Many years ago, we had a French student-teacher, Melanie, stay with us as part of an exchange program that had her working at the elementary school our kids attended at the time. One day, after I picked Melanie and the three kids up from school, the drive home was an exceptionally mind-numbing affair. All parents know what it’s like to have a carload of rowdy kids going bananas in the backseat while you’re trying to drive. They also know that sometimes, these episodes are more off-the-wall than usual. Such was the case that day. A million overlapping questions, siblings shouting each other, and so forth, and so on.
After addressing as many requests as possible and arriving home, Melanie, looking ready to pull her hair out, asked me how I stayed so calm the whole time. Lots of practice was the answer I gave, because it wasn’t always this way. Early on in the kid-rearing days, I used to get pretty angry. The exhaustion, the feedings, the chaos … you name it, it would set me off. After realizing that being irritated all the time wasn’t sustainable, I changed my ways. It involved yoga, jiu-jitsu, and a whole lot of kickboxing. The upshot was an ability to remain calm with the kids all day. Well, almost all day.
We start early in our house, ballpark 5 a.m. wake up for at least one child, followed about an hour later by a feeding frenzy. Part of my journey to stay calm included drinking the coffee and eating the food before anyone else got up. Like oxygen on an airplane, you can’t help others if you can’t breathe. Once I have these two key components inhaled, I’m ready to face the day calmly. Until 9 p.m. that is. Because this is when I turn into a pumpkin. You might call it hitting the wall. Regardless of naming convention, this is the end of the line for me. The time of day when the tank is totally empty, I’m out of gas, and have nothing left.
Right around 9 p.m., the kids — in theory — should be in their rooms, heading for sleep. At which point, my wife and I flip on Netflix for an episode of the show du jour, and zone out. Very healthy, I know. But the truth is, I cherish this hour of flat-on-my-back relaxation. And should that cherished time be interrupted, I start to struggle with keeping calm and carrying on. As anyone reading this knows, kids seem to possess a strange ability to identify weaknesses in your parental armor, right alongside a unique capacity for poking and prodding said weaknesses.
For me, when this armor of calm is defeated — which usually looks like one of the kids dramatically flopping onto the bed and making wild, clutching-their-pearls claims of exhaustion — I can barely reply. Oftentimes, I will literally beg my wife to take over. Suddenly, I am completely incapable of lending a hand. Fortunately, it’s not anger that overcomes me when I hit my nightly wall. It’s just an overwhelming paralysis of parenting. My kids know this, but they still lean into it … and I wouldn’t expect anything less.
