Rough evening, but it ended well

One of my biggest problems during recovery from an illness is trying to accurately gage my energy reserves. I try to go slow. I try to eliminate unnecessary tasks. But then I find myself faced with a task and I have nothing left to give. This happened today in a big way.

I was fine at 5 pm when Howard called from Dragon’s Keep to see how I was doing. I cheerfully told him to stay and finish the piece he was working on. At 5 pm I was curled up on the couch doing a sudoku puzzle while kids watched a movie downstairs. There was even a pot of homemade soup on the stove that was destined for dinner.

Then the kids all griped about having to eat soup. Gleek didn’t just gripe. She announced her total and complete hatred of soup. I tried to be firm, she got more adamant. I tried to be sneaky asking if she thought she could hate every last bite of soup while she ate it, she saw through my ruse. Bit by bit I coaxed Gleek into sitting at the table in front of the despised soup. I called the other kids to the table. Kiki announced she wasn’t hungry because she’d fixed herself ramen noodles only 40 minutes earlier. Link complained that the soup had gotten cold. I reached for my reserve of patience…and there wasn’t one. I then treated my four wide-eyed children to a harangue. I declared in resonant tones that I hate cooking. I hate it, yet I have to do it three times a day. And every single time I get complaints. No one ever likes anything I make. I never get thanked. And yet I still cook. (Obviously my children have learned hyperbole from me.)

They all began to put spoonfuls into their mouths. Then Gleek bit down on her canker sore. She shrieked. Another bite of soup, another shriek. Part of me felt sorry for her, she was honestly hungry, she’d decided to eat the hated soup, but every bite was painful. Unfortunately a larger part of me just wanted the shrieks to stop. In an attempt to not be mean to my kids I retreated into Sudoku land. Soup didn’t get eaten. Gleek came and demanded a turn with the DS on which I was doing Sudoku. Kiki wanted help with spelling. Link quietly read his required reading and went off to play. I relinquished the DS to Gleek, handed Patches some paper for drawing and sat to help Kiki.

Only I discovered that Kiki also needed help with last month’s reading log. She’d spent the entire month of October pulling time and page numbers out of a hat and now had to try to make these creative numbers match reality. I was very much in “one problem at a time” mode and so growled at anything which interrupted this tangled task. By the time that log was sorted, I had both Gleek and Patches pulling on sections of my clothing and demanding food. They were hungry after all of that failure to eat dinner. Go figure.

(In hindsight, this would have been a good time to call Howard and ask him to come home. But I was so focused on whichever minor crisis that was in front of me, that the thought never even crossed my mind.)

I did not want to re-open the incident of soup, so I acceded to Gleek’s request for oatmeal. She gobbled it carefully with only a few pauses for crying because of canker sore pain. Then I scooped her up and plunked her into her bed. It was an hour early, but I was done trying to manage her for the day and she was certainly cranky enough that the extra sleep couldn’t hurt any. “Scoop and plunk” makes it sound so simple. I wish. First there is the coaxing to get her into bed. Then there is the getting out of bed to go potty. Then there is the coaxing to get her back into bed. Then there is the application of cream to a rash. Then there is the being called back into the room 4 times for “one more thing.”

With Gleek in bed, I tackled Patches. I scooped him and carried him to his room. He’d done his share of crying and shrieking during the day. In fact on the way up the stairs he declared his intention to sleep in my bed. I’m trying to get him to sleep in his own bed all night. I was very focused on getting him into bed, his bed, so I flat denied that he could sleep in my bed. It was a tactical error, low energy night is not the night to make a stand on a relatively unimportant issue. I can only ascribe it to my hyper focus. He shrieked. Once again my reserves were gone. I could not deal with the shrieking. I could not deal with the fact that Gleek chose that moment to call out for me. I growled an incoherent growl at Patches, plopped him into his bed, then walked out and slammed the door behind me. I continued into my room and slammed that door too. Then I flopped onto my bed and tried to remember where I’d put the nice mommy side of me.

I lay there face down and listened to Patches crying. I thought about how he has been whinier lately and clingier. I’ve hypothesized that this is because I’ve been so much busier and crankier due to stress. I’ve also hypothesized about the stresses caused by his continuing struggles with toilet training. He honestly feels ashamed of his accidents, but hasn’t a clue how to make them stop. I don’t either, I wish I did. I listened to my boy cry and I knew that he needed me to be kind, loving, reassuring, and patient. I listened to him cry and thought all of those thoughts and just hoped that he’d stop crying and fall asleep so that I didn’t have to deal with it anymore today.

Patches did stop crying, but since the quiet was accompanied by the sound of his door opening, I was fairly certain that my wish had not been granted. At least he was being quiet now. Gleek called for me. I didn’t respond. Then my mind wandered back to Kiki’s reading log. At the end of each week she was supposed to have the log checked by an adult and initialed that it was accurate. She had initials on all of those weeks, only I hadn’t signed it. She confessed to signing it for me. I lay there and realized that I need to make clear that signing it for me is not acceptable, that if she does it again I’ll have to go to her teacher and ask that the score be adjusted. I had this thought and I knew that if I didn’t go say it right then, I would probably forget to say it until after some other crisis. So I hauled myself out of bed and back to the Kitchen to undertake yet another unpleasant task.

The kitchen looked different than I had left it, cleaner. Kiki was standing in the middle of it clearing the counter. Kiki then confessed that she was cleaning up the kitchen so that she could make cookies for me. She said “Mom I don’t care if I get Fs on my homework. The most important thing in the world is a happy mom. I just want to make you smile again. You go back to bed and I’ll take care of the rest of the evening.” Wow. I thought I was good at guilt trips. I broke down in tears. She hugged me lots. Then the two of us cleaned the kitchen together and she made cookies. So here I am sitting at my computer, cookies and milk next to me, and listening to Patches, Kiki, and Link playing happily in the next room. I still have to put them all to bed, but my reserves are refilled courtesy of my wonderful daughter.