They don't listen. They don't cooperate. They're messy. They are overly emotional. They infiltrate every millimeter of your life. They are like Jeckyll and Hyde. One moment, they are completely sucking the life out of you, the next moment, they are curling up in your arms, declaring that they love you. I think the motive for the latter is often to steal whatever is on your plate.
Living with a toddler helps me understand why so many species in the wild end up as single parents. The parent least physically attached is driven to madness as well, and their only way out is total disconnection. Isn't it reasonable that at least one parent should survive?
Some people might try to forewarn you about the difficulties of parenting through the more difficult phases, but who wants to crush the hopes and dreams of expectant parents while they pick out jogging strollers and a sweet little layette? Instead, they are intentionally vague, or wincingly nostalgic. "Enjoy the time that they are little." "It all goes by so fast." Truth be told, I think that they have simply blocked how hard toddlerhood was in the same way that most of us can't exactly remember how painful labor was.
I've come to the point where I try to convince myself everything will be okay, because most of us survive toddlerhood--both on the parent side, and the child side. But there are moments when no matter what anyone tells you, it just sucks.
There are times you are so afraid of your kid's unpredictable behavior that you don't want to risk leaving your house with them.
A trip to a department store or grocery store is like a death wish, because you end up wanting to find someone who conceals and carries and just ask them to shoot you. At least twenty-five percent of the time, you walk out, thrashing toddler over your shoulder, and a full cart left behind.
You do understand that like that full shopping cart, there are parts of your life that you just have to leave behind--sometimes just for a little while, sometimes for a long time. But it's still hard, because some of those things seem so small and so reasonable.
It doesn't matter how you plan. You can try to guess the best time of the day to take your toddler someplace. You can feed them, give them snacks, and water them. You can rest them. You can fill their "attention" and "power" buckets. You can do everything right, and still end up with a two-year-old who is running away from the nurse at the pediatrician's office and refusing to stand on the scale. You can still be peeling your child off the floor as they go completely limp, red in the face, and repeatedly yell "no, don't want to."
You ask yourself, "what am I doing wrong?" And your spouse wonders "what are we doing wrong." And no matter what you read or research--because somebody has to--the only consistent answer you come up with is that it is hard, and it sucks, and you need to just be in this "wonderful" moment of your child's development and discovery. Blah, blah, blah.
And all you and your spouse want is a break. Just a few hours to have a peaceful dinner, during which no food ends up intentionally on the floor. Just a few hours when nobody is yelling for help. Just a few hours when you are not a human chew toy and jungle gym. Just a few hours when you are not chasing after snacks, drinks, or other assorted items for someone. Just a few hours when you are not trying to prevent your child's untimely demise or other disastrous injury, because they have climbed up onto the dining room table for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.
Just a few hours when you actually begin to feel like a normal human being again, and you actually miss your child's sweet face, instead of feeling like a hostage.
You see the commercials for the baby sitter and nanny referral company and wonder if it would be safe--for them--to watch your child. After all, sometimes it feels like it's not safe for you to watch your child. And you realize that while in the throes of just trying to keep this little human alive, you have failed to keep yourself alive. You are totally the person on the plane who puts everyone else's oxygen mask on them before you put it on yourself.
You haven't made mom friends. You haven't joined any of the mom groups. You have no village. The only oxygen mask you have is the bottle of generic Zoloft in your medicine drawer and the promise of a few hours a day, when you send your kid to preschool six months earlier than you were planning to. The thought of it makes you feel kind of wistful and sad. It makes you feel like you failed and couldn't do it all on your own. And it makes you feel guilty for just needing to breathe.
In the midst of it all, you remind yourself that this beautiful, crazy, maddening little person is exactly what your heart wanted more than anything. She's what you wanted when everything in your life was so hard, so wrong, and so upside down. You didn't put your own oxygen mask on then either. You waited, and hoped for someone else to notice that you were turning blue-just like you still do. By now, most people just believe blue's your natural color.
And you don't know if you will ever learn to grab your own mask, or breathe. You don't know, but you do know that somehow, you just have to teach this little girl to grab for her own mask, and not just to breathe, but to live, and to never wait for someone else to notice that she's turning blue. And you know somebody smart--probably even a voice in your head--would tell you that you have to teach this one by example.
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