The Tantrum Monster

The other day I was sitting in Café Nero with my husband, enjoying a cappuccino (skinny, decaff, just to be extra boring.) While we drink and talk it’s fun to people-spot, especially since Café Nero is reassuringly cosmopolitan for a small coffee outlet in North Wales. Opposite me was a person whose t-shirt said, ‘Animal Free Ride’ on a large green circle over her left breast, talking away in Polish, I believe, to the rest of her group. Listening to them gave me a pleasant feeling of being abroad, because all the other conversations were such a babble that I couldn’t make out individual words. It’s nice to go out for coffee with my husband. It’s nice to feel free and sophisticated and relax a little on his days off.

Except for the two and a half year old. The emotionally fragile two and a half year old...

The realities of two and a half year olds is that you are never away from them. Offers of babysitting tend to pale away in proportion to how stroppy he is being at that point in time. The ‘of course you can go out, we’ll look after him,’ quickly turns into, ‘well, maybe when he’s not quite so volatile. Maybe when he’s happier being apart from you.’ So a relaxed coffee with the husband turns into a tag-along blowing raspberries in the back of the car, into a high incidence of very sticky hands, into a silent prayer of today, let him be happy.

So far that day he had had tantrums over being sleepy, waking up, wanting to be carried, wanting to be put down, and a sausage roll. In Café Nero it was time for him to have a tantrum over his straw. The carton comes supplied with a proportionally short straw, but he put a long straw into his carton. (‘Did you get him that straw?’ I ask my husband. ‘I thought you did,’ he answers. Then we realise he’s just acquired a stray straw off the floor, and is sucking away at it.) But the straw is too long for the carton. He tries to shove it further through the hole. Apple juice sprays everywhere. He won’t accept the other straw. He won’t let us trim the long one down. He just wants it to be shorter – to spontaneously shorten itself because he’s furious with it.

Having a two year old is like having your own personal drunk or drug addict. They’re volatile, fall over easily, are irrational, take delight in strange food combinations, concentrate intensely on one unimportant detail, and can’t focus on what is important. Their speech is slurred, their co-ordination is clumsy, and they’re wildly unpredictable and liable to fall asleep at a moment’s notice. They often smell of pee. The only difference is that they don’t smell of alcohol – and that they’re like this all the time.

How is that that a sweet request of, ‘Peanut butter?’ can turn into a freshly made sandwich being torn into pieces and thrown on the floor because it wasn’t folded right, the peanut butter wasn’t spread right, he wasn’t allowed to make it himself because sometimes I just don’t have the patience to oversee these things, or because he changed his mind half way through and wanted honey instead? Actually, this article at slate.com answered a lot of those questions. It explains how hard it is for the toddler to understand why you’re suddenly saying no all the time, how they work to their strengths when negotiating the world (using their new-found motor skills in place of their inadequate language skills, for example), and how their frontal lobe is just not developed enough to enable them to plan and reason logically. All this boils down to the fact that when your two year old is screaming and throwing things (when your seven year old gets a black eye because he’s just had a toy hurled at his face), there’s a reason for that behaviour, and to a certain extent you just have to work through it. It doesn’t always help when he’s just upturned a potty full of urine onto the carpet, but knowing that your two year old is living in a bewildering, changing world is a very useful thing.

So, let’s get back to a world where you give the toddler a carton of apple juice and he decides the straw is too long. It’s almost inevitable that there will either be a spillage, or screaming. You can try to explain to him why he shouldn’t squeeze the carton like a marauding monster rampaging through a city, or why you can’t make the straw longer – but you shouldn’t expect to get anywhere, at least, not until a few more months have passed. Perhaps you will get looks of shock and disapproval from other people in the café (perhaps they never had children, or forgot what it was like.) But you shouldn’t feel that your child is the most terribly behaved child in the world. You shouldn’t feel that you oughtn’t to take him out in public, or that you should be able to stop him screaming. You should just grit your teeth and try to enjoy your coffee. After all, how many chances will you get, until your babysitters decide they can actually handle your bundle of joy again?

On Books and Women

Yesterday was World Book Day (leading to a slew of panicked posts on facebook starting with ‘My child’s just told me they have to dress up as a book character!’ and ending with, ‘I’ll send him as a normal boy, then,’ or ‘I’ve spent all night making mouse ears.’)

Today, it’s International Women’s Day, I’m told.

I can understand World Book Day. Not everyone is exposed to that many books. Even now children still manage to slip through school without ever learning to read, and adults get by day by day without society knowing they can’t do much more than spell their own name. You have to admire their resilience. I’d imagine that anyone clever enough to hide their illiteracy would be clever enough to learn to read, given the right encouragement. So promoting books and reading is an excellent thing. As a writer, I certainly believe in anything that encourages a person to pick up a book.

Books have only been around for the last two hundred years or so – and by that I don’t mean all books. I don’t mean the Lindisfarne Gospels or the contents of the British Library or Bibles and prayer books. I mean books. The kind of books that exploded with the advent of the railways, with W. H. Smiths setting up on stations, with Dickens writing books that went out in serialised chunks, where the next exciting instalment was waited for with baited breath by readers on the other side of the Atlantic. Books you can push into your pocket. Books you stack up in the bathroom to read in those private moments. Books in piles by your bed, books teetering out of the bookshelves, because books are cheap, books are easy to get hold of, books are given away free with newspapers and sold for pennies in charity shops, and lent and borrowed and read until the spines cracked, and then replaced because it’s that cheap and easy to do so.

