Rainy Days and Mondays
When I last checked in, I was cruising down the road, rested, or at least caffeinated. Work was fulfilling, not overfilling, and home life was balanced, with the help of two extra adults with over 30 years of parenting experience under their belts (Shout out to Yaya and Papa Tom). Add to that some inventive dinner concoctions from Yaya, and we were all almost surprised by how easy this transition was going. It seemed as though God had answered my prayers. He/she knew what a frazzled mess I would be if my first week back to work involved sleep deprivation and piles of paperwork. Fortunately, God saved it all for the second week back at work. That way, I at least had some perspective under my fragile wings. With one good week filed away, I couldn’t legitimately melt down crying “wahhhh, this is IMPOSSIBLE; it is just as bad as I had imagined, and I will not survive it”. Instead, I could only say,” it’s just a bad week, and I know it will get better. I remember better days…I do I do I do”. I knew about the Ying and the Yang. I had my precious Ying week, so it was only right to accept the wicked Yang week, and this is how it began.
Recently, our house has turned into a game of “Whack a Mole” each night, with mama being the master of the mallet. I know that Dad can totally handle this job, but apparently no one else in the house (Ella) believes me. Only mom can bring down the hammer at 2/3 or 4 am between feeding the baby. There was a time, right after Cora was born, that Dad was on mallet duty, and he was great. For some reason, we (parents) are no longer the boss during the wee hours, and as it turns out, whoever can howl the loudest at the moon can also get pretty much whatever they want in the middle of the night.
Baby Cora’s participation in “whack a mole” appeared in the form of a growth spurt, so I found myself waking up in the day bed of the nursery, unsure of when or how I got there with the little one still attached to me. Usually I was startled awake by a snort, or a little baby fart, and I frantically scrambled for my phone praying the alarm would NOT start beeping as I squinted at its glaring light. Relieved that it was only 3 am, I gingerly placed little one back in her crib, and tip toed back to my own bed. It seemed that right when I settled into my own complicated arrangement of pillows, and shut off the manic talking in my head, the other mole was up, only this one was rabid, with a sudden sense of being slighted.
Let me explain. It is Ella’s nightly routine to take a bath, watch a story which is read on the computer by wonderful celebrities who support literacy, (www.storylineonline.net - check it out!) brush her teeth, read a story in bed, and say good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. This is our routine every-single-day. When she isn’t listening, (as in, running around the house naked, and refusing to put on pajamas, even when we ask repeatedly) she loses the story on the computer, and you would think we were removing each finger nail, one by one from her tiny little hands. The meltdown is severe but when she begins to act like a sane 3 year old again, I feel like an accomplished parent who stuck to her guns. So, when we stuck to our guns last week, and we trudged through the meltdown, the time out, the screaming and thrashing, the lying on the coffee table, gripping the laptop for dear life episode, and we the parents did not surrender, I felt like we had done the right thing. The night ended with us reading a beautiful Tinkerbelle book, wearing a sparkly headband, it was all so pretty, peaceful, sweet, and over. That was until she came bursting out of her room, and directly into ours at 3:30 am. I always hear her before I see her, and it makes my heart jump into my throat. This is one heavy footed, spirited child, particularly when she is upset, and feels as though an injustice has been done. It’s almost matrix like, the way that she arrives so quickly at my bedside, minus the light footedness and flying thing. I could smell her breath, and feel the heat of her anger, as she screamed hysterically with crocodile tears, “I want my story on the computer”. These moments scare me, because this is when I realize just how much of me she has in her blood. The need for routine, the difficulty with transition, the extreme sensitivity, not to mention, the inability to go to sleep and stay asleep. From me, she gets her anxiety and sensitivity; from her dad she gets her creativity and whimsical nature, so I just pray we are able to nurture the boogers out of the better half of her.
Anyway, in these moments, I don’t know why she goes to me, for the life of me, I just don’t know. My patience is shorter than an eye blink, and I go from normalish, to wanting to throw myself from a cliff in 3 seconds. I believe I got out of bed and said something, to no one other than myself, like “are you freakin kidding me?”. I threw off my sleep mask, to which she yelled “don’t frow fings mommy! Why did you frow dat!?”, and proceeded to burst into more tears. I couldn’t even respond…Our house is a small ranch, with hard wood floors which are excellent for this kind of event that calls for reverberation. So between her stomping, my shushing, and her reprimanding, we were making some serious raucous. It could have only been made better if I had started bawling the way I wanted to. With a little back rubbing, and an explanation of why mommy threw her sleep mask, and that “no, mommy was not going to wear it to school in the morning” she was able to get back to sleep. As for mommy, not so much. Within an hour, Cora was ready to be seated at the “breastaurant” again.
Fast forward two whole hours. I’m trying to cosmetically correct blood shot eyes, guzzling lukewarm coffee, and yelling at my husband because he sleeps. The poor guy, I mean, what is he supposed to do when Ella slaps her body on the tile floor, howling in the moonlight “go away, I don’t want you!” I’m not so sure I wouldn’t just cry myself to sleep. Somehow, as morning requires, we all got dressed and out the door by 6:30. Me with Ella, daddy with the baby. It’s a tired, very rainy, Monday morning.
