My friend Tonya is a really good mom. I look up to her for many reasons, but particularly because she handles motherhood with a great deal of composure.
She has three boys and never seems ruffled by them. I’m sure she must get crabby like the rest of us, but the way she stays calm makes me drool with envy.
Recently, Tonya was talking to me about Devin, her youngest son, who was having a shutdown over his favorite shirt, which was not hanging in the closet.
“I was downstairs getting breakfast ready,” Tonya said, “and he was upstairs in his room screaming ‘Wheeeeeere iiiiiiiiiis myyyyyyyyyy faaaaavorite shiiiiiiiiiiiiirt?’”
“So what did you do?” I asked. (If I can emulate how Tonya handles a shirt-meltdown, I can maybe be a better mom.)
In her good-natured way, she replied, “Well, of course I just told him to find another shirt to wear.”
“That’s it?” I said, a little disappointed that her response was so… simple. “Did he find another shirt to
wear?”
“Sure,” Tonya said. “He carried on for a while but finally realized his favorite shirt was not going to materialize in his closet so he’d better get dressed in something.”
This conversation with Tonya really got me thinking. Thousands (millions?) of words flow from our mouths every day as we go about our business of mothering. Most of these words fall on deaf ears (in my house, anyway), but what about the ones that our kids actually listen to? These words can wield power to encourage, instruct, and make things better – but don’t they also have the capacity to royally screw up our kids?
What I mean is this: There are a hundred different ways that Tonya could have responded to Devin during his tantrum. Depending on the day, the circumstance, the weather, and/or how much sleep she got the night before, she might have taken one of the following approaches:
§
“Quit screaming! You have 50 shirts hanging in
your closet that you can wear! Put one on and get over yourself.”
§
“You can wear your favorite shirt tomorrow, once
I’m finished washing and drying yet another load of laundry.”
§
“Take a deep breath and calm down. No one is
going to help you find your favorite shirt when you are acting like a
two-year-old.”
Furthermore, the way she says these hypothetical words can add a whole other layer of significance. She could say them with a shrug, with a smile, or – like me – with a vein visibly and quite unattractively pulsing up the right side of her forehead.
This is what I’m struggling with: How do we, as moms, know we are saying the right thing? How do we not consign our children to years of therapy because of words that have thoughtlessly shot out from our lips and messed with their innocent little heads?
I never anticipated that my experience of being a mother would carry with it so many variables. I used to think that there was a right way of doing things and a wrong way; now it seems that it’s all gray.
***
Happily, there is more to this story. When I showed Tonya the paragraphs that you just read, making sure she was OK with me putting her kid’s favorite-shirt shutdown-story on the internet, her response was generous and expansive: she gave me even more material to work with.
First, she admitted the following: “My son has dozens of shirts and I had no idea which one was his favorite. As he was starting to melt down, I went through the closet, pulling out shirt after shirt, saying ‘Is this the one?’ ‘Is this the one?’ until there were no more shirts left.”
(I love this detail. Thank you for that, Tonya.)
She went on, “Some days I’m more affected by my kids than others. Sometimes I can handle a situation calmly, and sometimes I can’t. I couldn’t even tell you what percentage it is. Either way, I don’t beat myself up about it.”
Tonya graciously threw in a bonus story to make me feel even better about the fact that I don’t always know how to handle things like rages about missing shirts. She said, “Yesterday, I told my oldest son that I was sick of him bitching at me every morning. He said, ‘Why are you swearing at me? I learned at school that you should back away from parents or adults when they swear!’ So I told him, ‘TELL YOUR TEACHERS TO TELL YOU TO STOP YELLING AT ME.’”
(Tonya, thank you for making me simultaneously laugh and cringe. That one is a classic.)
She finished off by saying, “I don’t expect to be perfect, nor do I want my kids to think that I am – or that I want them to be perfect. Bad moments happen and mistakes are made. We all say things we shouldn’t, but you know what? Sometimes we can all breathe better after exchanges like that.”
My take-away from Tonya is that maybe there isn’t one right thing to say in a messy situation. And that maybe I shouldn’t take things so seriously.
After all – looping back to Devin and his poor shirt gone astray – Tonya kindly chided me, “Laura, I told you that story in the first place only because I thought the strong emotion Devin had for his shirt was so funny.”
And yes, it was funny. I had forgotten that. Thanks for the reminder. It seems that my sense of humor sometimes disappears without warning, just like Devin's shirt.
