The Last Straw: Mommy Meltdowns

A close-up of what shall forever be known in our family as "The Sharpie Incident"

I’m writing this in our upstairs bathroom, watching my 21-month-old in the tub, hoping that a long soak in lots of bubbles will help remove the black Sharpie marks that she has made all over her legs.  I’ve only just discovered the Sharpie marks, since my husband and I perfomed a child-swap at naptime, allowing the marker to hide from me until I performed a post-nap diaper change.  I noted the huge black ink marks and called my husband, whose response was, “Oh yeah.  That happened.” 

My typing has been interrupted several times thus far.  Once, my little acrobat, with no warning, dove headfirst out of the tub onto the bathmat.  That required a bit of comforting and a fruitless dialogue about safe choices in the bathroom.  Twice, I’ve had to say, “Stop eating soap!” and wash the bubbles off of my kid’s mischievous open-mouthed face. 

For now, though, she’s playing happily, the Sharpee marks showing no sign of lightening, and I have a moment to assess.  Under normal circumstances, the sight of marker on one of my kids would barely evoke a reaction at all, let alone the welling up of tears and need to write a blog post.  This time, however, the Sharpee marks were the last straw.

Every parent knows what it feels like to be at the end of your rope, and every parent experiences that feeling just a little bit differently.  My friend Jamie is a yeller, and so is my husband.  My friend Bridget describes shutting down temporarily and functioning on a sort of mommy auto-pilot, which I imagine to be something like one of those incomplete dial telephone messages.  “I’m sorry — the mommy you have dialed is currently unavailable.  She will return to her fully functioning capacity soon, once you children have stopped behaving like complete ass-hats.”  I, myself, am prone to melodramatic crying jags.

The Sharpie incident has come at the end of a very long week, highlights of which include our three-year-old refusing to eat anything about but popsicles, demanding that I not talk to him again – NEVER, and discovering that the dog makes funny noises when you grab onto his tail and pull with all your might.  Our littlest has done her part by perfecting the bang-your-head-on-the-floor tantrum technique, dumping my entire iced coffee out on her as-clean-as-it-gets-in-our-house outfit, rendering her soaking wet and me under-caffeinated, and managing to come down with a series of minor and slightly absurd medical conditions with no apparent regard for the fact that we’re currently without health insurance.   Not to be outdone, biggest brother threw his hat into the make-mom-cry ring by saying, in attempting to get out of an appointment, “Well, it’s not like you ever have to do anything.  What do you do all day anyway?”  Charming.

Add to all those teensy little things my husband starting a new job and some disconcerting extended family news, and I’ve been pretty weepy.  In a particularly stressful moment, right after Corrina’s diagnosis with a burst capillary (bloody eyes, which came close on the heels of her big brother’s 24-hour bloody nose), that I glared at my sick, sobbing toddler and screamed, “It is NOT your turn to cry.  IT IS MY TURN TO CRY.”   This was actually a somewhat successful parenting technique.  Rina was so freaked out by my crying that she ceased with hers and stared at me, too in shock to keep fussing.  And as it turns out, I’m not the first one who has stumbled upon this method of kid silencing.  During a recent chance encounter with one of my favorite customers, she described a moment with her kids as “Mom has a breakdown, kids finally back off.”  The mommy freak-out actually has a somewhat positive effect.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.  Maybe our kids being shocked when we fall apart means that we’re doing a pretty good job holding it together the rest of the time.  Maybe it means that, at least from our children’s perspectives, we actually are the kind of supermoms and dads we’ve always wanted to be.  I don’t know.

What I do know is this – I don’t have any more time to spend figuring it out.  I have to go.  My kid just pooped in the tub –again. 

-Meryl at the Goose