Mommy's Undoing?

It’s a Sunday night (as I begin writing this) after another busy weekend. Todd and I are in our typical Sunday night moods – a bit frayed along the edges, sassy, exhausted, happy the girls are in bed, but kinda missing them already. Todd is in the kitchen brewing up a batch of his Grandmom Axsom’s rice pudding and the resulting smell is making us both feel warm and at home. Iris just inexplicably woke– it’s only 30 minutes after Todd put her to bed, and I’m just down from rocking her back to sleep. Sitting up there, staring into the wet, cold night, I got thinking about which of these children will be my undoing. . .

It may be Bella, who will cause the undoing of the mommy out of frustration. Bella is very sweet, usually helpful, always intelligent. But she is capable of episodes of blind, hard, unreasonable fury, brought on by seemingly minor factors, which always translate to her either feeling scared or out of control of a particular situation. If both of these issues occur at the same time - the fear and her feeling out of control - well, anyone causing that may as well watch out.

This past Friday night, for example, the fury storm hit because her toe nails needed to be trimmed. Isabella hates to have her toe nails trimmed, I can’t trace back some horrible experience in her past which would have caused her to feel this way. I’ve not clipped off a single one of her toes in the act, as far as I remember. She just hates having it done. As a result, I don’t do it much. I won’t even say the last time I’ve done it because (1) I can’t remember and (2) All the grandparents might collectively exclaim, “It’s been how many months?!” Yes, that’s right - it’s been months.

Friday night I pulled her from the bathtub and caught sight of her toe nails which had finally exceeded the length of acceptability. They were starting to look freakishly long and borderline in-grown. And the moment I said (quietly, firmly, calmly), “We’re clipping your toe nails tonight”, she immediately begin screaming and crying at the top of her lungs “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO”. This repeated “NO” continued during the five minutes it took to dry her off and get her in her pajamas (Iris crawling all over us in the meanwhile, as happy as a lark). As the moment of truth approached, I detailed the easy way/hard way scenario. “Easy way= let mommy hold your toes and gently clip the nails and then you get them painted. Hard way=scream, cry, writhe your body around until mommy is forced to sit on top of you, clip them quickly, and then you go right to bed.” After some further convincing, which included my beginning to sit on top of her, she finally selected “EASY WAY, mommy, pleeease.” And the job was done fine. Still some crying. No toes removed out right.

Afterwards, I grabbed Iris to take care of her little baby nails as well. She allowed me to pick her up, sit her on my lap, and then held herself perfectly still as though toe nail clipping was the most important thing in the world. Bella watched in awe and finally asked, dumbfounded, “Why is Iris so calm?”, to which I snapped, “Because this doesn’t HURT.” From downstairs, we heard Daddy laugh. He’d been listening to our little battle of wills while installing our new (thanks to Grandpa Bill) DVD-R.

This tale is told as an example of a scene which repeats itself again and again over the course of any amount of time spent with Bella and is my main challenge in this whole being a mommy thing. She is so like me in many ways, but so very unlike me in this blind fury and unreasonableness. Some of it is her age, but so much seems her personality and I battle not snapping at her. . .

. . . all the while keeping my hawk eye trained on Iris, aka the DareDevil, who will surely cause my undoing through incessant worry. Iris is our little carefree thing who is a thrill seeker. Again, this is probably partially due to Iris’ age, but Bella was never this reckless, even at age one. Iris is the kind of baby you can’t turn you back on. She is brave in her crawling and is all over the house. If the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs is left open, and Iris is safely in the room furthest from the stairs, I can’t turn my back for even a moment. She will crawl at warp speed through two rooms, a hallway, and halfway up the stairs within a 10 second interval. Her bathtub habits also never cease to cause me worry. Again, if I advert my glance for even a second, I’ll turn back to find her standing up in the slippery tub, often on one leg, her face covered in bubbles because she’s dunked her head into the water, and she’ll laugh and screech at my worried reaction (“IRIS RUTH – SIT DOWN!!!!).

Last night she discovered she could climb up on the little toddler chair we have in the playroom. After climbing up and down several times, she decided that was not exciting enough, so she started to climb up and stand (and smile and laugh in delight at my reaction, again “IRIS – SIT DOWN!!!). I took a few pictures of our mountain climbing daredevil, before she careened face first into the ground. After a few seconds of crying, she was back at it, but then obsessed with the feeling of careening itself– oh how she careened and giggled when she fell into my arms, each time making me jump inside with anxiousness that she’d hurt herself.. Again and again, she careened into the mommy. As she did this, I had visions of her mountain biking at age 8 and conking herself in the head, and then of her climbing Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank at age 17, and then of. . .who knows. . . it makes me jittery just to think of it.

Luckily, Todd always puts things in perspective for me, calms Bella and I both down after we’ve butted heads, rocks Iris to sleep after she’s exhausted herself careening. And then he tells me that everything will be fine, that these girls will be great, that I’m a good mommy, and love them, and that is all that matters. And, really, he’s right. At the end of every day, after the girls have been read to, cuddled, and tucked away in their beds, I am thankful for their strength and obstinance, and zest for living. All of these characteristics will serve them well as grown women, as grown humans. It might mean my undoing, but it’ll be a happy undoing in the end.