As I sit here blogging, Genevieve is making her way through the usual bedtime meltdown: calling for me or Shannon, yelling about how she’s not tired, singing angrily, just plain screaming. Julia’s four feet away, in her own bed, enduring it like one of her stoical Finnish descendants might have endured domination by the czar’s troops.
Genevieve, what the hell are we going to do with you? You’re so often charming and funny and wonderful, and you’re always smart and cute, but sometimes – like every goddamn night between 7:30 and 8:30 (if we’re lucky) – you are a horror. Tonight, as I went through the stupidly useless routine of having her teddy bear talk to her about how important it is to go to sleep with “no cry-crys,” I realized that my throat was tight, my heart was pounding, and I had an ache in my jaw from clenching my teeth. Such is the stress of trying to get the maddening princess to go to sleep.
You can see it in her here, right? A certain sense of herself, serving both good and ill purposes? I can’t take my eyes off her, or stop thinking about her, but nobody’s ever made me more deeply or frequently angry than Vivi.
I hear you, I hear you, I hear you. We have one of those too. She found levels of anger inside me that I didn’t even know existed. Every day. Every night. Still.
Our middle child screamed for almost over 4 months. Unreal. I kept thinking: “How hard can I shake this tiny child and still get away with it?” Once she learned to crawl (at 4 and a half months!), she was better, but still gave us immense fits. She gives us immense fits to this day, nearly 15 years later.
Ooops… cross out ‘almost’ in previous post…
I’m remembering the Mothering advice my mom gave me:
“Don’t be surprised when you think ‘if that little shit cries one more time I’m going to throw her through the window’ “!
It’s not something they talk about in Lamaze class. But every parent has been there.
Mnmom – Yes, after having children, I can understand how child abuse can happen!
And it’s because we love them so that they can get to us so deeply. *sigh*