Kiki and I got into an argument over clarinet practice. This is not the problem. The problem is that in certain emotional states I can not leave things alone. I lecture and Kiki acts stubborn. So I lecture harder because I feel like I’m not getting through. And in that moment it feels critically important for her to learn that lesson right now. Finally I manage to break out of the face-off, usually because another child has developed a dire need for attention. However the argument with Kiki feels unfinished and so I’ll go back to it. Eventually I allow Kiki to escape into solitude in her room. Once Kiki is away from the barrage of parental scold, she invariably breaks down into noisy tears. During that time she is taking my words and using them to berate herself. I hear the sobbing and the nurturing mommy part of me just has to do something, so I go to her to try to make it all better. But she’s still angry with me and with herself. She isn’t ready for it to be “all better” yet. So we end up going for another round of argument on the same subject that started the mess, or sometimes we find another thing to circle endlessly and uselessly.
Honestly the best thing for me to do when we end up in a face-off, is for me to leave Kiki alone until she works completely through her emotions and thoughts. She is really smart and she knows what is right. She has really good instincts that lead her down the right paths. I need to back off and trust that she’ll find a good way, even if it is not mine. But it is so hard. I really dislike conflict and I have a driving need to make it all better. At the same time I have a driving need to make sure that I teach my kids the lessons they’ll need. And so I try to do both and end up making a mess. Poor Kiki doesn’t see that I’m the one making mistakes in managing a minor incident, and so she feels like everything is crashing down around her. She is convinced it is all her fault. I’m convinced it is all mine. And sometimes we fight over that too. Which is dumb.
I have got to find a way to stop these escalation cycles. Everyone else suffers for them too. Gleek, Link, and Patches did not have a pleasant bedtime because I was pre-angered over the conflict with Kiki. Fortunately this kind of head-to-head conflict is fairly rare. Today it happened because I’m stressed about the books arriving tomorrow and I was subconsciously looking for things to fill my time. I need to teach my subconscious that picking a fight is not a satisfactory way to spend time.
Tonight I broke the cycle by leaving the house. I left the kids with Howard and went shopping. By the time I arrived a Walmart I realized that, except for a 15 minute trip to pick up kids from school, this was the only time I’d left the house all day. No wonder I was ready to pick a fight. I bought a card to say sorry to Kiki because cards are very important to her. She keeps all of them. I figured that I should apologize in the way best suited to her. Tomorrow Kiki and I will talk and it will all be okay.
Now if I can just figure out how not to do this to any of us again.
testing this one…
Very interesting… as always! Cheers from -Switzerland-.
Thats’ really interesting to me, because that seems like the same situation my sister is in with her youngest daughter. The oldest girl will engage in an arguement – or even just a discussion, and turn it into an arguement! – and that sort of head-to-head thing is my sister’s nautral way of dealing with things. But the youngest girl is like me: the more Sis talks at her, the more she withdraws emotionally from what to her is an overload, and that withdrawal my sister perceives as either being stubborn or not understanding, so she persists even harder, and the vicious cycle goes on until Youngest runs to her room crying. Youngest needs a quick presentation of what’s wrong and what she might do, and then to be left alone to process until she’s ready to talk about it. Which she always does, quite well, just not on my sister’s timeline. My sister, even knowing this, has a really hard time stopping herself from following her own natural tendencies to get everything solved and taken care of immediately.
So, yeah. I have no solution, except, don’t do that. But at least you know you’re not the only one who has that problem!
My dad sat us married kids down on Sunday and told us about a book called, “Crucial Confrontations”- (not to be confused with ‘Crucial Conversations’). I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds like it is right along the lines of how to handle these type of things in parenting.
I’m scared to have a daughter for these very reasons. I know how girls are because I am one, and having to reason with one through her teen years scares the snot out of me.
I can’t remember how old Kiki is, but she might be at the point where you could discuss this with her. Not the issue itself, but your reactions.
At the risk of sounding like a pop psychologist — one of the toughest points in life is when it really sinks in that your parents can fail. But it can also be one of the most liberating. When I realized that my parents wanted to help me through my adolescent problems but weren’t fully able to make them go away, I suddenly forgave years of perceived slights and insults — I realized they had been doing the best they could.
Are you at a point where you can talk to Kiki about your reactions? You could tell her that you’ve realized that the two of you have a bad habit-pattern forming, and you’d like to stop it before it gets worse — and you need help. Tell her exactly what you’ve written down here (the whole pattern of escalation) and see if the two of you, together, can figure out how to recognize it while it’s happening and determine an alternative strategy.
It may not work (at least not right away), but the fact that she knows you’re trying could mean so much more than the fights themselves.
That’s a better suggestion than I could have come up with. Kids grow up REALLY fast these days and in my limited experience treating them like kids is not the best way to go. ISTR Kiki is 12, maybe 13, which is a very difficult age to be, and I wasn’t a girl – I gather it’s even harder to be a girl, in some ways. But treating her like an adult, not a kid, in this respect might well work. I’m sure you’ve got the guts, sometime in the next day or so, to sit down with her and say (in your own words), “look, I’m sorry, I screwed up. I shouldn’t have gone on so much, it’s not all your fault (or mine) but hey, we’re all human and we all make mistakes, and please forgive me?” Then you might be able to go on and discuss the things that make your respective lives hard, and might cause either of you to be unreasonable. You might be able to work out a kind of safety-valve you can both invoke to avoid the whole escalation thing – a word with some humourous aspect that one or another can shunt into the row/confrontation to derail it before it gets too far.
Something similar happened with some of my friends: I have a habit of going on a bit, and someone coined the use of the word “fishslice”. This comes from a bit of Flanders and Swann (fantastic stuff, if you’ve not met it, give it a go) where Flanders makes a throw-away line about getting a word in edgeways, like “fishslice”. Between me and my friends, it’s shorthand for “You’ve had your say, at length, now STFU and let someone else have a go”, but it has an essential element of humour that stops it being insulting, and it’s generally used in a situation where I AM running on about something, and I have to admit it’s justified.
and BTW, finally, if you’re still reading: if you find a good way to communicate with an awkward young teen, please tell me…