When one day of the week is just soooooo bad it’s best to just pretend it never happened.
Eventually though, enough days will pass and you’ll be able to look back and recall all of the stabby details without wanting to smash a hole in the wall. Then, friends, it’s time to blog about it.
I should have realised that the gods had it in for me quite early on Thursday morning, but the first ordeal – getting Nixon in the truck for swimming lessons – arrived earlier than expected. I had no chance to fully activate all of my (limited) faculties before the first tantrum hit. We eventually gone on the road, 10 minutes late, with Nix still in his pajamas. Zero fucks given at this point. Was so close to packing it in and staying home but once we were on the motorway I prematurely gave myself a smug little pat on the back.
This moment of triumph was short-lived when I realised we had arrived at the pool with no towels.
WTF.
Towels borrowed, lesson complete, Nix and I were completing the god-awful changing room shuffle when the baby next to us power-spewed all over the floor. A milk/chlorine power-spew. After I acclimated to the smell I realised that no-one in the changing room had offered to help the poor spew-mum, in fact I’ve never seen the Mummy and bub duos vacate the changing rooms so quickly. Women were literally running to their cars barefoot and braless!
Nixon was quite entertained marvelling at the spew and narrating (at volume) the post-spew movements of his classmate so I stepped in, offered my assistance and went to get help with the cleanup.
We got back home and everything muddled along quite well until the after school shift began. E came home in a particularly defiant mood that rapidly escalated into a full blown showdown complete with “I’m never talking to you again”, “You don’t want me to be happy”, “You don’t care about anything I do” and “You just say NO to everything!”. I gave up and vacated to the yard with Nix where we spent the rest of the daylight hours jumping on the tramp and driving trucks in the dirt. There’s actually no arguing reasoning with my angry tweenager right now. He’s so pumped full of testosterone that anything you say in the throes of a discussion just translates to him as ‘I’m going to take away all of your shit and make your life as miserable as I can’.
The only technique I have for dealing with him is to let him cool off, think about what he’s said and occasionally he might apologise. What’s got him on a knife-edge right now is the xBox game we ‘mutually’ removed from circulation a couple of weeks ago (catch up on that here).
He wants it back. And quite frankly I’m sick of hearing about it. So, this weekend we re-negotiated the terms of the game’s release and the situation is being ‘monitored’.
Anyway. Back to Thursday.
Scene: Nixon and myself – good times – escaping yelling older son by playing in the garden.
Sun disappears, it gets cold. It’s time for dinner. Then it was all on. Nixon wanted no part of;
- Coming inside
- Eating dinner
- Taking a shower
- Going to bed
Cue massive, violent, extremely vocal tantrum. Outside. Nixon is huge. 18+ kilograms of thrashing toddler-superhuman that wants nothing more than to exert his will over mine. The only way I can safely move him in the state he was in without losing massive clumps of hair or an ear, is to hoist him under my arm and carry him face down like a canoe on my hip. Leave him outside you say? The volume of our youngest son is equal to his impressive bulk. Our neighbours can’t (and shouldn’t have to) handle an un-muffled Nixon tanty that had the potential to go on for at least 30 minutes.
So this went on and on and eventually resulted in a UFC-style knee to my jaw. At speed.
Much like my exit to our bedroom where I shut the door and cried for an hour. I had nothing left in the tank.
I can usually handle one of the boys giving me hell, but on that day, back-to-back tantrums at 11/10 on the meltdown scale just ruined me. Now, as I read back over this post I think “pffttttt, it doesn’t even sound that bad. You are a LAME mother Melissa”.
It was bad though. And it placed me firmly at the end of my rope leaving Dave and my Mum to pick up the pieces, feed the boys and get Nixon ready for bed. Failing to cope with my own kids left me with an all too familiar, despondent feeling that I was unable to shake for a couple of days.
With some perspective, I’ve thought hard about some different tactics to employ with each of the boys but, they don’t call it The Witching Hour for nothing right? Every day at 5pm I feel a little nervous…………….
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