I did something in the car the other day that would have shocked a lot of people. We were on the way to brunch with my husband and nephew. I was in the middle row and my two children were in the third row and in typical sibling fashion, an argument started.
This happens and it doesn’t always last for long and mostly it doesn’t result in violence, only in this case my two were hungry and trapped in a car together right beside each other, causing this argument to escalate. I tried the reverse-psychology option on them first, telling them to please go right ahead and hurt each other and could they let us know if we needed to go ahead and drive to the hospital now?
Sometimes that works, sometimes telling them I’ll pull over and put them out of the car on the side of the road until they come to peaceful terms will cause the argument to diffuse, but something unfortunate happened next: my son accidentally broke his sister’s bracelet she’d just gotten from Grandma Shu. Beads went flying and my daughter started screaming.
We were about two blocks from the restaurant and I don’t remember if I got out of my seat and climbed back to the third row before we were stopped or not, but I did. And I lost it on my children. I am not ashamed to tell you that I hit my son in the head with the palm of my hand. Not hard, but enough to startle him, because what he was doing was hitting her. My nephew said he saw my son elbow my daughter in the face.
Now for those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while, you know my daughter is in danger of damage to her eyes with mild head trauma. Her retinas can re-detatch (is that a word), she can have bleeds in her eyes and pressure can drop. And all that means more vision loss and she has so very little now, we just can’t risk it.
So I had to scare my son (and daughter) to, and I’ll quote myself, “NEVER EVER, EVER HIT ANYONE IN THE HEAD!” I explained that they could hurt each other’s eyes. I didn’t bother to explain that my son would probably be fine even with the most gruesome of punches launched at him by his sister. I had to make it even because I didn’t want to make it look like my son had to treat his sister special or that my daughter was special in a negative way.
And I screamed it. The whole time. I bellowed at them. I was for all they could tell, furious. Because I wanted them to be scared. I wanted them to remember and not hit each other’s faces if it was going to come to blows between them. Then I asked if the understood and if they did, tell me what they should never, ever do and they could get out of the car and go to breakfast and see Chase from Paw Patrol (my daughter’s favorite).
My son immediately (and surprisingly to me because he’s stubborn) told me not to hit people in the head. Out the door he went and I was left with my daughter who wailed and cried and moaned and just could not manage to say it even though she desperately wanted to go meet Chase. After ten minutes she calmed down enough and we made it in time to lunch.
I felt sort of bad for the intense and out of control display I had done in the car. I leaned over to Kyle, my nephew and told him I apologized for the crazy but I had to shock the children because I would far rather be though of as a bad mom than a mom who, through inaction, didn’t prevent her daughter from becoming more blind.
The Big Boy Update: While we were in the car on the drive home something happened and my husband swerved the car suddenly. I cried out some explicative which you’ll be able to guess when I tell you what my son said next. He admonished me from the back seat saying, “don’t say that F word again in our faces, mom!”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter starts school on Tuesday at a new school. We’ve been trying to make her feel comfortable about the transition, being positive about her upcoming new experience. I was folding laundry when I heard my husband ask the question, “what’s the most important thing to remember about your new school?” My daughter thought and then said, “the bathroom?”
No comments:
Post a Comment