This is a concept that I keep having to reinforce around here.
Not just in the sense that mothers get to go out once in a while with their own friends, or that mothers sometimes like a few minutes alone with the thoughts in their head, but in the sense that mothers aren’t somehow extra-special human beings endowed with super-human amounts of patience.
This afternoon knitting was cancelled, so I agreed to take the kids to the river to play baseball/soccer/frisbee. I asked them to wait the fifteen minutes it would take for me to clean up the lunch dishes, and off they went outside, but they kept coming in to complain about each other. ” He whacked me with the baseball bat on my hand ON PURPOSE!” and “She won’t do what I want!” accompanied by crying and door slamming and general carrying on. The imperious, “Are you finished the dishes YET?” finally did me in.
I called them in, sat them on the couch, and told them that I hadn’t to my knowledge signed a contract saying that I would take them places or do nice things with them no matter how dreadfully they acted, and that au contraire, I actually had lots of things that needed doing around the house, which I could now get around to because there was no way I would be taking either of them to any park any time soon.
Meek silence, followed by the noise of my vacuum cleaner.
Then a whispered conference, two apologies, and the promised afternoon outing. With two rather well-behaved children.
We were definitely on the same page today. I must say, I think you handled your frustration better though.
If only reasoning worked on a toddler, huh?