The Feels

I remember, at one point in the middle of the toddler years, wondering if I was going to make it past the next tantrum. There was a decent stretch of my life where it felt like I was just waiting for the next tantrum. The only unknown was who would throw it and what it would be about. I counted myself lucky if only one child cried at a time.

I remember people telling me that the tantrums stage only lasted a couple years. I only had to make it a little bit longer. The end was in sight!

What those people failed to mention was that the Big Feels don’t just disappear after a couple years. The Big Feels stick around and fester beneath the surface, just waiting for the right moment to erupt. The preschool Big Feels are still there. The elementary Big Feels? Oh my goodness. They’re there, and they’re heartbreaking. Instead of angrily lashing out, the tantrum turns inward. It manifests itself with “Why am I so sensitive?” “Why am I not as smart as them?” “Why doesn’t she like me?”

And I can’t fix it. I can’t hand them a snack and tickle away the tantrum (let’s face it, at a certain point that gets weird). The disagreements can’t be solved by me magically producing another Thomas train so they can each have their own. Honestly, I haven’t even worked through some of my Big Feels from 2020; how can I expect them to?

Luckily, at 6 and 8, my magical powers of distraction still work (not at solving the problem, but at pushing the problem back a bit so I can think through my answer). So that’s what we did today. A power outage knocked out our afternoon schooling anyway, so we ran away from our problems and visited a new aquarium. It brought a whole new set of problems when Mitchell was asked to feed a bearded dragon a live cricket (he’s vowed to set all of the crickets free next time we visit, so we’ll have a whole new set of problems then), but at least the original problem was forgotten for now.

I never expected my parenting method to be Distraction, but hey. It works. For now.