As we drive to day care, I’m trying to be happy, positive mommy, pointing out colors and shapes, talking about the meaning of a weather report, and basically trying to make up for my middle of the night temper tantrum. It’s times like this that I think “What would Anthony do, and then I pretend to be my husband for an entire 30 seconds before the spell is broken, and I’m back to boring old mommy listening to NPR and drinking coffee. When we pull into the parking lot, I am more than thrilled to see that the carport is free, which by the way NEVER happens. I do a little happy dance. Small blessings are what it’s about on days like this. I put the car in park, and unbuckle my seatbelt when I hear the beginnings of storm coming from Linda Blaire in the backseat. This is one meltdown I could not have predicted. Like her mama, she goes from mellow to maniac in a matter of seconds. The conversation went something like this:
Ella – crocodile tears, face red, feet flailing “no mommy, you have to park over the-e-e-e-e-r!!!”
Me – (legitimately confused) over there? In the rain?
Ella – yes!!! Go park over therrrrrrrrrrr.
Me – Ella, it’s raining outside. We are two feet from the door, I am not going to park in the rain, we will get wet, and I don’t have an umbrella. We are parking here.
Ella – Screaming.
Me – (trick #1, distraction) Look Ella! I see your friend Chloe eating breakfast! Let’s go see Chloe and Ms. Tracey!
Ella - I don’t waaaaant to go to schoooool todaaaay. (boogers emerging from nose)
Me –(I have no more tricks) You have got to be kidding me. Are you kidding me?
(As it turns out, three year olds cannot answer this question, they are not even thrown off by it. They will however use it against you once you have emptied it from your arsenal of useless commentary.)
So, I threw the car in drive, haphazardly parked in the rain, and took up three spaces in the process. This only led her to more tears. I stomped around to her side of the car, hunched in the rain, and firmly snapped at her to hurry because “mommy’s hair is getting wet and I don’t like it”, to which she asked, just as honestly and calmly as can be, “why”…,..my answer??? “I don’t know”. For a moment we stared blankly at each other. I furrowed my brow searching for an answer, raindrops pecking my back. She waited, doe eyed. I think both of us were wondering why this question was so puzzling.
How do I explain that when you get old, things that were once captivating become a nuisance? That when you get older, you become more concerned with how you look than with how you feel inside. When you go in the rain, it feels icky, and then the back of our pants get wet, and your hair gets frizzy. And somehow these trivial things trump the feelings of your child. Yes, I know I will be standing outside in the rain to let students (who are pretty much strangers to me) out of their cars for 45 minutes this morning at my school, but for some reason, I can’t wrap my brain around letting you, my sweet Ella, out of our car for one minute this morning.
I guess because I’m not three, and I forgot that when you are three, Mondays don’t mean extra coffee, they mean its ballet day at school. Mondays also mean that it’s the first day away from mom, after a really fun weekend, and that’s kind of hard.
To a three year old, rain doesn’t mean my hair will be a ruined frizzy mess. It means my face will get tickled with little water drops, and I can shake my wet hair like a dog, and there will be lovely puddles to jump over and into, where before there was nothing. It means the sky will be full of big, bubbly clouds, and the sun will be playing hide and seek. Rain means we might have the awesome opportunity to use an umbrella, because umbrellas are still really quite cool, and a mystery, the way they go from being SO BIG, to so little again with just a button! Umbrellas are enchanting little things. I can be outside, with rain coming down all around me, but not be wet? Isn’t that magical? Three year olds are geniuses.
I drove to work feeling horrible, like the wicked witch from the west, scared of a little water. For a long time, I could have these moments, and be fairly certain she would not remember. Those days are officially over, and I am TERRIFIED. As a kid, I was extremely sensitive, and I have a few choice memories of really bad days, and of really great days. What worries me is not knowing which days/moments/words she will remember. Will she remember that I cut out her French toast in the shape of pine trees with powdered sugar for snow, or will she remember that I threw my sleep mask, and snapped at her to get out of the car? Will she remember that I gave het tickly back rubs in the middle of the night, or that I cried next to her bed out of exhaustion? I just don’t know, and I wish the “not knowing” was enough for me to pull it together for the sake of giving her nothing but intact memories, not to mention a stable childhood.
It seems all is not lost though. When we got home from school that day, and she was sitting just how she likes, in her panties, t-shirt, and socks, eating princess gummies, she said “mommy, you were mad today, you didn’t want to park in the rain”. She remembers…sigh. I gave her a big bear hug and kiss on the head, saying “I know honey, I’m so sorry”, and she said “It’s okay, because we can try again tomorrow”.
You know what, I taught her that, and she remembered that, and with that, you bet your money I can try again tomorrow. Let it rain, let all the days be Mondays, because my baby girl believes in me, and I couldn’t ask for a better rainy Monday than that. As humans, we are built to be strong, to be optomistic always, to be resilient. When we have bad days, we tell ourselves it will get better. When our parents model as many varied behaviors and moods as there are days in a year, we instinctively remember the ones that will help us to best survive. So, my little one is a survivor, because of me, and despite me. Even an overly sensitive little bird like myself can make it in this world, so I know my little baby bird will be just fine.
That's my little drama mama!
