Tonight was not fun.  I have a 2 and a 3 year old.  If you know me in per­son, you have prob­a­bly heard far too many K and A sto­ries for your lik­ing.  I love them SO much that some­times I feel like I can­not stop talk­ing about them.  Tonight, how­ever, I felt inadequate.

I could give all the back­ground (me being in Chicago for the week­end, stay­ing up too late a few nights recently, mov­ing 3 weeks ago, etc) or I could explain that they both woke up between 5 and 5:30 this morn­ing, but in the end it didn’t mat­ter why.  Tonight, they were so tired, and they sim­ply melted down.  Both of them.  For an hour and fif­teen min­utes.  When Jason was gone.

Hav­ing been a spe­cial edu­ca­tion teacher in my past life, I often give off the appear­ance of remain­ing calm and know­ing just what to do in a tough sit­u­a­tion.  Tonight, I felt like I had no idea what to do.  I knew they were both tired.  I knew tonight would be an early bed­time.  When Jason left, I knew I just had to get them ready for bed and lay­ing down.  Exhaus­tion would take over from there.

Unfor­tu­nately, we hit a snag in the road right around clean up time.  They had invented a new game.  I’m not sure of the details, but as it appeared to me, the goal was to pile as many toys from the play room as they could onto our liv­ing room chair.  When it was time to clean up, they were ready and will­ing.  I sug­gested we each put away 3 toys.  Know­ing how tired they were, I planned to do the rest later on my own just to get them in bed.  Well, it turned out that I unknow­ingly took the toy that K had his heart set on putting away back into the play room.   I told him I was sorry I hadn’t known he wanted that one.  K began to cry.  He explained to me over and over that he had wanted to put both big trucks back into the room.  I offered him a cou­ple solu­tions.  He could go get the truck and put it in him­self or he could pick up x, y, or z toy.  Those didn’t work for him.  From there, every­thing was wrong.  He didn’t like his pajamas(which he chose), his tooth­brush, his tooth paste (which he chose), or his diaper(which he chose).  He also didn’t want to help fill up his water cup, nor did he want me to fill it.  He did want water though.

Dur­ing this time, A was also upset.  He is pretty sen­si­tive, and I think that between being tired and K feel­ing upset, it was just too much for him, and he shared in the sad­ness.  Poor kids.  I tried to take turns nurs­ing them.  I offered them cud­dles and hugs.  I empathized with them.  “It sounds like you are feel­ing sad.”  “You really wanted to take that truck into the play room.”

At some point, I started to feel over­whelmed, really over­whelmed.  My instincts were to say some­thing like this, “Enough.  No more cry­ing.  You are tired.  Lay down.  I am not fight­ing over this any­more.”  I really wanted to do those things.  I didn’t actu­ally think they would help or calm the boys down.  I didn’t think that they would make K or A see the light and think “yep, she’s right.  That is enough cry­ing.  Guess I’m okay now.”  I felt like I didn’t want to deal with it any­more.  That was about 25 or 30 min­utes in.

I didn’t say those things though.  I also didn’t say any­thing like, “You can go to your room, and when you are done yelling, you can come back out here.”  I also didn’t spank (and never have) either one.  These are com­mon sug­ges­tions that I get when some­one over­hears me talk­ing about a melt­down at our house or if some­one hap­pens to be over when it happens.

I didn’t say or do those things, because that is not the way we have cho­sen to par­ent.  In my moments of clar­ity dur­ing a melt­down, I often think about how I would feel if Jason and I were hav­ing a fight that included me being upset and in tears.  If he left me alone until I could talk about things rea­son­ably, I don’t think that would help me feel loved or com­forted.  If he said, “I’m going to go watch tv until you are ready to talk” I would be m.a.d. If he tried to help me feel bet­ter and com­forted me for a few min­utes but left when it wasn’t work­ing, I think I would feel even worse.

I know that kids and adults are not in the same roles in fam­i­lies, but I do think that there is value in allow­ing a child to express emo­tions and val­i­dat­ing them.  I also think there is value in being with a child dur­ing a tough emo­tional time.  Because of these beliefs and many oth­ers, we choose to par­ent in the way I described in this post.

I haven’t writ­ten a lot about our spe­cific par­ent­ing beliefs on this blog.  I have alluded to them, and we try to prac­tice what we believe when we inter­act with our kids although some­times I fall far short of my goal.  One of the rea­sons I chose to write this post and pub­lish it was a con­ver­sa­tion I had with a friend over din­ner a cou­ple months ago.  Our friends are mar­ried with no chil­dren.  They had sup­per at our house one night.  Dur­ing the course of the evening, I said, “we don’t spank” and “we don’t use time outs.”  The wife of the cou­ple said to me, “What do you do?”  So, I thought I would give an exam­ple of what we do because both spank­ing and time­outs are so com­mon that some­times peo­ple don’t real­ize that there are other options.  I know, I didn’t.

To give a lit­tle res­o­lu­tion to the sit­u­a­tion, I’ll let you know what hap­pened to finally resolve the melt­down.  After we went into the bed­room to get ready for bed, K threw his cup into the hall­way.  (We keep a gate in the door­way so they don’t wake up and wan­der around our apart­ment at night.)  K felt pretty sad that his cup was in the hall­way.  I told him (prob­a­bly around 50 times) “I can go get your cup if you sit or lay by your pil­low.”  I felt like I needed him to be in a place where he would be safe and at least a bit calm before I could leave him and A in the room to get his cup.  Finally, he said, “Can I have mama milk?”  I nursed them each one at a time.  They laid down, and they were asleep within 15 min­utes.  Poor kiddos.