Thoughts from the morn
I had to sit through a 4-year-old’s meltdown before eight-thirty this morning.
Just as I sipped my chai and looked out at the kookaburra (which I then googled and found out was a grey butcherbird) that was perched upon the bare tree in my backyard, it all unravelled.
A cranky preschooler awoke with a mission to bring down the roof. Tears down his cherubic face, hoping he could cry his way into staying at home, resistance to eat breakfast — another act of protest I assumed, screams so loud it could power an alleyway in Sydney: all of this incessantly for a good twenty minutes.
The little grey butcherbird, unblamably, decided to seek calm on another barren tree.
I have to admit, I lost my cool. No amount of deep breathing techniques saved me from my feelings of growing stress with a side of fear of a loss of hearing.
I managed to shove him into the car seat somehow, tears still blotching my T-shirt while I mentally listed out my never-ending to-do list of the day.
But I dropped him off, got back home, sat down to work and finished most of the tasks in under two hours.
That’s all it took.
Two hours.
There was a wave of silence. A silence so loud, I could hear my guilt echo.
As the reality of my richness in efficiency and poverty in patience became apparent, I started to revisit and question my morning.
If that’s all the time it took to get my work done, I could have spent an extra ten minutes helping my son cope with his feelings better, right? Right.
So, why then did I react the way I did?
Why did I not hold it together a little better?
I sat with these questions and dug a little deeper. Peeled layer after layer because I seemed to have time. Here are some musings and plausible conclusions on why I almost mirrored my toddler’s tantrum:
maybe it was the need to get to work instantly,
or the annoyance that a much-hoped-for gentle morning was shattered,
maybe the lack of ability to handle a tantrum dawned on me, which wasn’t very helpful either
or could it be the fact that my husband was off to work before all of this unfolded, and I had to bear the brunt of this high-decibel situation alone?
it’s probably the fact that I was finally able to get to do work I was truly passionate about, 4 years postpartum at that, and now I am still stuck putting my intellectual desire on hold and tending to an emotional catastrophe,
maybe I just needed a win,
maybe he did too,
was it any one of these many realisations,
or was it all of it at once?