Today I had a fairly long period of time where I was thinking about how hard my kids are. The hard manifests in a few flavors and intensities. I feel like talking about it. I feel guilty before I even write this entry because I try to mostly not talk about them too much. I feel guilty about “judging” them.

My kids are destructive. (Shanna to a much more extreme degree than Calli.) I try to think of it as “they like to explore the physical parameters of the world around them.” When I’m angry I feel like my kids were born just so I can’t have nice things. (I don’t say that out loud. And I shop at Ikea for reasons.) Which of course is an asshole thing to think and totally not true. But holy crap my kids break things all the fucking time. My house has been culled to the point where stuff is either paper (I clean up a metric fuckton of confetti every week; they fucking love those scissors. I hate those scissors) or indestructible to idle hands. Other people don’t sanitize their house like I do so my kids walk in and break shit. I feel horrible guilt. Yup. They do that. I have not broken them of that habit. I actually not-so-secretly like that they are so curious about everything that they want to test the boundaries of how it works as soon as they pick stuff up. And they aren’t careful. I feel really guilty. I talk about it…

My kids are not very good about respecting the boundaries around “my stuff vs. your stuff”. We have fairly carefully worked on having a “yes” house. Stuff that is on the VERY TOP shelf of whatever cabinet (doesn’t matter how tall) is OFF LIMITS and my bedroom is off-limits. Other than that, they go wherever they please and touch everything. And I mean everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. I have my “private” things locked in a chest because otherwise my kids would be into all of it. There will be no funny videos on youtube about my kids playing with my sex toys. Thanks, but no.  My jewelry is so high in my closet I nearly need a ladder to reach it.

My kids are incredibly demanding of attention. They expect to be noticed, talked to, and to have people care about what they like and don’t like basically at every moment of the day. They think their preferences matter. They are entirely oblivious to the fact that a high percentage of adults think little kids are icki and should be silent. That hasn’t appeared in their world view. When someone doesn’t want to talk to them they assume the person is just having a bad day. It is fascinating to watch.

My kids are energetic. They don’t sit down very well without a reason. And they have short attention spans for doing things and they are used to their attention span deciding how long they do something. One of the big exceptions is in restaurants. My kids know how to behave in restaurants. That’s because they have been in restaurants 1-5 times a week since they were born. We practice. Outside of a restaurant not so much.

My kids are tactile and expect that they should be allowed to touch anything that comes near them. This adds into the “not knowing what isn’t theirs”. They are improving in stores (we practice going to stores a lot.). They are pretty good about not touching things in grown-up-only houses. If something is within reach in a kid house it is entirely baffling to them that someone might care about them touching it. They are kinda assholes about it.

They both expect people to listen to long-winded descriptions of what they want at many friction points in the day. Other adults are generally not so interested in negotiating with Shanna. It’s funny to watch. But I feel like an asshole.

My kids are loud. Loud. LOUD. LOUD. LOUD. Like, make your head explode loud. I honestly don’t want them to be quieter. Even though I wish they were quieter. It’s a tough issue for me. The marks on the door have made a big improvement in the screaming. But their speaking voices are more like bellows.

Part of the problem with all of these issues is my kids are still pre-rational. I explain a lot to them about boundaries and socialization and manners and situational rules and I tell them the why behind all of these things but… they don’t get it yet. And I don’t care enough about any of these behaviors yet to work hard on modifying them. My kids have the attention span of gnats. They would get in trouble in kindergarden/preschool right now. They would be disruptive and inappropriate. They would be considered immature and deficient.

And then again, my kids can sit down and listen to me read for as long as I’m willing to do it. Hours. I have never maxed them out. I have read for three hours straight (and Noah has pulled longer stretches) and my kids never lose interest. They are fascinated by all kinds of different stories.

But if you want them to produce work in front of you that you dictate the form and manner of then you will be disappointed. Shanna will lose interest and decide to make friends with everyone at the table and invite them off into some other more fun game. Cause she’s like that.

Calli would start doing something else and then get angry and yell at you if you corrected her. (We are working on “saying” the rebuttal instead of shouting it. But I don’t know that I will work on “don’t defend your work time”. That’s a useful life skill.)

I mean, they’d learn. They’re not stupid. They don’t enjoy being publicly humiliated any more than any other person. They would stop misbehaving, at least mostly. But compliance isn’t a high priority for me.

For now I acknowledge that they have some behavior traits that drive me batshit insane and I try to do my version of meditating and I let go of attachment to being able to control their behavior. They are not little robots. I don’t get to decide how they act or think.

Calli has some challenges around self-control and anger. She is so my child. I’m doing my best to teach her the emotional self-regulation that I lack. Which is tricky. I talked to my shrink about that today. I feel very uncomfortable with the fact that I am kinda sorta teaching my kids what they should do while not being able to do it myself and they in turn narrate for me how to do it when I freak out. I’m getting a lot better. My shrink told me that it wasn’t as bad as I think to have this kind of dynamic. No, it’s still not the best.

I have never had an experience in my life that is as motivating as feeling like I need to stop needing for Shanna to talk me through calming down. She’s good at it. She’s heard me say it a lot. She’s great at calming down.

It pisses Calli off when Shanna tries to talk her through calming down. Given that it works on me (partially because I feel embarrassed about being so out of control that even a five year old can call me on it–grow the fuck up already) it is really kind of funny when Calli gets as mad as she does. (I try very hard to not laugh.) Shanna will have to grow into her nurturing. And do it with someone other than her sister.

I have reached this point where I feel like I am shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Yup. Sometimes people are assholes” in response to a lot of behaviors, of course including my own.

But I’d like to be able to hang out with them without feeling so scared. I’d like to stop feeling like I am going to be in big trouble for being late.

No one gets to punish me any more.