Shouting

After school yesterday, Rose went on her one mile run around and around our driveway loop. (Jay's lastest ankle injury is still preventing him from running--that boy twists his ankles so often!) Looking out the window, I noticed that Amber had joined Rose and was merrily biking alongside her favorite sister, training wheels a-rattling. When they reached the slight uphill rise one one side of the driveway loop, Rose circled around behind and pushed Amber up. It was so sweet, I went outside and took a picture.

After their bike-and-run, Rose and Amber sat at the kitchen table together painting with watercolors. Rose opened her new watercolor set that she bought with her own money, and Amber had her almost used up watercolors (which she had willingly shared with Rose for weeks before Rose got some of her own). Amber kept trying to use Rose's new watercolors. Rose kept getting madder and louder, shouting at her. While making dinner nearby, I kept telling the girls to be nice to each other and share and stop arguing. Normal mom-phrases that bounced right off. They did not listen to me, and eventually Rose put away her watercolors, deciding it was better not to use them at all than to share with Amber. That made me kind of peeved, a feeling which was compounded by the fact that I was dealing with gross ground meat at the same time.

After putting away her watercolors, Rose got out her poster paints and started using those instead (it is uncertain why she thought using different paint would solve her sharing dilemma). Of course Amber wanted to try these new paints too. Rose said "no Amber these are different paints; you don't know how to use them." They proceeded to have a maddening back-and-forth classic no-yes-no-yes type of argument.

"These are a different kind of paint than watercolors and you don't know how to use them."

"Yes I do, Rosie!"

"No you don't."

"Yes I do!"

"No you don't!"

"Yes I do."

"No you don't."

This went on over and over and over, round and round, until I was ready to boil over with irritation at their impasse. The weird thing was, they weren't even overly heated in their argument; they were just persistently bickering--almost as a default. I calmly asked them several times to stop arguing. I informed Rose about the importance of sharing using several different tactics. Nada. They continued arguing. Finally, goaded beyond endurance, I went straight to full volume mad mom mode.

"STOP ARGUING RIGHT NOW OR I'LL PUT YOU BOTH OUTSIDE!" I bellowed.

Silence for two breaths. Then,

"You don't know how to use these paints, Amber."

"Yes I do!"

"No, you don't."

"SERIOUSLY!?!? STOP ARGUING NOW!" I yelled. I held nothing back, injecting all of my venom and volume into the scold. After my second shout they finally stopped and finished painting their pictures in relative silence, chatting quietly about colors and kitties and capes and other important topics while they worked.

Meanwhile, I finished making a pan full of burger patties and cleaned up the nasty bloody raw meat mess, all the while hating the feeling of my back-to-back shouts hanging in the air.

I guiltily Marco Polo'd a friend about my outburst. Then I went to the bathroom. The minute I sat down on the toilet, Amber came pounding on the door. "Mommy? Mommy? MOMMY!??

"I AM ON THE TOILET AND I WILL NOT BE TALKING TO YOU UNTIL I COME OUT OF THE BATHROOM." More Shaina-shouting. Apparently my guilt over the first two shouts wasn't sufficient to keep me from having another go. Ugh. Amber ignored me and pounded on the bathroom door, shouting questions at me until I finished up and opened the door, shattering even the paltry 90 seconds of peace a pee-pause potentially provides.

Jeff had not responded to my text asking his ETA and home that night. I felt annoyed about that (dinner needed to go in the oven at some point before he left for home so it would be ready in time for us to eat together). I was mad at myself for yelling at my daughters. I was also mad that we didn't have any chocolaty baked goods in the house. Throwing caution to the wind, I shoved the dinner into the oven with no husband ETA in sight, set the timer, and allowed the children to have their screen time while I went outside to un-simmer in my front porch rocking chair.

As I sat and absorbed the peace of the pastoral porch view, the first feeling I had was TIRED. I sagged into my chair. I was tired. The past few weeks had been peppered with too many nights of bad sleep. I wasn't newborn-tired by any means, but I was still very tired--that slow-building fatigue that comes from unexpected missed sleep without any daytime adjustments to counteract it and help cope with it. That shaky foundation was topped with the heavy load of a desperately low husbandly presence lately along with the stress of his recent mental health hiccups. Last week was also exceptionally intense for all of the above reasons and more, and I didn't really take specific time to recover from it before plunging into the next week.

The next emotion I felt was guilt--guilty about yelling at my kids. I don't want to be a shouting mom. I am not a shouter. I have been teased my whole life about my inability to yell, some ribs more friendly, others more barbed, but shouting is not something I really aspire to so it wasn't a big deal. My shouts (such as they are) don't get super loud thanks to my weak vocal chords, but I hate how I FEEL when I shout. I am sensitive to emotions, and when I shout, it fills the room with a massive negative energy that I them re-absorb into my annoyingly sensitive soul, which in turn makes me feel even worse. Hello! If I was mad enough to shout, I don't need any more negativity! Yet it lingers.

