yelling (Babble)

I don’t hit my kids.  I don’t believe hitting kids is a rational thing to do.  If I’m not legally allowed to strike a fellow adult as a form of discipline I can’t imagine how that can be an acceptable thing to do to a child.  But that’s a whole loaded topic unto itself that maybe I will address another time.  I bring it up solely because it’s an example of something I have decided is not something I want to inflict on my children and I am capable of following up on that decision.  I have made the choice that I am not someone who will hit my kids and therefore I don’t hit my kids.

But yelling….  I can’t figure out why I am not able to have the same level of control over myself when it comes to yelling at my kids.  I am always ashamed of myself when I yell at my children.  I don’t mean raising my voice so they can hear me from a different floor of the house or down the block, or even to snap them to attention if they are in danger because of traffic or touching something hot.  No, I mean when I’m frustrated or annoyed to the point where I blather in a loud, scary voice intended to reduce my kids to a more submissive state.  I hate that.  It makes me feel like a bully.


It’s better now that Ian is home.  When he was deployed and I never had more than maybe two hours a week away from my kids (literally Quinn was on me 24/7 except for an occasional mandolin orchestra rehearsal) it was extremely stressful.  The talking and touching is cute until it hits an overload moment, and when you are with your kids all the time that feeling of overload comes up often because there is no real chance to cool down.  So I would yell at my kids at least once a day because I was too tired to keep repeating myself nicely and it was the only thing that seemed to get their attention sometimes.  Most of the time it was about getting dressed or into the car because we were late, and sometimes it was about simply following up on something they promised to do (usually picking up toys or clothes).  The most idiotic thing in the world is to yell at them about making too much noise.  Even as I hear myself shouting up the stairs, “I told you to be quiet because your brother is sleeping!” I think to myself that it would be hard to be more ridiculous.  What is the point of that?  Why do I do it?

Now that Ian is back and we can take shifts with the kids I don’t yell nearly as often.  If I’ve been at work all day I miss them and everything they do seems charming instead of annoying.  I’m able to write about them sweetly when I blog because they aren’t in the room with me when I write, so I miss them, and there is nothing left but fondness for them in their absence.  When I get a break from them I’m able to appreciate just how good they are. 

My frustrations with them don’t come from them being disrespectful or mean or anything actually bad.  Anyone is annoying after an excess of contact, and it’s hard not to want your child to stop saying, “Look at me!” for the millionth time at the playground even though it’s meant with sincere love, simply because it would be nice to finish a thought of one’s own and not be interrupted all the time.  Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt toward my children, but grumpiness, yes.  And even now with breaks from my cutie pies I still lose it from time to time, and I never feel okay about it.  If I yell at them before bed it haunts me all night long.

I think a lot of parental guilt gets misread as good parents obsessing over an inability to achieve perfection.  I don’t think that’s it.  There is guilt inherent in knowing you should be grateful and appreciative of extraordinary things every moment, and it’s not humanly possible.  I’m acutely aware of how fortunate I am to have the life and children I do, and when I’m reduced to petty emotions about mundane things it feels wasteful.  I strive to be a better person, a better parent, than the one I am, but there are limits to patience and sometimes small problems evoke disproportionate responses.  I think parental guilt stems from feeling resentful and angry over things that look meaningless out of context.  It’s hard to justify yelling at your child over spilling a cup of water by mistake, even when it’s the last straw in a long chain of events.  We feel guilty when we know we are being unfair.

And I do think most of the yelling I do is unfair to my children.  I apologize later and my kids always forgive me, but I want to get a better handle on it.  I know I would not yell at other people’s children even if I had to tell them a hundred times to pick up the legos, but the third time repeating it to my own children I lose it.  The fact that I can make a conscious decision to stay calm with everyone else in the world is evidence that I shouldn’t need to resort to yelling at my own kids whom I adore, and yet I keep doing it.
I think to some degree it’s how the kids have trained me, not that that’s an excuse. 

The truth is I only really yell at Aden.  If I raise my voice at Quinn or Mona they are instantly reduced to quivering puddles, so not only do I feel like a monster but it’s counterproductive.  They only really get caught in the crossfire of the yelling.  Aden can get so distracted and lazy that it pushes me to the brink, but she just stands there and takes whatever shouting I apparently need to get out of my system and then does the thing I wanted her to do that would have prevented all the yelling in the first place.  So with Aden the yelling works, which is probably why I repeat it, but I don’t want to do it.  There are other, better ways to accomplish the same end, I’m just too lazy myself sometimes to pursue them. 

