Noelle's Maxim

One my my favorite quotes about parenting comes from my friend Noelle (the one who made the MDRA marathon training video I posted in October).  She once said, "I was the best parent in the world until I had kids."  And I have known to stay humble, and that managing a classroom, a speech and language group, or the intensity of a 1:1 session with a nonverbal angry toddler, was going to be way easier than parenting.  I knew this to be true, I just didn't know what the challenges would look like and feel like.  I am starting to find out.

If I could give three traits to Charlotte it would be:

1. Work ethic.
2. Finding happiness and fulfillment on her own in every day rather than expecting every day to bring it to her.
3. That perfect balance between taking crap from no one and respecting others.

Number three is tricky.  It is still one I personally work on every day.  And apparently so does Charlotte.  At home she is pretty good in terms of following through on requests and respecting everyone all the way down to the cats, and whatever meltdowns she has, she works through on her own.  At school, well, it's a different story.  Like her teacher Indrani says, "She goes on strike" a lot.  Refuses to put her hat and gloves away nicely.  Refuses to go on the potty.  Refuses to go outside.  Refuses to come back inside.  And by refuse I mean something as simple as just sitting there like a stone to more disruptive behaviors like screaming and yelling.  One day last week, when I showed up to pick Charlotte up some generic four year old said to me, unsolicited, "Charlotte was very naughty today."

Good times.

I will often see Indrani pulling a parent to the side, giving them a heart-to-heart about their own child's behavior and part of me breathes a sigh of relief.  For once it someone else's kid.  But mostly, I just want to say, "I feel your pain."

The thing that is a little unsettling to me is the typical three year old behaviors she is going through all happen at school and not at home.  I'd be much more comforted if she went on strike all the time at home and performed at school.  I've seen kids do this for well over a decade: perform in school or in clinic and hear from the parents how difficult they are at home.  My line to parents has always been, "Well that is the biggest compliment you can ask for.  They know, with you, they can be 100% themselves, warts and all, and you will still love and accept them.  But with me or any other adult that security isn't there, so sense they have to perform and conform if they want to be accepted by us."

But Charlotte is doing it the opposite way.  I'm not at the level of worrying about this yet, but it is certainly something I am tracking.  I think she is just her raw true self with us and at school and home life is easier than school life for her right now. But really who knows why.  There are a hundred possible explanations.

One thing that helped me in terms of letting go, was a conversation I had with Indrani.  I used to really focus on Charlotte's behavior on the ride home.  We'd talk about it.  I'd give her time outs.  I'd remind her of the behavior expectations time and time and again.  Looking back, this got us nowhere and I admit mistakes were made in this regard.  But I couldn't figure this out on my own.  Indrani was going over Charlotte's most recent strike about a month ago and I said, "Okay we'll work on this at home," and she said, "No you don't work on it at home.  That is why she comes here.  So we can work on it."

And that was the most liberating damn thing I've heard.  This isn't physical therapy where there is homework to work on a specific skill.  And it is not speech therapy for stuttering where attitudes and emotions have to be targeted in a specific way.  Instead, this is the messy task of growing up (for both me and Charlotte) and I can't use whatever clinical skills I have to make that any easier. In fact, forget clinical skills, most parenting skills are overrated in a time like this outside of being consistent, patient, caring, and a role model.

So yes, the only thing I can control is letting go and but that has been hard to do.  I hear from Indrani about how bad Charlotte's behavior been at school, all the while Charlotte is running up to greet me with a hug, and I am torn.  I want to hold her accountable but I also want to let her maximize that moment of seeing me at the end of her long school day.  But now it is clear to me, in terms of school, for now I should just focus on the latter and let Indrani take care of the former.

The other thing that has helped is my own memory of my own childhood.  I remember getting in a spitting fight when I was like four on a ride in Kiddie Park.  I never met the kid or saw him again (we were at some mutual "friend's" birthday party), but I do remember we were spitting on one another over and over again.  I also remember getting in pretty big knock down drag out fights with the kids from up the block, on a weekly to monthly basis.  And then we'd hit restart and be ready to play again the next day.  I'm sure we can all recall times when we were less than angelic, thousands of times in fact, and we all turned out able to navigate society as adults and are all works in progress at home, with our family, and with our close friends.  Holding onto that fact is what gets me from wanting to scold her for misbehaving in school to wanting to hold her, hug her, kiss her, and tell her just how much I love her and that she isn't just a good girl, she is a GREAT girl.

As parenting gets more difficult with each passing month, I keep going back to Angle of Repose, one of my mom's all time favorite books.  The Doppler Effect is a strong theme in that book: sound waves (like from a siren) are much louder as the emergency vehicle travels away from you compared to towards.  I know I have made parenting decisions, reactions, and key events have already happened in this child's life that will be blazingly obvious down the road.  I just don't know which ones matter or will matter until after the fact.  So instead of worrying about that, I challenge myself to just be in the moment no matter how difficult her behaviors get.

And finally, I remember a conversation I had with Charlotte about a month ago.  Indrani told me she asked Charlotte if she was Mommy's girl or Daddy's girl.  And Indrani said that Charlotte said right away, "I'm Daddy's girl."  Well, I was more than skeptical because that doesn't sound like Charlotte as she seems equally connected to both of us, and I don't think she even knows what that question means. So I think she just said Daddy just for the sake of answering the question.

So we were driving home and I asked her the same question and she said, "I'm not Mommy's girl or Daddy's girl.  I'm Charlotte's girl."

And I just remember smiling and nodding as we drove along.  I wanted to tell her, "You're damn right that's who you are and that's who I always want you to be."  So really, if going on strike and giving Indrani and her peers a little hell right now is presently a weakness, or something to work on, it is also that same spirit which gives her the strength to be "Charlotte's girl" and no one else's.  And that is a trade-off I will take for now and for always.