It was an up and down day. She has a lot of energy and some days we make better choices with our energy than others.
We stopped at a friend’s house. She bounced off the walls, dumped out boxes, threw things, climbed on furniture and struggled to obey the limits of each timeout she earned.
We went to Walmart. When I turned my back, she scooped up an armload of everything breakable she could find.
We came home. She tried to open every closed container she could reach. Fish food, human food. She splashed fish water. She stuck her hands in the dinner I was cooking. She jumped laps around her sleeping baby sister.
At dinner, she adopted a fiercely unpleasant attitude about. Every. Single. Thing. The food was gross, we were doing this wrong, I interrupted play time and on and on and on.
I expressed frustration often today, but I’m proud to say I kept my cool, more so than I used to. At dinner we calmly responded to her attitude with respect and kindness but with firm reminders that rudeness never works and attitudes alienate people that you may want to play with later. And meanness hurts people.
Honestly, as someone who knows how hard it is to shed a bad attitude once you are in the thick of it, she did an amazing turn around. She ate the yucky dinner, she rephrased her angry language. For most of the remainder of the evening she was pleasant and kind.
Bed time arrived. She gets tired and gets emotional. She wanted to call her dad. On particularly emotional nights this becomes a “I want to go to your house,” temper tantrum/meltdown. I reminded her that she had been doing great and we couldn’t be throwing fits at bedtime, and then I let her call him.
Of course, it became a meltdown.
As she was sobbing into my shoulder and I was gently reasoning with her to calm down and empathizing with her that yes, it is hard to miss people and it’s hard to be patient, she suddenly exclaimed in a frustrated and matter-of-fact tone, “And kaboom!! We are back to naughty.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. And then I hugged my sweet frustrated little girl and reminded her that it’s ok to feel sad. It’s ok to miss people. It’s ok to cry and have big feelings. Throwing a fit about wanting to go to her dad’s is not the same as crying because she misses him. It’s ok to have feelings and express them. Crying because you’re sad isn’t being naughty.
It always amazes me how little we teach children about how to handle their feelings in a healthy way. Somehow, either intentionally or unintentionally, we teach them that uncomfortable or intense feelings are bad or negative. They confuse feeling things with being naughty. It took me until my mid twenties to learn that my feelings were not dangerous.
I could almost feel her relief when I offered empathy in response to her sadness; when I gave her permission to feel her feelings rather than ask her to stop; when she realized I was there to help her find a healthy way to feel sadness.
Kaboom. Back to being human.