When You Realize You're Parenting Yourself

Do you ever find yourself in a really hard meltdown situation with your child, and suddenly you’re transported back to your own childhood? Like, you’re watching your child but actually you’re watching yourself, 25 years ago, act a fool in the exact same way?

Well this just happened to me tonight. We’re getting home from a walk, and it was all great until the very end (isn’t that always how it goes?) when everything went to shit.

My oldest and middle like to race to see who can touch the car first, and there’s always a 50/50 chance this will end in tears.

I would perhaps ban this tradition bc of how bad the odds are, however, I’m always at least 20 yards behind them walking along with their little brother, who hasn’t quite caught on to the high that comes with being a winner.

So it happens before I can stop it. I won’t bore you with the gritty details, but let’s just say it involved a stick and someone’s face, and a “that’s it, no TV for you tonight!”

We’re going through a violence phase, and there does not seem to be a whole lot we have been able to do to stop it. We take things away, we yell, we calmly explain why this behavior isn’t acceptable. It keeps happening, no matter what tactic we take.

So, eventually, we take drastic measures, hence the “no TV for you!”

It’s a cycle.

And as I was watching my child flail about in his bed, unable to calm himself down, I realized that I’ve been here before. Yes, with him. But also with myself. I’ve been that child. I wasn’t violent, but I was loud. I couldn’t control my feelings, even from a young age.

And the scene plays out in front of me: me, crying for desert at a restaurant, my parents saying no, me refusing to calm down, my parents ultimately deciding I had to go right to bed and not watch Full House with the rest of my family.

I was beside myself. I couldn’t calm down. Much like my child tonight, I recall literally rolling around, my body so filled with rage that I couldn’t stop my arms from hitting into the rails of my bed.

So today, I had a choice. I could close the door, and leave him to deal with the consequences of his behavior. Because he knows better, and hitting his brother with a stick is not something that we can just let him get away with.

But will that tactic work? And more importantly, did that work for me, when I was left to deal with my anger alone?

No. It just made me more upset. More confused, more alone.

So I stayed. We decided to take a bath. And even though he was still not allowed to have tv time with his brothers, I stayed. We made a plan to read a story. He was upset, but he wasn’t alone. Maybe this made it worse. Maybe he will hit again. Maybe I should have shut the door and let him deal with himself.

Or maybe this was the moment he’ll think back to when he’s a parent someday, and maybe instead of wishing he could erase that night from his memory, he will think how he didn’t feel alone, that even in his worst moment, he wasn’t alone. Maybe he won’t question where he stands with the people he’s closest with, because even when we took things away from him as a consequence, we didn’t take US away.

I would have loved to leave this post at this perfectly wrapped up ending. If that’s how it went down, I would have. But, no, we didn’t just happily sit there reading stories while his brothers watched tv downstairs. After bath, the realization hit that he wasn’t going to get to watch the show. He flailed. He was mad. I stayed with him, and we had moments of calm. But he ultimately asked for his dad instead. So dads up there with him now. And no, it’s not going magically, but he’s not alone, and I don’t hear any more yelling from him. Because he doesn’t have to yell for our attention, dad is right there, with him.