“Well anyone who thinks that way is just an ignorant,
hateful bigot!”
Welcome to the car ride home from Mother’s Day Brunch. Just me, my husband, my daughter and my
in-laws traveling back from a lovely boat ride complete with complementary
champagne.
My father-in-law is good at getting me to say things like
this, and by “say”, I mean turn bright red and yell adamantly. He knows that all he has to do is wait
for me to have a couple of glasses of wine and then make some sort of
right-leaning political statement.
I think it entertains him, because on Mother’s Day it is all about my
father-in-law’s entertainment. But
I digress…
You see, I’ve always considered myself a relatively patient
human being. I teach teenagers for
heaven’s sake, and I’m generally crippled by confrontation. I’m not exaggerating when I say that
there have been arguments that have literally sent me into fetal position. But the reality is, inside of me there
is a little, knee-jerk fireball. A headstrong, reactionary who has no control
over what comes out of her mouth.
She is usually kept in-check by the aforementioned crippling fear of
confrontation, but she does surface from time to time. Usually it’s when I’ve had a little to
drink. The wall of fear that has
been holding back my little demon dissolves and she comes raging forth, looking
to pick a fight with anyone who dare defy her.
I have discovered that when I gave birth to my daughter, I
was not alone. My little
inner-demon gave birth as well. My
four-year-old is a bright, funny, charming girl who harbors her own mini firebrand. Only simply being four is apparently
the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine. There is no fear to hold back her inner-reactionary.
This has been on my mind a lot lately, and today especially,
as my attempt to turn off “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” was met with a
pink plastic brush whizzing by my leg.
“Did you just throw your brush at me?!?!?”
“PPPPOOOONNNNIIIEEESSS!!!!!!”
Now this is the first time she’s actually thrown something at me,
but the impulse is common.
Anything contrary to her view of how the world should work is met with
immediate flashes of anger.
“Mommy, I don’t like to be wrong.”
Truer words were never spoken.
I have to admit.
I’m at a bit of a loss of how to deal with it. My initial impulse is anger, but that gets us nowhere. Timeouts are meaningless to her as she
figured out early that there is nothing holding her in place. We’ve been trying loss of privileges,
a.k.a. choose a better response or lose your ponies; however, we are finding
that her need to be right actually outranks her My Little Pony obsession.
“You have a choice:
change your attitude or lose your ponies tomorrow.”
“I don’t want them for a week!”
I guess saying that she is stubborn would be stating the
obvious at this point.
I think part of the reason that I struggle with this is that
I don’t necessarily want her to lose this inner-demon. This same impulse that inspired her to
chuck a hairbrush at my leg is the one that will eventually make her unafraid
to speak her mind and that will not allow anyone to walk all over her. I don’t want her to fear this little
demon or wish to hide her. I do,
however, want to help her find a better way of dealing her rather than trying
to put a welt in mommy’s leg. That
is where the real challenge lies.
I’m sure I’ll think of something.
