The Frenemy Within: Losing it with My Kids and Post-Tirade Repair
While composing my weekly newsletter about healthy coping skills, I took an impromptu break to yell at my kid. I didn’t yell, “Hey, great job!” or “Love you, buddy!” I let out a bloodcurdling, eye-popping shriek of unadulterated madness. A vein I didn’t know I had stood out a foot from my temple, throbbing in time to my racing heartbeat. For you southerners out there — I lost my religion. For you Yankees — I went out of my frickin’ tree.
Perhaps I hadn’t read my own previous emails, written in the role of advice-dispensing, encouraging, and calm psychiatrist, about composure and enjoying the present and being patient with our beloved offspring.
What set me off — my 8 year old surreptitiously nabbed my phone and reprogrammed the Sonos speakers. He abruptly axed mellow James Taylor (I WAS USING THAT TO RELAX!!) and assaulted me with that Daft Punk ear worm, “One More Time”.
The horror! My brain revved up in the face of this offense, firing on all cylinders. My fight or flight went full berserk. Adrenaline raced and before I even knew what I wanted to say I screeched out, “DON’T TOUCH MY PHONE!! AAAAGH!!” Since I like to model manners for my children I tacked on a belated and pained “PLEASE!!” I yelled a little (a lot) about rules, the messy house, the lack of quiet and respect (ouch, in retrospect that’s the worst of the lot), and speculated (unfavorably) on whether I would have an imminent heart attack.
In the denouement of my tirade, I saw my three children huddled on the couch, hiding under a blanket. Stoking my ire at the time, but to my great relief in hindsight, they were giggling.
Why am I, a mental health expert, confessing this? Despite my desire to appear consummately professional, a good, non-abusive mother, a wise child psychiatrist, and a decent person, I want to write about the importance of recognizing our transgressions and moving on from them. We all transgress. To pretend otherwise is itself a transgression and an affront to humility.
I do not recommend yelling at children, my own or anyone else’s. Or spouses or neighbors or colleagues. Yelling is not a manifestation of power, but of weakness. It’s a tantrum, an attempt to wrest some feeling of control from a situation that has made us feel powerless. Does it work? Not so much, and only for the fleetingest of moments. It leaves us guilt-ridden and ashamed for longer than the relief we eeked out from the explosion. And it puts distance and mistrust between us and whoever is unlucky enough to be our aghast audience.
The pandemic, and its restrictions and demands on us, is undoubtedly shaking loose some of our less attractive quirks and bugs and chinks in the armor, but parents losing it and yelling at their kids is older than COVID-19. The global, collective loss of control over our lives and movements is unprecedented in the last few generations on this scale, not since the polio pandemic in the last century. The hours, weeks and now months of forced family time are dragging out our beasts from the shadows. Numerous public health and family advocacy agencies are rightfully concerned by an uptick in domestic violence. Cabin fever is real. Our intolerance with one another takes us to the brink, or over it, of blaming and punishing each other for the discontentment we feel, with nowhere to go for escape.
What is our responsibility to ourselves and our families, neighbors and colleagues? First off, we try to do our best.
Secondly, when we fail to do our best, we apologize. Again and again. We do and fail, and do again. When your X-wing spirals into the Dagobah swamp (NB: this is a metaphor for losing control), you can blame someone else, or whine about it, or give up, or get to fixing it, no matter how hard it seems. You have to want to lift yourself out of the swamp, and you have to dig deep to do it. To state the obvious, self-control is a wholly internal process for which you have to take full responsibility each time. Full. Responsibility.
I apologized sincerely to my children and husband and I am grateful for their forgiveness. I then walked us through an exercise in healing, in which I invited them to imitate me during my tantrum and give me advice on how to control my temper. They loved it. They hammed it up mercilessly. Daniel Tiger songs were sung and they relished waggling their grubby, chubby, baby fingers at me. I took it on the chastised chin like a champ. We embarked on a Don’t Yell art project. I put on the Daft Punk song and we danced around while they continued to mimic my outburst, vaporizing the tension and defanging the scary spectacle of an enraged parent. I laughed with them, but the regret in my heart was, and is, still there like a dagger.
I had been feeling annoyed already, sitting in front of my laptop screen, and ignored it instead of addressing it. I was primed to react. Under my skin there were signals of building resentment — a close cousin of denial, of non-acceptance, of suffering, which is the space between what we want and what we get — of being cooped up in the house, having eaten too many chips and moving too little, wanting to work better, sleep better, eat better, look better, wanting quieter kids who eschewed screen time to make brilliant art and read leagues above their grade level, etc, etc. I was going down the rabbit hole of comparing my actual life to my fantasy life. It created anxiety and sorrow and fear. Anger is an effective short-term tool to disperse those uncomfortable emotions, and mine was on a hair trigger. BOOM! The humanity.
How can we do better when we’re annoyed, exhausted, bereft, or taxed? When our multi-tasking pulls our brain in ten directions? Stop. Pay attention to the interior rising discomfort. That beast is your frenemy. It’s your warning system. Get it some tea, take a walk (around the living room in circles if necessary), do an inventory of what you can be grateful for, practice diaphragmatic breathing, put on your favorite song, recite a prayer or mantra, scratch out a few lines in your journal, nap, read fiction, watch SNL, do a sun salutation, what the hell, eat a cookie. Shunned, spurned, ignored, or scorned, that helplessness, grief, or anger will redouble in intensity when unleashed. Our children will remember what they felt in our moments of bombastic meltdowns. They will not recall how they provoked us (a weak and relative concept at best), only how we behaved badly.
Apologize when you don’t do your best. And move on. Forgive other people their transgressions. If your children under quarantine have glued their little sister’s hair, get the scissors, make a joke, and move on. If a stranger harasses you in the supermarket, retract your hackles, extend compassion, and don’t take it personally. Move on. When you feel the beast rising within, pay attention right away and do whatever you can to soothe it instead of fighting it. You will lose. It is waking up to tell you something. Be curious about its message from the depths and listen. Forgive yourself. Forgive each other. Embrace your inner frenemy. Find humor whenever and wherever you can.
And don’t even think about turning off my James Taylor.
