This is getting tougher

There are days I wake up and feel incompetent as a mother, and go to bed feeling worse, completely helpless, not at all up to the task. It has come down to only of several things. My measurement of how good a day is, is by how many tantrums Kodi throws. In that, I feel like a failure as a mother so far. Whatever parenting material I have read, all the fellow blogs I’ve observed and made notes from, everything seems pointless to me right now.

The whole month that we were in India, K would throw a tantrum a day. I counted those as the good days. It was to be expected, he did it the last time too, and we had braced ourselves for it. One tantrum a day was good.

But on the bad days, which were significantly more in number, we’d have a tantrum every few hours and horrible, absolutely unacceptable behavior. Like that one time, he threw his shoe at a visiting relative. And another, when he flung a plastic cricket bat at his grandma which narrowly missed her eye. Another time, he hit me with a ruler. One evening, after a really nice outing with his cousin, which all of us enjoyed, especially him, on the car ride back, he went wild because he didn’t get to sit where he wanted and wailed and screamed the entire ride back. He was absolutely inconsolable. A nightmare of a way to end what was otherwise a great evening.

So far he has listened to logic, reasoning, and usually responds to calm explanation and plenty of love. In face of these new tantrums, all that is history.

What were the triggers? Absolutely random. We try to stay on top of the typical ones – hunger, fatigue, thirst, need to use bathroom, sleep – at bay. It’s almost funny, how we raced, not against the clock, but to serve his Highness lest he get angry. The list kept growing each day and we kept trying to stay on top of it.

If I were to dissociate myself from this picture, and try, as objectively as I possibly can, to look at it from a third person lens, I’d probably arrive at some psychological reasoning  “That poor kid. He is adapting to having a brother. It can’t be easy watching the baby surrounded by all. He is not getting the attention he deserves.” “So many changes he’s been through, its bound to show up in some way.” “He’s not going to school, na, that’s why.”

Then I switch back to mommy mode, to being the first person witness to it all and wonder how he could go from feeling quite content with his brother to hating everyone because they talked to him. How he could have possibly got more attention. Yes, his brother is cute and charming and all, but K was never sidelined. In fact, he got more attention than the baby from some members of the family, who firmly believed that he was one of a kind and irreplaceable.

I wonder what I should have done. Read to him more (which he resisted on most days)? Snuggled him more (which he hates, btw)? Keep him constructively occupied (resistance again) ? Give him more one-on-one? (done) Take just him out for special treats every so often? (done) Ignore his tantrums? (tried and worked 2/10 times) Disciplined him more? (how? how? how?) Between the Bapa and I, we tried, believe us, we did. We were conscious of what we did, within all the practical constraints.

We didn’t manage to tame the monster till we left India. Now we – me and the kids – are in Dubai with my parents, and so far, it seemed like he was stable here. Thrilled to bits to see his MommyAmma. Fewer people to deal with, so lesser tantrums. All was fine. Till this week. When we had some guests over, and they tried to engage him in conversation and he responded by yelling back that they should not be talking. He’s that kid – that kid of a distant acquaintance, the one I’d see occasionally when I was a teenager – who’d whine to get his way, who’d have his parents running around to cater to all his changing needs, who’d be rude to visitors, who I’d want to slap silly and bring to senses. That kid I used to shake my head at and exclaim to myself how spoilt rotten he was. That kid, is my child today.

Today’s behavior takes the cake. He woke up with a hunger tantrum. Nothing new there. He was cranky all afternoon, kept wanting to hit me with whatever he could find, and kept pushing his brother down or pulling his ears, just because. Then in the evening, he threw something at his grandpa when the three were playing. It might have been accidental, might have been intentional. But what he did after that bothers me more. He left the room, ran out to where I was – and knowing that I didn’t know what had just happened – urged me to take him to bed quickly as he was oh so sleepy. It was his escape. It was not until my dad came out several minutes later, holding a hand to his eye did I find out what actually happened.

The sneakiness – that bothers me. What happened to innocence? Have I already created a moat between us that he has to sneak around? And the anger. So much anger. So much. I’ve written about it before and I write again – it shocks me how much can be contained in a 3 foot frame, and at what pressure he must be to explode with that much rage.

I haven’t even mentioned the general resistance to every single thing. There’s a battle for e.v.e.r.y thing from drinking plain water to wearing clothes to going to the bathroom. It has become our way of life now, so I am not even going to complain. I have given up fighting for several things – don’t ask me when he drank milk last. He’s going to end up nutritionally deficient and I’m going to end up simply feeling deficient as a mother.