For instance, as I’m working on this, my kids are supposed to be cleaning up their toys.  I took a break from writing a few paragraphs back to help, and what we did was get out the video camera and turn the cleanup into a magic act.  I would film Aden pointing a wand at a toy, she would freeze while I stopped the camera, and Mona would swoop in to pick up and put away the toy, and then I’d restart the camera.  When it goes right the movie looks like Aden is making toys vanish, and when it goes wrong (and Mona doesn’t wait for her cue) we see bits of Mona blink in and out as well.  It’s hilarious, and a much more fun way to clean a room, but it takes forever and has to be an event in itself.  Some days I’m up for making the chores into magic, and other days I just want the silly toys picked up already.

I’m nowhere near perfect, but I only feel like a bad parent when I yell.  Today, like on so many other days, I’m resolved to cut it out.  I want to show my children that I think better of them than that.  I don’t want to teach Aden that part of being loved involves people screaming at her.  I want her to steer clear of people who act like I do when I’m yelling.  Like everything with parenting, I have to learn to be the right thing in order to teach the right thing.  It’s hard, but it’s worth it.  (Maybe I should go buy a punching bag….)

The Little Things (Babble)

I’m in a good place.  The new house is so much easier to function in than the old house that I’m calmer in general.  No one is sick (except Aden has a cough and Quinn tells me his stomach hurts at odd times and Mona has some bug bite on her shoulder the size of coaster, but you know, the baseline for sick in a household of kids is different than for normal people, so none of this counts as anyone being sick in my book).  Work is good, kids are happy, and I’m hearing from Ian a little bit now and then and that’s always nice.  I even got a letter this week letting me know that an essay I submitted to the ‘This I Believe’ series on NPR is being published in a collection due out in the fall.  How cool is that?


It probably sounds like I’m setting myself up for karmic disaster by admitting to hogging too much of the good at one time, but I’m just going to enjoy it while it lasts.  Because the really nice thing about that ‘calm and everything is under control’ feeling is that the little things aren’t getting under my skin.  When I’m pulled too many directions and I’m anxious I tend to snap at my kids a little too quickly, which makes me feel guilty, and then I’m just not nice to be around. 

Right now?  I’m the fun mom on the block with extra kids from the neighborhood hanging out and staying for lunch and we plan paper mache projects and paint and bake cookies with mini M&M’s in them.  That’s so much more satisfying than being the mom who is always yelling because we’re late for somewhere and no one listens the first ten times I tell them to do something.  It’s summer.  I’m not even enforcing a bedtime.  I can’t get upset about them not following rules when there are almost no rules to break.  The big ones at the moment are:  Don’t come downstairs naked, don’t leave the yard without telling me first, keep the back door shut (that one they are bad at), and when the fireflies come out it’s time to come home.

There are still important codes of conduct that apply, but they don’t feel like rules.  Occasionally I have to remind someone that at our home no one may be excluded from playing any of the games going on, but that seldom comes up.  I would clamp down on any of the kids if they were being rude or mean or overly careless, but those times are rare.  As long as everyone is being nice things are easy.

There is one funny side effect, though.  Mona craves either a little more structure, a little more conflict, or both.  I’m not sure which, but it manifests itself in her choosing periodically to punish herself.  Aden and Quinn do that too from time to time, but with Mona it’s more dramatic.   Aden at around Quinn’s age once famously told me when she was angry (I think the offense was we weren’t going to go someplace because it was closed) that, “FIne!  I won’t eat sugar for a whole day!”  I just looked at her and said, “Okay” which made her more angry and she upped it to a week.  Last night Quinn was so tired by the time we got home from work that when he asked me to open a chocolate milk for him and I pointed out I’d already done it, he was furious.  He said, “How could you do that?  I didn’t ask you yet!” and he stomped off as loudly as possible and collapsed on my bed and passed out.

But Mona is in a class by herself.  She has what I think of as her Garbo moments when she wants to be alone, and I don’t have a problem with that, but she can’t expect to be alone in a public space.  She can’t, for instance, claim the play structure as a place to be alone, or the TV area, or the kitchen.  That’s just not fair.  I will clear people out of the music room for her, or give her my room, or even clear kids out of the toy room for awhile if she wants it, but today she tried to use the computer in the middle of the dining room and tell her brother he couldn’t look on.  I told her that wasn’t nice and she took great offense and banished herself to her bedroom screaming, “Fine then I won’t have breakfast and I don’t love you anymore.”  She stomped up the stairs (the new house offers much better opportunities for noisy stair stomping apparently) and when she turned around at the top of the banister to add something else I was fed up and raised my voice and told her to be quiet and go to her room already if she couldn’t be nice to her brother.  She wailed that she hated me and moped on her floor under a blanket.  After some cooling off I went in and told her I was sorry I yelled.  She told me I should yell.  I asked her if she wanted me to punish her more often and she said, “Yes.”