But women, to my understanding, have been around for – well, take your pick. When exactly do you choose the moment that homo sapiens broke away from their relatives? Wikipedia, the fount of all human knowledge, tells me that ‘Archaic Homo sapiens,the forerunner of anatomically modern humans, evolved between 400,000and 250,000 years ago.’ So we’ve been there for a while. And that’s not forgetting that females didn’t pop into existence when homo sapiens decided to branch out and become its own species. Women have been on this earth for as long as men have been on this earth. Every person that has been born has encountered a woman at some point in their life.

Suffragettes on Bow Street,1913 (Leonard Bentley, flickr)

So why do we need a special day for women? Wikipedia, again, tells us that, ‘the sex ratio for the entire world population is 101 males to 100females.’ So there we are. I don’t think one extra man to every 100 females makes us exactly a minority. It probably makes for one disappointed man, but not much more than that. I don’t want to be hoist aloft for one day of the year and told that I’m special, that my opinion counts, that I’m worth my place in the world. I want this to be the reality every day, not because I’m female, but because I’m a person. Let’s not have one day a year of lauding women’s rights. Let’s not have feminism or girl power or reminders that we are special. We’re no more special than anyone else. How about 365 days of respecting everyone’s rights?

Of Sleeping, and Not Sleeping

I am a night owl.

That’s not really a fair description. I’m sure most owls don’t spend their nights lying in bed staring at a computer screen. If they did they’d die of starvation. Most owls don’t have unrequited lustings after stars of the screen or obsessions with certain television series. Most owls don’t write novels. (I have to wonder what an owl’s novel would be like, although since my latest novel contains a character who, at times, thinks she’s an owl, perhaps I’ve tried to answer my own question.)

But anyway, here I am. I prefer to go up to bed at around eleven. I prefer not to go to sleep until about two. I could push that later, but owing to the feeling of having some responsibility to be awake in the daylight hours, I don’t. I’m lucky that I have a very accommodating husband. (I’m not going to start referring to my family members as ‘DH,’ ‘DS1,’ ‘DS2,’ etc., which makes them sound like gaming consoles.)

It’s a shame that I’m not trying to write this in that lovely quiet time before two a.m.. Then I wouldn’t be typing one handed while a two year old shoves a Weetabixy spoon into my face and screams at me. But my tendency to stay awake until the small hours is why I find this article so reassuring.  Apparently, ‘more intelligent individuals are more likely to be nocturnal than less intelligent individuals.’ This pleases me. This means that while I’m lying under my quilt staring at my computer screen becoming more and more dejected because I can’t make words flow or think of a plot for a new story, I’m being super intelligent. It means all those infuriating, bouncy, ‘I couldn’t be so lazy’ type morning larks are the dull and brain-dead among us.

Owl, by Jennicatpink on Flickr.
This is roughly how I look if I wake up too early in the morning.

I know this isn’t the most social way to live. I force myself to turn off around two. I wake up somewhere around 11 a.m., if I’m lucky; later, if I’m really lucky. If I’m prised out of bed earlier than that I tend to roam around with my face creased up into an attempt to pretend I’m still asleep and do things on automatic pilot. If I have to walk the children to school I usually haven’t brushed my hair or looked in a mirror or changed out of the t-shirt I slept in. I stay alert just long enough to walk back, before slipping back under a quilt at the earliest opportunity, putting an audiobook into my ears, and going back to find inspiring dreams.

Later in the year, perhaps, when I’m not pushed into a dreary, uncreative mire by the curse of winter, I might use those precious after-midnight hours to write something of worth. Until then I’ll keep on staring vacantly at the computer screen, and writing bad poetry. But at least I have the reassurance of Psychology Today that I’m intelligently unproductive.

Introductions

This is the time to introduce myself. A shiny new blog, a place to jot down idiocy and ramblings and frustrations and ideas. It's hard to do right now because I have a two year old standing behind me on the settee slapping my head with both hands and shouting, 'Lap! Lap!' at me. (He's pretty good on his 's's, but not when he's concentrating on hitting me, it seems.) When he's not shouting 'slap,' he's jumping and shouting, 'Bounce high up!' The cat is drinking the pineapple juice from the child's bowl (who'd have guessed?) and there's soup in the pressure cooker screaming to be turned off. I'm trying to lose weight (ten pounds so far) and soup seems like the way to go.

Perhaps this is as good an introduction as any, since it describes quite a few of my days. What else is there around me? Sunshine. A good spattering of dog hair and rubble on the carpet (a lovely 1960s piece made of inter-meshing fern leaves.) Books. More books. And a certain degree of peace, since the other children are at school. Thank god. I mean, home education seems the way to go, but I think I would go mad if I attempted it myself. I'm an introvert. I crave quiet, not 18 hours a day of arguments.

To prettify this entry and make it look as if my life is not all chaos and dog hair, here are some crocuses I took pictures of yesterday. See you again soon!