Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone
The past few days have been very trying and challenging. I've been trying to adjust to some recently discovered behavior issues with one of my kids, and it has not been easy. On Wednesday, I was so intensely depressed that I had no will to even attempt to deal with my family in a fair or rational way. I was just angry. Every call of "MOM!" or request for help was just too much for me to handle. Everything I'd ever done, any decision I'd ever made about family, childrearing, love...it was all futile. There was no point to anything.
Edison, my 13 year old son, bore the brunt of my anger, even though he wasn't the main source of my frustration. He and I have been butting heads since he was two, and I have journal entries to prove it. Something just got into that boy's system and has never found its way back out. He's argumentative, independent, headstrong, persistent and his mood changes very easily depending on his surroundings.
He's a lot like me.
So we went head-to-head about his argumentativeness, his sloppiness, his rudeness, his criticism of his siblings. I was ruthless. He was ruthless right back.
The thing is, this is just the type of behavior I've been trying to address. Not that I've been trying to address it so much in Edison, though that seems to come as a side effect of my own changes. I've really been trying to address behavior problems in me.
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. ~Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969
Raised an adopted only child in a very, incredibly dysfunctional household, I got some pretty screwed up signals from my parents. My dad was, and still is, a manipulative liar. My mom was simply out of control. She didn't know how to handle me, and decided that the authoritarian, belittling, beat-the-tar-out-of-the-child approach was what would whip me into shape.
I inherited the best of both parenting worlds.
Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
This is absolutely, amazingly appalling to me, given that by the age of 12 I had begun planning my post-childhood life, and it did NOT include repeating with my children anything my mother had ever done to me. At that age, I didn't see the manipulation and lying that my dad practiced regularly. I simply saw that he was my savior. He rescued me from bedtime, from discipline, from having to face my mother.
When he was around.
And he wasn't around often. Birthday parties, friends' visits (which were limited, as my mom hated most people and criticized all of my friends), family dinners, you name it. My dad wasn't there. He didn't attend my track meets, dance recitals, school functions or softball games. He just made sure that when he was around, he was the ultimate "good guy."
My parents were not very social, didn't belong to clubs or groups or organizations. My mom had very few friends, and my dad didn't have many good ones. They weren't Christians, so they didn't belong to a church. They simply stumbled along in their child-raising life. I was there to stumble along with them.
When I moved out, my mother carried out the threat she'd screamed many times all through my life. She divorced my dad, and told me that she no longer had a daughter.
So, coming into motherhood, I was ill-equipped. As a daughter, I had been bullied, threatened, beaten, manipulated, lied to, distracted, rewarded, screamed at, hated, argued with, applauded, slapped, shaken, frightened and frustrated. As a mother, I was determined to be better.
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. ~John Wilmot
I read every parenting book I could find. Since I was a Christian, I read a lot of books that approached child-rearing from a "Christian" perspective. Most of those books included some kind of physical or emotional punishment. Spanking, time-out, ignoring the child when they displayed bad behavior, etc. I had been insistent with my husband Bohemian that I would never spank our children. The system I liked best was natural consequences. We spent many conversations discussing this, him telling me that this sounded good in theory, but how would it work in this situation, that situation, and what if it didn't work at all? I stood firm. Until my daughter was born.
Theoretical parenting, or theoretical anything for that matter, is not nearly as difficult as hands-on. I have never done anything in my life as difficult as being a parent. With Bard, I worked very hard to change my ways. I would be positive. I would not allow certain television shows to be viewed. I would bake more, cook at home more, speak positive words more. I would be firm, but fair. I would be consistent, but caring. Bard responded to this so well. But the hardest was yet to come. Bard was actually a fairly easy child to raise, and we raised her by the James Dobson method. Discipline immediately, consistently, lovingly, and informatively.
But, as I said, Bard was easy.
Boy, n.: a noise with dirt on it. ~Not Your Average Dictionary
When Edison was born, I was confused. I had been confused about how he was conceived, I was confused about when we should tell people that I was pregnant only six months after my first child had been born, and I was confused about when he should be born. The issues have changed, but the confusion has not diminished. With Edison, the parenting books flew out the window, and the discipline became much more serious. He was headstrong, to say the least. Some of his first words were "shubbup!" (shut up) and "goway!" (go away). Some of the things he would do would just break my heart. Some of the things he would do would just melt it. So I plugged away, disciplining, caring, trying to be consistent, trying to be fair, and most often, doing all right. Then along came Monet.
Around the time that I had Monet, I joined a feminist mothers at home e-mail list which had influenced my decision to become an attached parent. Monet was with me all the time. He was either attached at the breast or slung from my hip. I taught him sign language to give him a communication advantage. I tried not to spank, but instead ignored bad behavior and rewarded good behavior. Monet, in his effort to be heard, just made the bad behavior louder. And louder. And I became more and more frustrated, and less and less of a person.
Around this time, Bard and Edison discovered a new, entertaining pasttime. Sibling rivalry. This, I believe, was the beginning of my parental breakdown. Up until this time, I thought I was at least a decent parent. By the time Monet had grown old enough to join in with the sibling battles, I had begun reverting to my old parenting tactics, the ones I had learned as a child. Bullying, spanking, anger, belittling, sarcasm...even a few occassions of slapping. The worst one, I think, was screaming. The older my children got, the more they fought with each other...and the more I hated myself.
