biting the hook

It turns out that screaming at children is bad for them, and for us, but a lot of us are doing it.

Thanks to a new friend of mine, I know this is New York Times worthy stuff. Strangely, it's not as comforting as I thought it would be to learn that I am not alone in this. I just picture a sea of stunned children's faces in the aftermath of being yelled at. I get ferklemt. Like a lot of us, I've been on both sides of the screaming fence and I've come to see it as abuse, although the article above doesn't mention that word, and the examples it provides as far as what is shouted and what provokes the outbursts makes me feel weird and defective, because I don't need to get all the way to Friday evening to lose my shit. I can lose it just fine first thing Monday morning. And after reading a scare piece like this I could spiral into a guilt so stormy it would make my grandmother finally come out from the rain, may she rest in peace. Because I've done a lot of screaming in the past five and half years.

So the article is another reminder for me to keep paying close attention to how it feels (i.e., horrible) when I unleash the mother lode of fury on my ever-innocent, resilient and mercifully forgiving tots, who in the past few days have taken to beating the shit out of each other like it's just what we do every evening before dinner.

I tell them in my Buddha voice to be gentle: "Hamish honey, your sister doesn't like it when you sit on her head. That's what that crying sound is. Why don't you give her some space?" When Hamish finally releases her, Stella, beet-faced and tear-stained, whips him in the eye with her Mardi Gras beads, and he punches her in the back and they howl and that's about the time I run clean out of ideas so I invite them to fight it to the death and calmly lock myself in the bathroom with a magazine. I wouldn't recommend doing this with older children. Eventually one of them notices I'm gone and comes whimpering, knocking on the door and I tell them it's time to wash hands and they do, and we move on to the next thing and I know that I wouldn't have gotten through it any better if I'd yelled. I want to build a fortress of experiences like this, where I don’t bite the hook and we're all better off for it, if a little bruised and pulpy.

Of course I notice that there's a buttload of guilt for the hostility I see in the kids when they're thrashing away at each other, because where else could they have learned such rage? It's the same way I learned it from my father. I feel his presence in me when I lose my shit. Like a poltergeist. The good news is that I'm on the right track and not just because my therapist told me, right after I asked if she was absolutely sure I didn't need drugs and she said that my issues seem to stem from an intense inner battle instead of from a chemical imbalance and I thought, can I get that in calligraphy please?

How do I know I'm on the right track? Because tonight my mother came over. And I kept it together. See, my mother is the wind-whipped rocky peak of my rage mountain. I realized this evening when she couldn't find Stella's shirt, a mere two inches from her glistening face (my mother cannot get enough hand-holding or petroleum jelly) that she and the kids and a portion of the world at large will never stop annoying me, and I might never be rid of my rage and my stupendous neurotic guilt, but I can learn to not react to any of it by witnessing myself when I'm losing my temper and remember that it sucks, both the rage and the inevitable follow-up guilt, and remind myself that this transformation from mean mommy to compassionate mommy takes time. Years probably. Lifetimes maybe. I used to think that enlightenment meant you were suddenly free of the woolly straitjacket of odious emotions but it's starting to look like that's not the case at all. Maybe the buckles just loosen instead, jangling with every cloaked movement to let us know they'll always be there.