Day 61: Children

In the past 24 hours, I watched my sister's son have three or four complete meltdowns. He didn't get his way and got angry. In his anger, he lost control and basically threw a hissy fit. He screamed, demanded his way, shouted and was defiant. He is five, so this behavior is understandable, but unacceptable.

Did my sister deal with it the way I might have, maybe not, but after having my stepsons and baby throw some winners, I have understood that parenting is more subjective than black and white. You can use different words or actions but with varying degrees of success. One technique might get him to cease the meltdown faster, but not teach him to control himself in the long run.

My daughter today was in a mood as well, maybe there is something in the water. She was pretending to drink out of a pumpkin sippy cup. I told her I would put some water in it to drink and give it back. Lil Bit has some lungs let me tell you!! She screamed bloody murder until I gave it back. She pitched a fit about everything I tried to feed her at dinner, and screamed with rage and fury when I was not presenting her with her frozen juice pop at a speed commensurate with her ability to ingest said Mott's freezer pop.

Nothing made her happy this afternoon and I couldn't do much about it. I managed to keep her calm and appeased for the most part, but she still had three massive screaming fits, which for a one year old who can't tell me what she needs or wants or what hurts is par for the course some days, but makes you realize that most parents of children throwing fits are completely lost as to what to do or are ignoring the behavior as part of a less immediate way to deal with the behavior.

The second that child resorts to a tantrum in public is the most humiliating and immobilizing moment, almost like a deer in the headlights. You want to throw a blanket over them, hide the behavior and simultaneously magically create a perfect child behavior to save face in the store, mall, friend's house, in front of your visiting sister and mother. In that second you feel like everyone is looking at you and thinking, what a disaster of a parent!

We have a tendency to judge too quickly, especially parenting, but each child and family have accepted rules, mores, norms that are part of the way they live, handle family roles, deal with emotions. What my family considered normal, you might think was ridiculous or inappropriate. I may not agree with a lot of parenting choices, but it tends to be only the very worst parenting shows up on our radar. We may see the playground "bully" pull our kid off the swing and not have heard him ask nicely for a turn before losing patience. We see the negative behavior, but not that his parents have been working for weeks on impulse control or patience.

Children even at one are little independent people who want what they want when they want it. As we mature, we realize social benefits to patience, delayed gratification, kindness, empathy, but as children, we are walking bundles of need and want. Just as you couldn't walk up to a random 40 year old man and order him around, getting your children to behave perfectly reasonably for an adult isn't going to happen much of the time. If you get it to happen 80% of the time, even with reminders and coaching, you're probably doing an amazing job.

My sister is very patient with her children. She and her husband do their best to avoid spanking. They explain why rules are the way they are, they establish expectations and consequences for failing to meet expectations. Most of the expectations for the kids are pretty much what my rules would be and are age appropriate. They might tolerate more back talk than I might or might be trying to demonstrate extra patience with company here, but they are doing the best job any parents could. Sometimes children are just children.

And the next time you see a mother dragging a tantrum throwing child through Wal-Mart, stop and ask yourself if it were your child, really what would you do? Give in to every whim? Probably not, so what would be your strategy when "no" doesn't cut it? Let them scream and cry, drawing every eye? Dragging them out of the store and going home? Spanking them right there? Ignoring them and continue to shop while your little darling screams like someone drove a steak knife through his eye?

Parenting is hard. You're trying to make sure every lesson, reason, rule is part of the grown-up person you hope your child becomes. And somedays, you're just hoping you have enough patience to allow them to grow up without drinking .  .  . too often, at least. 

Day 128: Divorce part 1

Being a stepparent for the second time and watching the struggles of my stepsons has really made me think about the effect divorce has on children and the carelessness with which people separate.  The children are forever torn between two people who live apart. They rarely have both parents in the same place at the same time so are forever missing one parent.

Even if you take away any arguing on the part of the divorced parents, being bounced between two households is hard. One of my stepchildren has confessed to me that a secret wish is for the parents to remarry. Regardless of the likelihood of such an event, they wish for it. They want to be able to love both parents without  feeling disloyal. They want to spend time with both parents at the same time.

Obviously, if my husband and his ex-wife had not gotten divorced, he and I would not be together. I am incredibly in love with him and look forward to a life together. I am glad we found each other, but that does not diminish the effect divorce had and will continue to have on his children.

I decided to do a little research on the lasting effects of divorce according to experts.

A caveat here - I think marriage is hard. I’ve been divorced. I know that people, me included, get married with a romanticized view of marriage and the reality is very different, sometimes the reality of WHO you’ve married only sinks in once the rose colored glasses come off. And our current culture doesn’t value marriage the way it once did. So I am not trying to hold myself up as a judge over anyone, but I think if people really understood how much divorce truly affects children, they might think twice before divorcing or perhaps even getting married. It might have given me pause in my younger years. Maybe if people really grasped that the children are better off if the parents stay together in all but the most abusive situations, perhaps more parents would try to work it out.