I rocked on the porch for a calming 20 minutes, thinking and trying to shake off both the fatigue and the post-shout-guilt.

At 5:30pm, the kids finished their screen time voluntarily (because their friend Ian had to go home, although Amber still had to be dragged away from.her computer shrieking like a banshee). Jeff had sent me a message announcing his ETA by then, and our dinner of oven baked hamburgers was cooling on the stove. During the ten minutes between the end of computer time and Jeff's arrival, the kids started sparring: Jay relentlessly teased and the girls alternately defended themselves and each other from his various attacks. There was a lot of screaming and running and fighting. I couldn't handle it and I was too deflated to try shouting again (honestly this time it was probably too loud for them to hear me anyways) so I slipped out the side door and sat on the steps, vent-writing all about the difficulties of this cursed witching hour. As I wrote about my frustrations, I built up more irritated steam. I was fuming. I didn't have enough time to write the entire scene down before Jeff came home, though, so I was steaming-irked when he arrived. Somehow all of this intensity only lasted an HOUR-- ok, 80 minutes. Then Jeff rolled in on his bike. He came over and sat next to me on the side porch, cheerfully commenting "that bad, huh?" at my stony gaze. I replied with an equally cold hard granite voice:

"I'm really not in the mood for playful banter. At. All. The kids have been fighting and I shouted at them and you didn't text me in time and dinner is getting cold and I am so tired." Even as I spoke the cranky words, part of my brain knew that Jeff had already fought plenty of his own battles in the day (in his ETA text he had mentioned that a runner got heat exhaustion and nearly passed out). On some level I knew I should ask him how he was feeling. But I couldn't muster the strength or goodwill to do it. So after a pause, I told him wearily that dinner was ready. He jumped up with a gratingly cheerful "I'll go set the table!"

"Make the KIDS do it," I growled as he disappeared inside. I can be quite onery when the dark sides of the planets align. Through the window, I heard Jeff telling the kids that they really needed not to fight anymore tonight, for me. I was so cranky that I felt annoyed that Jeff thought he could waltz in and save the day, when I had been toiling all afternoon and clearly failed. "Good for you," I vengefully thought, "It must be nice coming home and having a fresh start with the kids and not have an entire day of Ambadgering hampering your ability to cope with the crazies now." It rankled, even though I had been waiting for him to come take over and give me a break! How awful is that admission? I was peeved at my husband for finally getting home like I wanted him to, and then doing what I wanted him to do? To be fair, I was fully aware in the moment that my irritation at Jeff for his helpfulness was utterly irrational.

I waited till the dish-assembly sounds trickling through the open kitchen window reached an almost-done point, then paused for a desperate prayer, begging for help to stop feeling so annoyed and cranky. "I know I am not doing a good job of being patient right now, but I am so tired and I need help! I feel too irked to have the spirit with me, and I really need it. Please help me not to be grouchy anymore right now." I didn't feel any immediate peace through my crankiness, but I sat there another minute tamping down my frustrations, (in other words, getting a grip), then got up and went inside to face my family for dinner.

The first little bit of dinner was quiet while we all hungrily ate our oven baked hamburgers. (Amber had cheese on a bun instead. Typical ungrateful picky eater. Ha.) Then Jeff slowly started drawing each of the kids out with kind questions about their activities during the day. I wasn't exactly cured of my weary maxed-out mom-mood, but after a little while I stopped needing to focus all of my energies on not being snappy-rage-ful. We were able to have a relatively ok family dinner together. We did not do a Come Follow Me lesson, but I suddenly realized that tonight was a night where we just needed to have a positive meal without any reprimanding or pointed lesson-ing. Just family time. After dinner the kids did the dishes and everyone actually helped put food away too, which was nice. Then they got ready for bed and coasted in the last 15 minutes to bedtime with more computer time. We had family scripture and prayer at 6:58pm, and then the girls were in bed reading and Jay was the last man child standing.

Jeff and I chatted with Jay on the couch for 15 minutes. Then Jay went off to find Ian (I let him play till 8:15pm) while Jeff and I retreated to the basement to watch the Dick Van Dyke Show and eat ice cream, after which I finished writing this lengthy entry until bedtime. A good night of sleep thankfully smoothed out the last of my ruffled feathers.

This is the part where I put a nice thoughtful epiphany conclusion, but I don't really have much of one. I shouted at my kids even though I don't want to be a shouter. I was a grouch to my husband. It was the end of a long day and I was tired, but my actions were still a choice. I chose to explode under the pressure in that moment. My family forgave me. Eventually I forgave myself and vowed to do better and be better next time. That's all any of us can do.

 Jay with his snack on the front porch, the girls riding/running together on the right.

Amber likes taking pictures of me almost as much as I like taking pictures of her.