I remember interacting with other mothers with older children and listening to them complain about their kids. "Just you wait until..." Like it was a given that my baby was going to be a pain in the ass, too.
I was discouraged and offended by it and I told myself that I didn't ever want to grow up to be a bitter mom. I was not going to judge other people's parenting decisions the way I did before I had a kid. I was going to do the best I possibly could, but in the end I knew that no matter how much I rocked or how much I sucked as a parental unit I was going to give it all I had. I am, obviously, human. So I anticipate mistakes. X-man and I got through life scream-free until about June of 2008, when he was 27 months old. Then I started to get frustrated with everything, and I realized what made those bitter moms bitter.
As the parent of a newborn, I was underneath some delusion that if I talked to my child and kept the lines of communication open and tried to set a good example he would respect me and we'd have fewer behavioral issues. (Yeah, I'm laughing at that sentence, too.)
But what I realized by having a toddler, is that like my difficult pregnancy, I have very little control over anything. I can plan and anticipate and adapt, but at the end of the day, my child is still going to drive me mad at bedtime. Even though we have the same bedtime routine every night. Even though he ate plenty of fruit and vegetables. Even though we had a pretty indepth conversation (at least for X-man) on how he feels like he suddenly wants to stay a baby rather than be a big boy, even if it means only drinking milk from a bottle and lying down all day with a pacifier.
It made me realize that I have what I always wanted when he was so little. I have a free-thinker. I have a kid who is more interested in figuring something out than he is in having me do it for him. I have a kid who shows affection, disappointment, sadness, frustration and tries to talk to me about those experiences.
But it doesn't stop him from jumping on the couch. It doesn't stop him from refusing to sit still during a timeout. It doesn't stop him from trying to stall at bedtime or runaway when it's time to put pants on in the morning.
And like Freak, I find that my first response to being frustrated at those regular 2-year-old times is shouting. I don't want that to be my main kind of communication when things get rough, but it's hard in the heat of the moment (particularly after I've been bonked on the head with a metal truck) to get my shit together on the spot.
This job takes a whole lost of endurance and confidence. Now when I sit around mothers of newborns, I am very aware of the long road they have ahead of them. And even though I answer honestly about my challenges with having a toddler, I find myself remembering the moms who told me my child would grow up and scream that he hates me, embarrass me in public and that I'd be dying for a martini at 2 p.m., too. So I show a little compassion.
My child is not her child. And although he or she will probably go through some similar traits at certain stages, she'll get through them, the way I'm working my way through X-man's.
While I was searching the internet the other day, I found an article about a 60 Minutes interview with Felicity Huffman. Usually with celebrities you get a lot of crap about how they could stay pregnant forever or losing their baby weight on macrobiotic diets was a snap. I was surprised at Felicity's openness and even more shocked to find that she and I have similar parenting experiences. I'm not a big Desperate Housewives fan. I did enjoy her on Sports Night and on her guest visits to other Aaron Sorkin projects. But boy, she's got a fellow Mommy fan for life now.