Now, I am not in favor of staying married in an abusive situation or one in which a partner has been unfaithful; however, marriages can heal from both of these things if both partners are willing to work at it. People today in general need to take marriage more seriously from the start and need to be more committed to making it work.

Some of the research I found showed that divorce has a lasting negative effect on the children – forever! 20-25% of post divorce children were considered troubled adults when measured against a list of psychiatric disorders while adult children of intact families only had a 10% occurrence. The researcher, Hetherington said, “Now, that two-fold increase is not to be taken lightly. It’s larger than the association between smoking and cancer.” (Hetherington 2002, p. D6) Everyone knows smoking causes cancer. We have laws that protect advertising cigarettes to children due to this fact. We have warning labels on the sides of packages and on all advertising. Smoking is illegal in most public places, on television ads and even outdoors in some areas. But children have no protection from divorce.

According to a 25 year study by Wallerstein and Lewis,  ALL the post divorce children to a certain extent reached a conclusion that “personal relationships are unreliable,” failing to trust even the closest of family relationships. Even when the parents had positive second marriages, less than ten percent of the children whose parents had found stable new marriages felt secure and welcome in the new family unit.

That statistic makes me realize that no matter how well I try to parent the boys now, they are going to struggle with feeling loved and welcome in my home. They are going to be suspicious. If parents can leave, what would make a stepparent stay? That lack of trust kind of explains a lot of defensive argumentative behavior I have seen from several of my stepchildren over the years.  It also makes me want to call them right now just for a verbal hug. I feel like a failure. After losing the children I had so lovingly raised in my last marriage, I have struggled with getting close to the boys. I am afraid to love them too much because they have a mother and I am afraid I would get so emotionally invested in them that I would struggle with letting them go. I learned the hard way that, no matter how much I love them and how well I try to “parent” them, they aren’t my children at the end of the day.

But I am responsible for who I am for them and with them while they are in my home.  I need to make a larger effort to help them feel loved, welcome and secure in our home and with our relationship. If they, even on a subconscious level, fear losing relationships, I need to make sure they understand that I will always be available to them no matter what. I will say that my older stepchildren from my previous marriage are both in contact with me. We talk once in awhile, visit when possible (a few times a year) and email and Facebook often.

My take away from this tonight is to make a bigger effort to be good and understanding when the boys visit and to work very hard at making my marriage work. We’re doing OK so far, but we’re not quite five years in, nearly seven since we met. Hopefully we have a long way to go.

Day 131: Impossibly, horribly true

Tonight, I am not sure what happened. My TV seemed to choose a channel all by itself. After watching some DVRed sit coms, I was watching Oprah. I don't usually watch Oprah because she is sometimes overly congratulatory of how great she is. She has done a lot of wonderful things, but I think she has allowed her head to get a bit swollen and I have a hard time watching her salute to "I'm awesome!" If she were really as awesome as she seems to believe, she would do her good deeds in quiet, where God instructs our generosity to be so as to be of pure motivation. It is a tough call to answer, but just saying.

Anyways, enough of my anti-Oprah tirade. For all her pride, she has done some pretty powerful shows. The show that happened to be airing tonight, seemed to be from earlier today. I was immediately moved to tears by the story of a young man, Clayton Grad, who had been horribly abused by his father and step-mother when he was six. The details of the abuse were sickening. He was kept in a closet, dog fencing surrounding his body so he could not sit or move, much less escape the tiny 2x2 closet. He was not fed nor allowed to use the restroom. He was punished with urine and feces when he could no longer control his bodily functions. He was kept in the closet for most of his life during a long enough time period that he cannot recall when it started. Luckily he was rescued by a police officer who God made sure listened to his "gut" and was later raised by a loving aunt who did much to give him the life any child deserves.

The audio recordings of the timorous six year old recounting the horrible abuse turned my stomach and made my heart ache. I just can't understand how these people can have children, but I can't. I can't understand how they could look at this sweet little boy and torture him. Pausing the TV, I held my daughter so tightly and chased her around the living room, tickling her and kissing her. I must have told her "Mommy loves you" a hundred times tonight.

Being Friday night, I didn't rush to get her to bed early, but she's had a rough week with teething: fever, crabbiness, loss of appetite, sleepiness, temper tantrums. She started acting "done" around 9:30. She had crossed a threshold and nothing made her happy. I took her in to change into her jammies, but she was hurting and tired and just started crying. It broke my heart. I just held her and rocked her. I gave her toys and got her to laughing, but instead of putting her down to bed alone, I couldn't bring myself to let her go.

I wanted to be a mom from the time I was 16. I had a dream that I was pregnant and it was so powerful. I wasn't in any rush, but I wanted to be a youngish mom. I wanted to have several children, maybe adopt and foster. Then life got in the way and I was not able to conceive or not in a relationship in which I wanted to. By the time I met the man with whom I wanted to have children, I was no longer able to even hope for a biological child. We started looking into adoption. When we realized how costly it was, I began to realize that I might never be a mom. I was devastated, but trying desperately to accept that as my lot. If God meant for me not to be a mom, maybe He had a reason I shouldn't be a parent.

