LIKE MY FELLOW TSP blogger Anastasia, I’ve been pondering the Dooce pregnancy. (At least in the mommy-blog-osphere, it gets the definite article, just like the Obama Inauguration.) I remember the strange anticipation of my second child, the expected wondering about gender, personality and, in particular, how and what their relationships with each other would be. (Only child that I am, the thoughts ran to things like, “Am I ruining my first child’s life?”)
My anxiety was heightened, I think, because like Dooce, I suffered post-partum depression with my first pregnancy. Unlike Dooce, I didn’t get treatment for it, which was stubborn and foolish on my part. When I got pregnant the second time, I was deathly ill for five months (if you consider puking every day deathly ill, which I do). I was also very concerned that I’d have a repeat of the dark thoughts and malaise that plagued me after my son (aka the River) was born, and I told everyone who’d listen to Please. Watch. Out. For. My. Sanity.
As it turned out, my second episode of post-partum was much-delayed, not technically post-partum at all, though definitely depression. (And thanks to the assistance and intervention of friends, family and a great doctor, I was treated and felt much, much better.) But as a result of the delayed reaction, my daughter’s infancy was much easier for me than my son’s (quite possibly the only time I’ll reference my darling daughter, aka The Rock, as “easy.”) My more pleasant experience of her babyhood made me see the lost opportunities with my boy, and I sometimes wonder how my fragile state after his birth has affected him, and our relationship.
With the River’s little sister, though I am often baffled by her displays of will, I have a visceral understanding of her reactions. She’s super-rational, which is not to say that she can’t be capricious (she is 3, after all) but I can almost always empathize. The River, as I’ve written before, also lives up to his name. Most of the time, he goes with the flow, though, like any moving body of water, he can exert resistance, abruptly change direction, and wreak havoc. When he surprises me taking on these latter characteristics, I’m always taken aback, and I don’t always react well.
TAKE LAST NIGHT: He was at the kitchen table, faced with the most homework he’s ever had to do in one night. (Bitter, hard-to-learn life lesson: this is what happens when you leave it all to the night before it’s due. ) To make matters worse, his math assignment was two whole pages of problems, all the hated and feared subtraction. After a few minutes of pondering the worksheets, shifting back and forth between them trying to work up the courage to begin, he instead started to cry and bemoan his lack of ability.
His emotional outbursts tend toward the theatrical, for which, I’m not proud to admit, I have no patience. And so I snapped, and he cried more, and I felt like a bully who’d be referenced years later, no doubt in a therapy session or, if I’m lucky, his autobiography, as the cold and withholding mother who wouldn’t even show sympathy to a 7-year-old faced with the terror of the minus sign.
When things are rough between him and me, or between him and his sister, he’s been known to loudly proclaim that I show her preferential treatment. I used to write this off as ridiculous. But the older my kids get, and the more they experience their own conflicts (“I’m NEVER PLAYING WITH YOU AGAIN!”; or: “I wish I NEVER HAD A SISTER!”), the more I am forced to recognize that my easy ability to relate to his little sister’s internal traumas–and my difficulty in understanding his–does, at the end of the day, amount to a bias. And it’s one I don’t know how to tease out of our interactions, except to take a deep breath, and do what I’m always telling my kids to do when they’re about to take up arms against each other: Take a deep breath. Count to five. Think before you speak.
Wish me luck.
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I need to count to five and think before I speak too. And I hear you on the dreaded math homework. I’ve spend the last 45 minutes emailing bk and forth with my 7 yo’s teacher trying to come up with a solution for the homework that my darling daughter says “falls out of her backpack”.
The thing that I, the classic school girl good-girl overachiever, find mystifying, is that he’s actually GOOD at math. He’s got an intuitive grasp of it…but oh, subtraction. It is NOT his friend. Even though he can do it just fine, fear and panic take over My speech about FDR and nothing to fear, etc., fell on deaf ears (something of a surprise, given his obsession with World War II-era history.) But what I really worry: What’s going to happen when multiplication arrives? I’m going to need to run to the spa, pronto. Ha–as if!
I still have a hard time understanding what a preference means, really, now that I’m a mom. I got it CLEARLY as a kid; my mom “got” my brother and I was an enigma to her. But I find now that I have to pay attention to my little enigma and I think about her a lot and does that constitute a preference?
Sometimes I like to torment myself by playing Sophie’s Choice. Does anyone else do that, or am I a total crackpot?
I’ve never seen nor read “Sophie’s Choice” though I know the basic idea–and I do think about that sometimes,and then run away from the thought as fast as I can. I don’t really prefer one to the other (well, sometimes in the moment I do, but not in a meta sense) and I do think they both get the same love, attention and affection from me–but what role does empathy play? I think that’s the question I’m trying to ask.
I was so interested in reading this, and I was recently reassured reading Betsy Braun Brown’s parenting book, “Just Tell Me What to Say.” She was talking about how in some cases we just “get” one kid more. They are more like us, we are for some explicable reason just more in sync with them. That is the case with my kids. My son and I are more alike. I get him. Although my daughter and I are very close, I often understand her less – the way she processes things. I feel terrible about it, but it is true. Then the other day we were in the car, and she said out of the blue, “Hayden is more like you. I’m more like Daddy.” I asked her what she meant, why she thought that, she said, “I don’t know.” She’s right. Amazing how smart our kids are. Not that that solves anything. But I do think that we will love our children differently. My parents always said, “We love you both the same, in different ways,” when pressed to declare their favorite. The same, but different, I think that works for me, too.