I was on my way to pick up my kids from school that day when I had an unusual impulse that I really wanted to just like, hang out with them, outside of the patterns of our normal everyday life. I thought maybe going to McDonald’s and going inside and sitting down at the restaurant would be a good iteration of this: if they wanted to sit and hang out, we could, and if one or both of them wanted to run off and play, they could do that at the indoor playplace.
I hadn’t done any planning of this in advance, so I knew I needed to be a careful observer first. I needed to make sure neither kid seemed like they were 100% tapped out from school and unable to cope in public. Sometimes I pick them up and it’s just been too much and we need to go home where we can safely unwind, or be far away from one another. Since I didn’t have any tools on hand for that, I just needed to keep my plans silent until I observed enough of them to guess if it would work that day.
I picked everybody up, got everybody buckled into their seats, chatted with them a little bit. All seemed good, so I shared my plans with them. They were both enthusiastic about it.
It’s only like a 15 minute drive, but things started unraveling quickly. Summer had a tiny little ball of putty or play-doh or something and she picked off a tiny grain of it and then dropped it in the car and started weeping about it being gone forever. I pulled over in a parking lot to try to help her find the tiny bit but couldn’t find it. Apollo got impatient in the delay and started worrying we would be late. I got back in and kept driving and then the kids were pestering one another, Apollo looking at Summer or looking out her window intentionally to bug her, Summer turning up the sound on her iPad to bug him.
I started feeling myself getting worried about taking them both out in public by myself. If anybody really had a meltdown, I would have a really hard time getting everybody to a safe non-public space at this point, because they’re both so big by now. I can’t scoop them up and leave.
Here’s the thing that this post is actually about:
There was a voice in my head that was pretending it was worried about safety. In actuality, that voice was punitive, an old voice, an old pathway. One that’s buried deep in my brain, but not one I’m super interested in listening to. When I paid attention to what it was actually saying, it wasn’t actually about safety at all. “If you turn the car around and go home right now,” the voice was saying, “they’ll both cry and be angry about it at home, but that’ll really teach them a lesson. That’ll show him, not to antagonize her in the car. That’ll show her, not to pick at his sensory sensitivity.”
That voice knows how to be really sneaky. It disguised its message in lots of buzzwords that sound like the parent I want to be. “You can hold a limit that you won’t take them places if they’re fighting.” “Your job is to keep everybody safe.” All those things are true. But when I got down in the dirt, past the leaves, and looked down at the roots, the roots turned out to be from a seed I don’t like to listen to. A seed that says, “When kids are ‘bad’, making them feel worse will teach them a lesson for next time.” A seed about punishment, consequences, vengeance.
I don’t want to listen to that seed.
Now, importantly, the answer wasn’t actually for me to just 100% ignore the other things. I did actually want to pay careful attention to my children. WERE they truly at an unsafe level? It is my job to keep everybody safe. I had to filter out feelings of vengeance and try to focus on the facts.
- They were both annoyed, but nobody was at their emotional edge. (I just know this cause they’ve been my kids for years and years.)
- They were both hungry, and food would likely immediately improve the way both of them felt.
- They don’t like being in close forced quarters (like a car), and space would likely immediately improve the way both of them felt.
- My daughter tends to pick at my son because she is a mega extrovert and desperately craves ongoing attention/connection. The playplace might have another kid at it who she could play with, thereby taking her need for attention off of my son.
On top of that, I could hear both kids making attempts to make amends in a more desirable way. In the middle of picking at his sister, my son sincerely asked, “Can you please turn the sound down on your iPad?” And in the middle of freaking out about Apollo looking out her window, my daughter tried to distract him or redirect him, by asking him a question about planes (something he loves.)
So I could see both of them trying. Both of them reaching for the strategies they had. Some strategies helpful and appropriate. Other strategies childish or immature. Because they are not mature; they are children. They are children doing their best.
They’re not bad kids who need to learn a lesson. They’re children doing their best. Nobody learns by being hurt.
This is NOT a story about how, if they had both been genuinely unsafe and we had gone home instead, apologized, and rode out the storm of disappointment, that that would have been the wrong decision IF it is what had been needed in the moment. This is a story about how that wasn’t what was needed in the moment. If that had come from a seed of conscious, mindful parenting, of me trying to help my children and work as a team, then that would be the right thing to do. I might have needed to make that choice on a different day at a different time, but not when it came from a seed of “that’ll teach YOU not to act that way.”
We went to McDonald’s. Everybody felt better with food in them. My daughter made a playmate. My son and I sat and talked about things both silly and serious.
And I pulled up another weed out of the garden of my mind, on my way to becoming the parent I want to be.
