Of course, this makes it all the more difficult when your child comes at you with something so irrational and illogical that it makes your brain hurt.
Isn’t this the child who just showed a startling level of maturity and consideration?
So WHY is she now on the floor, kicking the wall and pulling her own hair because I asked her to not wee on the couch?
WHAT IS GOING ON?
You’re making lunch and she says she wants a Vegemite sandwich and you make her a Vegemite sandwich and now she’s convulsing in her chair.
Is it the bread? The colour of the plate? Did she want the crusts off?
HELP ME UNDERSTAND.
You suggest some time to play outside and she kicks her plate straight to the floor and a vein in her forehead pops out from the force of her scream and it takes a good ten minutes for it to settle down.
HOW DO I MAKE THIS STOP?
Yeah, you can’t.
Life is a constant dance across eggshells with toddlers as you do your best to keep them calm and happy—but also not let them become unmitigated a-holes. It takes skill. It takes intelligence, patience, negotiation finesse, powers of persuasion, mind games and straight-up bribery.
It’s the most exhausting part of parenthood yet.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for them sometimes, especially when getting what they want somehow enrages them. Like: okay, you want a bowl of grapes—here you go, darling. Oh, wait, you’re now livid because I’ve given you the bowl of grapes that you asked for? No big deal, that’s my fault—sincere apologies. I’ll take my leave.
You won’t be able to help yourself, though: you’ll try to argue with them using logical reasoning. Even though you know it’s pointless, it will achieve nothing and it will probably make things worse.
It’s like picking a fight with a brick wall. Why would you do that? It’s a wall. You’re going to hurt yourself. But you do it anyway because it seems that you too have lost your freaking mind.
We know that toddlers are incapable of understanding logic. You will point at the road and say, ‘We do not walk on the road because it’s dangerous and you could be hurt’ and they’ll walk straight at the road. Why? Because their brains told them to.
A toddler’s brain hears things, throws those things through a shredder and then pieces them back together like an abstract expressionist.
You say, ‘Please don’t lick the floor’ and they hear ‘Please lick the floor and also my leg’.
You say, ‘Please put on your pants’ and they hear ‘Please run, run, run as fast as you can’.
You say, ‘It’s time for bed’ and they hear ‘It’s time for bed, where your life will most likely end in a slow and torturous death while I stand by and watch, probably eating the popcorn I said you couldn’t have earlier today’.
Do not even hint at something that might happen in the distant future because your child will hear it as a BLOOD OATH. The other day I told my son that if he carried on when I took the iPad away, I wouldn’t let him watch it tomorrow. Somehow, he heard, ‘I promise, on my life, and without restriction, that you can watch the iPad tomorrow’ and no amount of dissecting the actual words I used will convince him otherwise.
Sometimes it’s incredibly hard not to laugh at the intensity and insanity of their tantrums, but even if it feels like they’re crying for no goddamn reason, it feels life-or-death important to them. Give them a little hug while they lose their mind over the fact that the time is now 4 o’clock and they wanted it to be 3 o’clock. And try to keep your giggling behind their back.