Mister Brightside

It is a nondescript Tuesday night.  We are taking yet another family trip to Target.  (We go there a lot).  We walk into the store and in order to cover more ground, and so I can have a few moments of peace in the makeup aisle, we split up.  I am alone and free, at least for a few minutes, to shop without my son.  I am perusing the clearance rack of clothes on my detour to makeup, checking out a few cardigans and raincoats when I hear a faint scream that seems to come from the opposite end of the store.  I move down the rack to cargo pants and, listen.  Wait a second.  I know that scream.  I walk through the shoes, through the cleaning supplies, past the diapers, and into the baby clothes to find the source of said scream.  My son.  Screaming and throwing himself on the ground in the middle of Target.  I look to my husband who’s smiling and who has obviously lost control of this situation.  “Is this funny?” I ask, “Why is he crying?  And why are you smiling?”  My husband tells me that my son tried to pick up one of the red Target page phones and wanted to call Gaga.  (His Gaga, which is what he calls my mother in law, not Lady Gaga.)  My husband took away the phone and that’s when the fit began.  My husband is smiling because he wants the people who watched the whole thing go down to think that he’s a level headed person and that nothing this child does bothers him.  I see right through his mask.  “Stop smiling.” I tell him, incredulously.  I bend down and tell my son, “Do you want to go to school tomorrow?”  “Uh huh,” he cries.  “Then stop throwing a fit.”  And he straightens right up.  Yes, I realize this bribe will not always work the older he gets, once he realizes that school isn’t all that great.  But for now, it works.  I look over to the smiling couple next to us, her belly ripe with pregnancy, registering for a baby shower.  I assume it’s their first and I laugh, “Are you guys sure about this?”  They laugh nervously.  I follow up, “Oh, it’s not always like this.”  Yeah, sometimes it’s worse.

Sometimes I can’t get him to stop.

Ever since I’ve taken away my son’s binky I’ve realized daily just how great a purpose it served.  Anytime I wanted to plug him up (I could’ve used one in Target) I just whipped out the binky and crisis averted.  It also served as a filter.  With the binky in his mouth, he observed a great deal more without actually processing it verbally.  I complained for so long when he wasn’t talking. All I wanted was for him to talk.  Now he won’t shut up.  Seriously.  The kid will not shut up.  Everything he sees and hears is processed out loud.  When he learns a new word or saying, he says it over and over until I regret teaching it to him.  When he sees something he wants he asks for it a million times.  And if it’s not given to him, or if he thinks you’re not listening, he knows exactly what to say and what to do to convey his dissatisfaction.  I have the overwhelming urge to shove something into his mouth, if only for a second of peace.  I lament the binky.  

As my son inches towards turning three, I keep hearing a friend’s voice in my head that said to me a while back, “The terrible twos are a misnomer.  They are really the terrible threes.”  To which I balked, yeah right, because, come on, can it get much worse than two? 

Hear me now.  Yes.  It can.

I’m kidding.  Kind of.  The funny thing about kids is that they learn so fast who they can go crazy on and just what exactly they’ll be able to get away with.  That’s their jobs, to figure out the boundaries and then to push them as far as they can.  Our jobs are to set the boundaries and enforce them.  I get that.  What I don’t get is how quickly they learn the give and take.  I don’t get it when I ask my son’s teacher how he is in school she always says, “Great, he’s so well behaved” and also that he’s “one of the shy ones.”  Really?  The kid who had a roomful of people applauding him as he sang “Single Ladies” into a microphone last weekend at my mom’s house (that says a lot about my family, that we just have random microphones and amps lying around the house, just in case anyone has the urge to break out into song and needs some juice), the kid who danced around like a kid on “Glee” is shy at school?  The kid who throws himself on the floor at the mall when I announce it’s time to leave is well behaved for his teachers when they announce that recess is over?  What’s up with that?  He learns so fast.  Your kid does too, probably.  He knows the difference between mama and the teacher.  He knows very well the difference between mama and dada.  Oh boy.  He knows that I have actually followed through with some of my threats.  Not going to the park if he doesn’t stop throwing a fit.  Taking toys away from him.  Not giving him cookies because he didn’t eat his green beans.  At least I try to set the boundaries and enforce them.  Dada however is such a softy.  He hates to see our son cry.  It’s not like I love it, but I think being a stay at home mom, I am a bit more desensitized to our little guy’s waterworks.  Lately my husband appears like he doesn’t even know what to do when our son throws these fits, besides riding them out, ignoring them or laughing at them like he did in the store.  My favorite is when he responds to these fits by yelling out, “Carrie!” as if he’s sinking to the bottom of the fit abyss and has no choice but to cry out for a lifeline.  Our son can throw a doozie of a fit, I know.  And they have gotten much worse in the last couple of months.  He’s bigger now and it’s getting harder to just scoop him up and quickly haul him out of any public place.  He has my husband’s build so he’s all legs and they flail all over the place when he’s throwing a fit.  This throwing himself on the ground thing is new too.  Verbal skills, plus size, plus a keen sense of observation and self awareness equals a demonstrative attack on all boundaries.  But where I refuse to give in, my husband’s heart caves like a Chilean mine.

I’m not attacking my husband, don’t get me wrong.  I’ve learned a lot so far as a parent but I still feel like sometimes I have no control.  I hate that feeling.  But I feel like I am a master of manipulation and can calm down or avert most fits with a simple “this” or “that” method.  My son is pretty responsive to this technique.  I don’t think my husband has a technique yet.  He’ll learn.  He’ll have to.  He lets my son get away with so much more than I do, so when he tries to enforce inconsistent boundaries, he gets a huge fit like the one in Target.  As I approached the scene the other night, I felt like the situation was out of control and then shortly thereafter, realized that I was the only one with control.

And then it occurred to me that I am the disciplinarian in my household.  When did that happen?