Today is my dad‘s 70th birthday. To help celebrate, we planned for Mike and I and the boys to drive to my parent’s house early, sneak up the driveway, and surprise him with presents, cake, and little boys for a fun birthday breakfast.
We made it there… just. And after all the creeping in, and yelling “surprise,” and little boy glee, Mum looked at Mike and I and asked how we were.
“Well,” Mike said a touch grimly, “We’ve had some stormy weather this morning. Very stormy.“
Then Dominic, who hadn’t appeared to be listening to this exchange, whipped around and grinned.
“The ME sort of weather,” he clarified for Nana. “Not the rain sort of weather.”
Right he was. In the hour before our arrival at their house we had one child up at 5:30 because he was already eagerly anticipating chocolate cake for breakfast, and the other child wake up just after 6 as foul-tempered and sharp-clawed as grumpy lion cub.
Then we had two little boys hitting and taunting each other. They were told in no uncertain terms to stop and informed that there would be consequences for Any. More. Touching. Each. Other.
Alex let it go and moved on. Dominic fumed and seethed and stalked his brother until he got the chance to land a final retributive swipe.
Then there was the imposition of the consequence, which in this case involved a “fine” from Dominic’s money jar.
Then there was a small child losing his mind, hitting me, and storming down to the kitchen, grabbing a whole pint of blueberries that was sitting on the counter, and flinging them all over the place.
Then there was Daddy picking blueberries up off the cream carpet (GAH) while Mummy struggled mightily not to lose HER mind and told said small child to go get dressed and get in the car, otherwise he would be left behind and miss out on birthday surprise.
Dominic, who was still firmly in “furious” zone, just crossed his arms and glared at me.
Heavens, these situations can spiral so quickly, can’t they?
But we all made it in the end, barely. Dominic was over it by the time we got to Mum and Dad’s. I wasn’t, but we still all managed to enjoy feta scrambled eggs, roast tomatoes, avocado, coffee, and chocolate mud cake together.
Afterwards, while I was driving the boys to school, I talked with them about holding on to anger, and wanting to hurt someone back when they hurt us.
“It’s normal to feel angry when someone hurts us, or hurts our feelings,“ I said. “Often, when that happens, we want to hurt them back. But that’s not the right thing to do. It doesn’t help us, and it almost always makes the situation worse. When we get angry we have a choice about what to do with those feelings. When the Red Beast wakes up, we can hold it close, and love it, and feed it, and make a special pet out of it. But what happens then? It can grow and grow and grow until it’s even more difficult to control. So it’s always a good idea to do something different with our red angry feelings while they’re still smaller, before they’re so big they can take over and boss us around.”
“It can be really hard to do this,“ I said. “But can anybody think of things we can do to keep those feelings small, or change them, or send them away when we want to hurt somebody? “
“Take some deep breaths,“ Alex said.
“Open the door and jump out of the car while it’s moving,“ Dominic said.
“Uh…” I said.
I talked about deep breathing first, then I tackled the “jumping out of a moving car” suggestion.
“You’re right, Dominic,“ I said. “If you open the door and jump out of the car while it’s moving, you probably won’t have a problem with those angry feelings anymore. That’s because you’ll be either very badly injured, or dead.“
“No I wouldn’t,“ Dominic said. “I could just jump out of the car, and run alongside. Or I’ll grab the railing and swing myself around and land on my feet.
Then we talked about whether that was something that works in movies but not in real life.
Dominic was pretty convinced it would work in real life.
So I tried to explain the physics of jumping out of a car that’s moving forward at 80 km an hour, and how that means YOU would be moving forward at 80 km an hour when you left the car, and what happens if a body that’s moving 80 km an hour hits a road surface that’s moving 0 km an hour.
Dominic was still unconvinced.
“No,“ he said. “Remember on sports day, when we did the long jump. Let’s just say I was running at 10 km an hour before I jumped, and then I jumped 2 meters. So if we’re going 80 kilometers an hour and I opened the door now I could just jump out of the car and jump a REALLY long way away and run really fast and it would be just fine.”
Five minutes later I had made absolutely no progress in convincing Dominic of the extreme danger of jumping out of a moving car. I had also remembered, again, that I can never ever ever homeschool this child, made a mental note to look for physics-related YouTube videos to help drive this point home, and realized how very far away we had strayed from the point of the entire conversation.
“That’s very complicated, Dominic,“ I said, when he next stopped talking. “I can’t quite figure out how to explain it to you in a way that you’ll understand right now, but you must trust me that it is a very bad idea for you to jump out of a moving car. Ever.”
Then, quickly moving us along… “So, do either of you have any other ideas about how we can stop ourselves from hurting people back after they hurt us?“
Silence.
“This is a hard thing for Mummy,“ I said. “When I get angry, I sometimes have a very hard time letting it go. But one thing that helps me is to try to think about the other person. Most people don’t get up in the morning and want to be mean and hurt other people. When someone hurts you, it’s usually an accident or it’s because they feel sad, angry, or scared. When I remember that, and I think about what might be happening for that other person in their life and in their head, sometimes that helps me feel less angry.“
There was quiet in the backseat for a while, and then Dominic heaved a huge sigh.
“Mummy, that is much, much more complicated than what we were just talking about before, you know.”