Because the rule for me had been to always be fair, but the only way I would ever have been able to accomplish that was to be everwhere at all times or to install a million dollar security system in my home. There was no way I could be fair, and to me, that just didn't seem fair. There was only one thing I could do...stop having children.
Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it. ~Jean Kerr
And then Sweetheart was born.
While Monet had been a planned pregnancy, Sweetheart was a total surprise. Through the whole of my pregnancy, I worried that she would be another boy. It was because my boys were boys that I was having such a hard time. Girls were, in my very simple opinion from my limited experience, easier than boys. I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when the midwife called to me to look at my baby's face, to see those rosebud lips and to just know. Sweetheart was a girl.
With Sweetheart, I was walking the line between being an attached parent and a conservative Christian parent. There were a lot of changes going on in my life...buying land, selling a house, moving into a tiny cabin, bringing my dad along with me even though I didn't really want to, but felt too guilty and indebted to say "no," and then, later, building our own home, which took the other part of the time that was left when I wasn't trying to keep a 16x24 foot cabin clean while seven people were living there. The one thing I most desperately did NOT need was another child. And that is precisely when I found out that I was pregnant with Baby. It was the worst pregnancy I could have had, from the horrible vomiting, to the kidney stones, to the flu, to my dad having an incapacitating back injury and, consequently, a nasty bicycle accident. I was so not ready to have another child.
And here's where I need to clarify. It's not the child that's the problem. No, not at all. It's totally and completely ME. I don't know how to care for my children. No, it's not like I can't feed them or clothe them. It's just that I haven't learned to talk to them.
But recently, I've been learning to do just that.
I picked up a book that I had tried to read several years ago, a book called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. I had originally glanced through the cartoons, and then I tossed it aside, maybe even gave it away, because it sounded like a bunch of psychobabble. But this time, I read it. And here it was. Me. Right there on the "don't do it this way" illustration. Again and again and again, I recognized myself. I was amazed. Because, before, when I would read How To books on raising children, I would feel so inadequate because it never told you what to do if you'd already screwed up beyond belief. But this one does. It shows you what you've been doing wrong, and how to do it right.
To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. ~Josh Billings
In reading this book, I also saw a lot of my childhood, a lot of the things I remember hating about how I was talked to. There was no compassion, no understanding. It was all authority, all "you will do it MY way, you bleeping brat!" I think, to give my mother some understanding, she was just too, too tired to try to talk to me. I was difficult. My father was difficult. She had already lived through a lot of difficulty.
So now, here I am, faced with a new way to deal with children. Listen to them. Be compassionate. But be firm. Be kind. Be empathetic. Oh, Lord! Doesn't that sound like...like...
...like what Jesus would do?
So here I am, trying to be more like Jesus, and along comes this issue with one of my children, an issue that just smacks me right in the face. It was embarrassing, deceptive, troubling behavior. What was I going to do with it?
And the first thing that came out was this: change back. What you're doing doesn't work. What you're doing is wrong, it's bad, it's damaging. Change back. You're giving them too much leeway. You're giving them too much control. Change back.
We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. ~Stacia Tauscher
And then comes my mother-in-law in her infinite wisdom, listening to me cry about my fears and my humiliations, hearing me insist that I'm doing it all wrong, just when I thought I was doing it right. I tell her how my son has done this unspeakable thing, has done it and another parent had to tell me about it. Another parent whom I fear, who intimidates me, and she tells me these things. My mother in law tells me these two things. First she says, you're humble. Of course you're humble in front of someone who intimidates you. Why be humbled in the presence of someone who doesn't count? Secondly, she tells me that I'm getting changeback messages, and that I need to refuse to accept them. Changeback messages, I say? What are those? She gives me a brief explanation. It's in all the twelve step programs, she tells me. You do something good in life, and someone comes along and tells you that you're doing it wrong. They want you to change back. The husband quits drinking, and the wife, who has nagged him for years to quit drinking, buys him some beer, justifies it. "It's the only pleasure he really has." Why? Because she feels guilt, she feels uncomfortable with his change. She had grown accustomed to his story, to who he is. So she "tells" him to change back. Satan, my mother in law tells me, is giving me a serious changeback message. You're doing something right, she says. Keep it up.
The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard. ~Sloan Wilson
I let my boys ride their bikes on the road. My dad wouldn't let me do that. He was afraid. He was afraid, I'm sure, of losing me. Somehow, though, he lost me, but in a different way. He lost me, he lost my mom, and now, he's losing his grandkids.
My son didn't do what he did because I let him ride his bike on the road. He didn't do what he did because I started talking to him like a human being and stopped talking to him like the control freak that I am. He did what he did because he has free will. He did what he did because he's a human boy, with ideas, thoughts, worries, needs, emotions, fears. My son needs my support. He also needs freedom. These are two things I never had.
I will not change back.
"Can I help cut potatoes?" she asked, grabbing one of the wet potatoes from the bowl. My first reaction was to tell her no, that I'm busy, that I want to get this done quickly.
I took a knife from the utensil crock and handed it to The Baby. She dropped the My Little Pony on the wet countertop, taking the knife into her hand. It took a few tries to show her the right way to hold the potato, the right way to hold the knife, to keep her fingers out of the way, to angle the blade toward the pad of her own thumb, but soon she was peeling potatoes, cutting them into cubes and dropping them into the big pot full of cold water, which went onto the hot stove, and was turned into delicious whipped potatoes with browned butter, which she brought to me in a little vintage bowl and asked me to photograph. 
