I was going to pick up takeout the other day (what is fast becoming an unwelcome Saturday evening routine) when I lost it with the stroller.
It was my wife’s idea to take my 16-month-old son along for the walk and he was being a total baby about demanding to be carried like some medieval potentate.
Put him down and he immediately goes limp and starts whining. He knows that if we let him go, he’ll hit the ground back-of-head first the way he’s leaning, but he doesn’t care. The first-world baby would rather get a concussion than use his feet like a pleb.
So I descend the three flights of stairs, unlock, open, and re-lock the front door, then open up the garage with my preposterously large smartphone, all with my son in one arm.
Then I find to my frustration that, because of the way the people downstairs have put their junk, there is no way to get my stroller through the gap left by the bulk of their fat plastic bodies.
Because my son is still in one arm, I can’t lift the stroller over the cars, either. So I do what any sensible parent would: I flip out and start ramming my stroller between the cars in an attempt to push it through. Of course, the technique that might work between shopping carts in a supermarket utterly fails on the 2 giant plastic bins before me.
I’m livid with hanger-induced rage. I no longer care if the flimsy plastic pram-UV that parents now buy to protect and transport their kids gets permanently jammed between the two offending structures.
After three or four angry shoves, my son starts to squirming to be let down and I have to cling hard to keep him on my bicep.
As soon as his feet hit the ground, he grabs the stroller and starts pushing just like I did. But where I was raging at being blocked in, he was ecstatic at having discovered a new game.
Thankfully, he’s too young to realize what raging idiocy looks like. Even if he did see me in the throes of pointless fury, I hope he always takes the same approach. See our setbacks as a game, and know that if we must be angry, to have fun with being angry, and then to stop and be happy again.
Later that night, he refused to go to bed and would not stop crying. Where he used to be fine alone in the nursery, he now needs more reassurance in order to be alone in the dark.
Our new bedtime routine is always the same, I sing him a few songs after first chanting three times the word he’s known all his life.
“AUM.”
It’s a sacred mantra. Said to be the vibration that all the universe emanates, the word of the creator, the entirety of existence in audio form. I don’t know about all that. I just know it gets him to stop venting his frustration with being stuck in a tiny baby body, unable to climb out of his crib and decide his own bedtime. At its sound, he lets go of his overpowering emotions.
Typical parents stuff.
Maybe he realizes, like I did earlier that evening, that whatever has him so worked up isn’t all that important, or maybe it just distracts him long enough that he forgets what he was feeling.
Either way, it sure is nice having someone with you who can remind you to let go.
I hit this point countless times. I suppose learning that one’s love overcomes even rage and temporary insanity is one of the hidden benefits of parenting. And eventually: the inexplicable realization that you actually miss these episodes long after your child has outgrown them.