Terrible Twos Overtaking the Household

I am a big fan of the “Sex and The City” series and I recently watched the second movie.  Although the movie as a whole wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, one specific part in it really struck home with me.  It’s the part where Charlotte and Miranda are at a bar talking about how difficult being a Parent is and how they would fortify themselves with a sip of their drinks to reveal their innermost doubts and ugly truths.  At some point Charlotte tells Miranda that when she started getting concerned about her husband and their nanny getting involved, the first thought in her mind was that she didn’t want to lose the nanny.  If you take that at face value, you could think that Charlotte didn’t care about her husband when in reality, as a Parent, you understand that we all struggle with raising children.

This whole introspection came after a particularly difficult day with Lucas, who is in the midst of the terrible 2s, and getting more difficult by the second.  We were all going to go for a family walk and we immediately started on the wrong foot when Lucas was put on “time out” after running out to the street (a HUGE no-no).  After the bawling and carrying on, because he was on “time out”, we finally got out of the house.  What proceeded was a nerve-racking trip which was exacerbated by the heat.  Lucas threw a major tantrum after I asked him if he wanted to walk “Tito” (one of our Dachshunds) and he said no.  I started walking with the double stroller, holding both dogs, when he decides that he did indeed want to walk Tito.  In exasperation, I refused, he had a major breakdown and my temper meter turned all the way to red.  Thankfully, Dennis was able to step in and I could walk off and cool down.

After Lucas went to bed I realized something shocking.  I realized that although I love my son to death, sometimes I don’t like him!  This thought made me feel awful and guilty.  Shouldn’t a “good Mother” love and like her children no matter what?? Did the fact that my patience meter was constantly in the red mean that I wasn’t any good at this parenting stuff?  I would like to think that a great Parent has infinite patience because they realize that the 2 year old doesn’t even mean half the stuff he says and that it’s normal for him to test ALL limits.  I gotta tell you, though, this imperfect mother starts seeing red after the fifth time that I have to scold him for hitting the TV or taking out the DVDs.  This imperfect mother sees red after the 200th tantrum because I offended him deeply by offering milk.

One of my biggest realizations when I became a Mother was that it is incredible how you can love someone so completely, irregardless of if they love you back.  One-sided love is hard to keep up but one-sided Mother’s love is infinite.  This explained to me why all those Mothers still cried and supported their children, even when they were proven to be criminals, murderers etc.   So how do I put together that I love Lucas and always will, but that this stage has really eroded how much I like him on a daily basis??   Relationships work with emotional capital.  You deposit in the bank so that when you take from the bank there is enough in there to sustain the relationship through that.  With children, they deposit just by being themselves.  Whenever they smile or say something funny or act kindly; their capital deposits are automatically made.  However, when they spend their whole day saying “no”, throwing tantrums at the most illogical things and hitting, they make huge withdrawals.

I always strive to be a better Mother.  To feed him well, teach him good things, limit time at the TV…..However, I have to tell you that the Terrible Twos exhaust me!  They leave me in such state of tiredom that the TV gets turned on and there is no reading after the bath.  Spending a whole day trying unsuccessfully to avoid blowups is like walking on eggshells that you know will break.  The kicker is that I am intuitively wired to Lucas’ cries so that if he is crying, it drains my emotional reserves as well.  I just want to make him stop, to make it okay.  So imagine a whole day, weekend, of him crying constantly about things that I can’t help.  I end up feeling like I was the one crying all day and by 6pm I’m sitting on the couch, watching Bambi with him, with the nagging feeling in the back of my head that tells me that he shouldn’t be watching all this TV and that I should be growing his brain by reading to him or playing with a puzzle.

I’m not much of a crier but sometimes I wish I could just cry.  Just let out this huge accumulation of frustration and anger welling up inside.  A good cry that could liberate the contradiction of the reality of parenting with my preconceived notion of how easy it would be.