When things started falling into place, and we finally knew that we would be parents, I was over the moon. But it didn't seem real until I held her tiny finger in my hand. My friends said they could see my joy in the picture of me by her cribside in the NICU. I still can't believe how lucky I am to get to be her mom. Until you have a child, you can't imagine the type of love you have for this itty bitty person. It is gut wrenching. Loving her is so intense sometimes it almost hurts.

After she fell asleep, I held her in my arms. I wanted to squeeze her so tightly as if I could hug my love into her so she would always be able to carry it around in her heart. I watched the rest of the show I had paused and cradled my sleeping angel, trying not to wake her with soft kisses as I tried to understand how anyone could take the precious gift they'd been given and do such things. I talked to her as I carried her to bed. "I love you so much," I said. "You deserve a perfect mommy, but all you got is me. I am gonna do my best to love you enough to make up for my mistakes." I know she couldn't hear me, but I needed to tell her one more time how much she was wanted. I was meant to be her mom. God planned it from the start even if I didn't know it and she was always wanted by me. But I did wonder what life she might have had if her birth mother chose not to give her up. It would have been filled with poverty, transcience, drugs, cigarettes, jail and dysfunction, maybe neglect and potentially abuse. I am brought almost to tears imagining that life for my precious Lil Bit. It shouldn't happen to any child.

But it happens everyday. 5-6 children died today from abuse. Every ten seconds a case of abuse is reported. That number is more staggering when you think about the fact that most abuse is never reported. Much of what we would consider abusive behavior isn't even recognized at the time by the child as wrong and if reported, would not result in the child being removed from the home due to an overworked, underfunded system.

The day I met my daughter was the happiest day of my life. I am far from perfect and have my days when I could be more patient or more energetic or know what to do. Being a mom is an impossible job. I am going to screw it up, I am going to leave her with memories of me being angry or impatient. It is literally impossible to parent perfectly or even close, but no one should have a childhood like Clayton. And yet, it is impossibly, unbelievably, disgustingly true for one out of every 110 (or so) children.

I see what happens to some of those children when they get to me in high school. While they believe they are adults, I can see the little broken children inside. It hurts me. I have reported a few cases of abuse. One family moved away immediately after the investigation started. Another was found unsubstantiated. One girl I sent home with bags of food and got her in touch with counselors, but she is still in the home full of neglect. I am not allowed to take them home. Heck, I can't even give them a ride home legally. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to.

I know God is the master and has a plan, but I can't find in myself an answer as to how such suffering of children is allowed to happen. Especially when there are literally hundreds of thousands of couples just like us waiting for a child whom they will love and nurture. I just can't grasp how these parents are allowed to exist by God or man, but they do . . . and there are no words for the grief I feel for them tonight.

Day 255: Pillows

Today my Lil Bit and I were both sick. We both just needed a pajama day. I have been run down for about a month and a half now. I start to feel better and get sucked back down into sickness again. Today the headache from H - E - double hockey sticks reigned. I took Aleve, Tylenol, Excedrin - nothing helped.

We both napped and snuggled a lot. I had the love seat filled with pillows and blankets. She sat next to me playing with her binky and grinning. Every so often she would throw herself backwards, landing on the soft bed of cushions and pillows or into my arms.

As I caught her once, gradually lowering her to safety, I thought how much I wish she could be sheltered like this always. Now that she has started to crawl, while her world has opened up exponentially to her exploration, she is also opening herself up to all sorts of hurts, injuries, dangers.

I know I need to allow her to explore and "get hurt" in minor ways so that she learns limits, the word "No", how to do things, but I don't know how I am supposed to sit by watching her investigate and not always jump to stop her before she falls. I see so many sharp spots, hard places that can hurt her. How am I supposed to know how much to let go and how much to hold on?

I've been letting her crawl around on the floor, with as often as I vacuum is hazardous enough, explore a little, which drug out the dreaded no. I can already see that she understands no when she feels like it and just ignores me when she doesn't. Her world got wider and so did her eyes. Lil Bit is into everything she can reach. The cute wicker basket I've been using as a toy basket is now a hazard full of pieces easy to pick off and choke on.

I have this sinking feeling that my living room and all its soon to be removed cords, etc. is only the first of many chances I will get to wonder how much to let her explore without me. Don't we all wish for a world full of pillows for our children? My mother and mother-in-law still look at us wishing they could surround us with giant airbags. They watch us leave home, and I would imagine, spend a lot of time wishing we somehow could avoid the pitfalls and briar patches (bad guys and ieds too).

There are so many amazing aspects of being a mom that I only thought I could understand until she came into my life. This concern and worry was something I didn't anticipate. If love was enough to protect her, she'd have a long, safe, wonderful life. I may need pillows around my heart since apparently it is already moving, moved outside of my body.