Riding in cars with babes

When I started working part time that meant I got to pick my daughter up from school. I was so excited. I pictured her face lighting up, running down the hallway to embrace me. It doesn’t actually play out like that. My daughter is approaching two and shows her love in a different way.

At school the teachers praise her calm demeanor. On the car ride home she lets it all hang out. I get to hear about all the hurts from her day, the toy swiped away by a peer, the snack she didn’t like, the discomfort of a soiled diaper, the challenge of using a paint brush. She doesn’t voice specifics, but instead cries ‘mama’ all the way home. She bottles up all her disappointments and frustrations from the day and cries it all out to me, her safe person. What an honor (no sarcasm intended). 

At first I was annoyed and confused. I wanted our time to only be sweet and I wanted her to be happy. I didn’t understand what she was doing. I thought she was making a big deal out of small things. I would try to reason with her that we would be home soon and that wearing a seat belt is for her safety. When she threw her stuffy and cried I would explain that next time she shouldn’t throw her stuffy unless she didn’t want to see it for the next ten minutes. When she cried trying to pull her shoes off I would tell her that wearing shoes really isn’t that bad and mama was also wearing shoes. “We will be home soon!” Please stop crying…

How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk- This book completely changed our drive home.

First off, this book is so practical! It’s so meaty and there’s so many opportunities for application. It’s not a quick read, it’s a journey. Reading each chapter is like a therapy session with homework to work on until your next meeting. 

In the chapter about helping children deal with their feelings. It talks about saying less and listening more. Instead of explaining to my daughter why she shouldn’t be upset I just let her be upset. I tell her I’m all ears, I tell her to let it out. And I give her the airspace to do so. The radio is off. My brow is furrowed and I’m nodding. I give the occasional “mmhmm”, “that sounds hard”, “tell me more”. If it’s just her day that she’s processing, the tears come and go and I say little to nothing. She feels heard and loved (my true desire). If it’s actually the stuffy, I pivot and say “I wish mama could reach your stuffy, I wish I could help.” She usually sighs and looks out the window. 

The real challenge I find now is not finding the right words to explain away her feelings, but rising above her feelings. Some days her cries give me so much anxiety. For this advice to work I need to keep my cool. I must lead with empathy while not letting her emotions become my emotions. I can’t take it personally and I must remind myself how thankful I am to be her mama.

Screen Time: The Thief of Joy

This weekend I sat with my almost two year old in the living room and we watched a mama bird sit on the nest she’d made in the vines overhanging our front porch. I was so thankful and it was so peaceful. 

I read The Montessori Baby while my daughter was in her early months of life. I read this book and Moms on Call. I was trying to decide what kind of parent I was going to be. I’m still on that journey and I’m very much a work in progress. Several things really stuck with me from The Montessori Baby and one of them was the reason why not to let your baby or toddler watch TV. 

TV moves so fast! I never realized how quickly one scene flips to the next until I started counting. I had a conversation with a fellow mom the other day about a certain dog show that’s popular with littles these days. “No matter how many warnings we give John, he just loses his mind every time we turn off the TV. It’s not like that with the other shows. With the other shows we’ll give him a one minute warning and then we’ll turn the TV off and move on with our day. But THIS show!” She told me she counted how many seconds per scene and this certain show changes scenes every two seconds. The least stimulating shows she could find for her three year old change scenes every four seconds. The real world does not move that fast! This is just a normal mom trying to limit screens and not overstimulate her child while also trying to make dinner.

My original motivation for not letting my daughter watch TV was so that we could keep our evening walk routine. I wanted her to be able to enjoy watching the trees pass by and the people walk around our local town square. I wanted her to enjoy the simple things. She’s more mobile now so we let her walk/run/bike some stretches but we have kept our routine.

It's about more than just our evening walk though. If I reflect on my own use of screens, screens keep me sitting and pacified and disengaged from my family, and worst of all screen time makes me dissatisfied with the world and people around me even after I’ve stopped watching. A walk through the neighborhood chatting with my husband is just not as great as the fun date night the characters in my rom-com just went on. My house looks more shabby the more I watch Architectural Digest. My own body is just not enough. My child and my husband are lacking. I am boring. I have no friends. I don't want this for my daughter.

My daughter is so good at being still and content with what is right in front of her. I’ve realized the less I spend on my phone the more still and content I’m able to be. The more present a mother I am. And it’s not that I just put away my phone while I’m with her. It is the effect of the phone on me long after I put it down that is the sickness I want to cure.

Withholding Joy

‘The best situation for a child is to have their mother’s physical and emotional presence for much of the time in the first three years.’ 

‘If infants or very young children don’t have their emotional needs consistently met they develop what psychologists call defensive, or stress inoculated, independence as a survival mechanism. As these children get older they are more likely to experience anxiety and depression.’

I messed up. I made a life altering, devastating mistake that affects my whole family. I feel extremely guilty and I want to crawl in a hole and never come out. I deserve to suffer. I don’t deserve forgiveness. 

And yet living under the weight of what I did and punishing myself will actually do more devastation to my family. I must choose presence. I must choose joy. I don’t deserve to sit on the floor with my daughter and play like nothing happened, but even greater than that, my daughter doesn’t deserve my absence or my emptiness. 

Tidbits from Erica Komisar’s book Being There