Poor girl is serious.  The thing is, she doesn’t really do anything bad.  She does what I ask of her and volunteers to do things like crack eggs or set the table.  She’s not perfect, but she’s six.  I correct her or explain things when necessary, but other than trying to shake her little brother off her tail once in awhile (which I get) she is a very good kid.  There isn’t much I have to tell her ‘no’ about, and maybe that’s a problem for her.  It reminds me of a quote I heard from Fred Rogers in an interview a long time ago where he said he thought it was a very cruel thing to do to children to never tell them no.  No was a way of outlining clear boundaries for children in a world where they needed to feel safe.  No was a way of showing them you care.  Maybe I need to take Mona to a place with broken glass and poisonous snakes so I can clutch her close and say, “NO!  Don’t touch!  Keep your shoes on!  No snake petting for you!”

Could this be a deployment thing?  That she has fears and frustrations and she needs an excuse to vent about them and she can’t find a good one lying around?  Maybe having daddy away feels like a punishment and she wants it to have a name.  Or maybe she’s crazy.  In any case it doesn’t happen frequently, but when it does happen it’s loud.  After about an hour of self-imposed exile in her room she drew me a love note on her magnadoodle and placed it outside her door for me to find.  She was all squeaks and cuddles again and she told me she loved me.  The dark cloud had passed.  Don’t know when I’ll see it again, but it’s scarier than the tornado warning we lived through the other night so I hope not soon.

But other than those odd moments when the kids are trying to get a rise out of me, everything else I’m able to take in stride right now.  It’s nice.  I first noticed how much better I was handling the little things lately when I had cluster of scheduling problems and it just kind of made me laugh.  The refrigerator was making a buzzy-screamy sound one morning, and since our house came with a home warranty I called them about it.  The soonest they could get someone in was three days later right smack during the time we had dentist appointments for all four of us scheduled.  It was painful to cancel those dentist appointments, but we couldn’t keep living with the horrible noise in the kitchen so it had to be done.  Do you know how hard it is to get four dentist appointments together on one day?!?!  Hard enough that the new ones are in October.  I had to think about the kids’ school hours for the reschedule for crying out loud.  In the meantime we’re on a waiting list so if people cancel and I want to sneak each of us into the dentist one at a time over the summer we can, but ugh.  Anyway, to accommodate the refrigerator guy I also had to move an appointment at the violin store and change my plans for grocery shopping.  Fun all around.

But that’s not the best part.  The best part is when the refrigerator guy got to our house, examined our appliance for twenty seconds, and then told me the fridge was fine, it was the doorbell box mounted above it that was screaming.  Apparently the heavy rain we’ve had here affected the wiring on the doorbell on our side door and triggered some kind of doorbell alarm mode.  A friend was kind enough to come out and disconnect it later in the day.  A couple of months ago I would not have found this funny.  Nowadays, well, it’s just not enough to bug me.  The dentist appointment thing is annoying, but no one’s teeth are falling out that shouldn’t be falling out, so it doesn’t really make any difference.  Life is fine.

Also, the freedom I have since Aden is around to help watch Quinn was unexpected.  I was thinking with the girls out of school for the summer that it would be more work, but it’s turned out to be less.  Aden is old enough (and a kind enough big sister) that instead of me having to help Quinn every time he has a computer problem or wants a piggy back ride or needs someone to push him on the swing, Aden can do some of that too.   When we’re all at the violin store and I need to work, Aden is wonderful about assisting both of her younger siblings with whatever they could use help with, and it’s really nice.  Quinn is crazy about his big sister and would prefer to do things with her most of the time anyway, and Aden thinks her little brother is adorable and doesn’t mind having him tag along.  This is also contributing to that sense of calm I’m currently enjoying.  (At least when Mona is not literally asking for a time out.)

This is not to say I still don’t have panicky moments when I worry about Ian in Iraq, or that there still aren’t a hundred projects I’d like to get to, but I can’t do anything about Ian and the war so I try not to dwell on it, and I remind myself how lucky I am that my biggest source of frustration is that I have too many choices of great things to do. 

I did get thrown for a loop the other night when I was watching an episode of Friday Night Lights on my computer before falling asleep, and the last scene was of soldiers showing up at a character’s door to inform the family that their soldier had been killed in Iraq.  I was not expecting that and wouldn’t have watched the show if there was any way to know that was coming.  I was pretty shaken up and didn’t sleep well that night. 

But those moments are few and far between right now.  Quinn’s smile always sets the morning right no matter how badly I’ve slept.  Mona makes me laugh.  Aden touches my heart.  How can I complain?  The little things that used to get me down are outnumbered.  I’ve got enough little things around that make me happy that right now every day is a good day.  I’m doing my best to appreciate that for all it’s worth.