Anatomy of a Tantrum
Written By Catherine Newman
print
single page
You sense it coming. You know you can't stop it.
Birdy is a week away from turning 2. She's tired, I'm tired, and our evening is going badly in a series of trifling but cumulatively consequential moments, each toppling into the next like the dominoes of sanity. Who invented giving up your nap when you're not even 2? And who invented this frightful time of day? If I were the mom from Bewitched, I'd wiggle my nose and — poof! — one minute we'd be watching the sun just start to dip behind the trees and the next the kids would be snoring. Instead I'm just mortal me with bodies to feed, teeth to brush, a pair of children to shepherd through day's end like sweet-faced, overwrought little lambs.First there's dinner. Birdy gobbles roast chicken while her 5-year-old brother, Ben, and I chew our food and discuss the "real pretend snake" a classmate brought to show-and-tell. There are smiles all around, the festive clinking of spoons and sippy cups, guitar music filtering in through the window. "This is great," I think to myself. Like a fool.
Because the very next minute is when Birdy decides she wants to hold both the bowl of steamed broccoli and the bowl of French dressing we're dipping it into. "I hold," she says. "I do it." This would be fine — if Birdy had a third arm. She puts down first one bowl and then the other, then picks both back up and wedges one under an arm, trying to figure out how to grasp a broccoli floret and plunge it into the orange goop without letting go of the bowls.
I am willing to let Birdy struggle for a while — I really do understand how important this is for growth — but finally I'm compelled to offer: "What if I hold the bowl of broccoli while you dip?" I'm just guessing here, but I think her screeching response means something like "No, thank you." I've offended her dignity, and there is, well, heck to pay: some obligatory stomping around, the accusatory groaning of the word "Mama," and a few tears — but this is only, maybe, a 3 on the 1-to-10 scale of toddler tantrums, as in "Loudly dissatisfied, but distracted by sticking fist into pudding cup."
When we go upstairs after dinner, Birdy wants to do the toothpaste "by self" (it bloops out onto the floor). She wants to eat the toothpaste from the floor (this is verboten). She wants to suck on the washcloth I've used to wipe her grubby face (I let her). She wants to fish a dropped sticker out of the toilet with her hand (I don't let her). And, by the time we're done with the evening's hygiene, it's all been too much for Birdy — too much "No," too much "Stop" — and we approach something like a 6 on the tantrum scale.
If my evening were a Jaws movie, we might refer to this as "foreshadowing" and there would be strains of ominous music. But this still is just baby stuff. I end up with a little snot on my shirt and in my hair, but Birdy pulls herself together. No, the real tantrum — the one you see slicing through the waves in the pointed shape of a fin — doesn't come until a few minutes later when Birdy, Ben, and I are pajama-clad and snuggled under the covers for a bedtime story. Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, to be precise. That's when Birdy finds herself unable to pull off her own fingers. "Aagh!" she cries, tugging on them. "Want to take dese fingahs off." She tugs some more, then holds her hand out to me and says, reasonably, "Mama, help me bease."
1 | next >
