When something terrible happens to someone you love dearly, who most certainly does not deserve it (or to you for that matter) how do you explain it to yourself? How do you prevent yourself from falling into a nihilistic hellhole? If you are like me and most other human beings, it is probably through the stories you tell yourself about why it happened.
So why does bad stuff happen to good people…
Most of you know I work as a mental health therapist in addition to my infinite unpaid hours clocked in #momlife. Thus, in school we had to take classes on behaviorism, or essentially, how to “predict and control” human behavior (lol x infinity). Said classes involved training pigeons to peck red dots and turn in circles, but I digress.
They make it sound so simple: to increase the probability of a behavior occurring, reinforce it (preferably at random intervals rather than every time). To decrease the probability of a behavior occurring, the most effective way is to ignore the undesired behavior and continue to reinforce the behavior you do want.
Most parenting articles I’ve read take the behaviorist approach to whining and tantrums. Stay firm, they say. They just want attention, so ignore them. Or alternatively, stay firm and punish whining and tantrums.
And because I most certainly would like to decrease the probability of whining and tantrums for my kids, I have been trying to follow this advice. It has failed miserably, largely due to human error. On my part…
…If you were the type who got terribly sick immediately after the last final of the semester literally every semester in college, you might know what I am talking about…
Well I’ve fallen off the interwebs for a few weeks and I will tell you why: I have been occupied.
Occupied with trying to pull it together and be okay, occupied with facing that I am not doing so well, occupied with confessing tearfully to my husband and a good friend, and for the last couple weeks, occupied with taking action to make my life and mood more manageable (because that’s just my personality…
As much as most of us would like to banish anger, anxiety and other undesired emotions from our experience forever, these feelings are part of being human. And motherhood is one of those knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-2×4 experiences that tends to bring us face to face with our issues. For example, many parents have deep-seated fears about something terrible happening to their children. This fear can manifest as anxiety or even as anger. When my toddler ran out into the parking lot recently, I instantly felt flooded with rage, but beneath the anger was fear and anxiety. As parents we are forced to make decisions every day that impact the lives of our children when we simply do not have enough information to know if we are making the right choices. (As a new mom, I coped with this by obsessive Googling). There are no guarantees. *** This article was published as a guest post on mother.ly. Click here to read the full post…
Grace Girl was born three and a half weeks ago, and while adjusting to having 2 littles at home is not easy, I am having an easier time of it than I did the first time around. Part of what makes it manageable is getting into a routine that works for us and ensures we are taking care of basic needs every day (eating, sleeping), as well as mental health needs (morale-boosting activities, ie. getting out of the house). A few notes: This general routine is what we aim for, but every day is different. Some days really do go about like this. Other days, we are all still in our pajamas at noon and I am crying right along with a grumpy toddler and overtired newborn, while we sit on the couch watching “Finding Dory,” (that movie was so cute, by the way. Should I blame the fact that the ending made me cry on postpartum hormones?). Other stuff: I feed Grace Girl whenever she is hungry, and I don’t let her go more than 3 hours between feeds during the day. She tends to eat every 2.5-3 hours most of the…
“Becoming a parent brings you this sadness you never would have known otherwise,” said a dear friend to me on the phone, as I pushed my toddler in her stroller through the sharp wind and shushed my newborn baby, who was zipped up inside my coat in her carrier. And I felt that delicious sense of recognition, of discovering someone else feels the way I feel. And while I don’t wish sadness upon my friends, it is incredible to have a peek into someone else’s tangled thoughts and feelings and find they look a little bit like mine. Before I became a parent, people told me that motherhood would open me up to more joy than I thought possible. But no one mentioned it would also hurt—that the hard times would hurt and the joy itself would hurt, in an aching, stretching sort of way. Kind of like the growing pains of childhood, or the opening pains of early labor, when it’s more of a dull ache. Like when I crawl into my toddler’s bed to wake her up in the morning, and she wraps her arms around…
Introducing the newest addition to our family…. Grace Girl! Here she is being a precious newborn. Here she is peeing on her daddy during a photoshoot. I will write up her birth story to share at another time… maybe when I have a bit more distance from it. For now, though, suffice it to say it was a humbling experience reminding me that, as they say, “it rains on everyone.” *** I am immensely grateful to have a beautiful, healthy baby girl! I felt so much joy when they first laid her on my stomach. Stay tuned for a future post on what I’m doing to help Warrior Girl with the transition to big sisterhood. It is certainly a huge change for her.  …
I’ve messed up a lot in my life and I’ve hurt a lot of people. Many of those people I’m no longer in contact with, and will probably never apologize to. And now, although I can’t think of the last time I intentionally tried to hurt someone else, I still do it far more frequently than I wish I did. Bottom line, human relationships are messy. Even if you try to never offend or upset anyone ever and coat all your words in sugar-honey-molasses-toffee and say whatever you think the other person wants you to say…you will upset someone sometime. And also that sugary business sounds exhausting and requires a lot of mind-reading. Which is a skill I do not possess at the time of this writing. Combine all the accidental-offense giving with all the times I just plain make stupid mistakes, like paperwork errors, forgetting to respond to an email, or forgetting to pick something up at the store, and what you have is a moderate-sized stew of human error. Fortunately, I can cope with that. Here’s how: I know how…
While there was certainly a time I could never imagine thanking my parents for anything, that time is fortunately long gone. Certainly becoming a mother has had something to do with that, as has the very gradual development of my frontal cortex. And now I can appreciate many of the brilliant and selfless things they did for me.
However, in an age when children playing kick the can until the streetlights turn on is a nostalgic vision from the past, I can truly appreciate that aspects of my childhood were charmed…