Banshee Moms

I was just about to ease myself into a hot bath when Nan called last night.

“Got a minute?” She asked. Yes. I always have a minute for Nan. Except that it’s never just a minute.

“I have to warn you. The battery on my phone is about to wear out.”

“This will only take a minute,” she assures me. (I am skeptical.)

“What’s up?”

“I have a question. If you were about to go somewhere, do you think Sophia would know not to jump in a muddle puddle and get herself wet and dirty?”

I think about it for a second. I know I tend to be a bit generous in terms of that I think Sophia is and isn’t capable of understanding. “No,” I answer. “She still isn’t really able to conceptualize a future that is more fun than the present. A mud puddle in the here and now would definitely trump whatever is coming next.”

Nan sighed. “I thought so.” And I realized my response, though validating her own suspicions, gave her reason to beat herself up a little.

She pained a complete picture of that afternoon: She and her three children were getting ready to go to Chuck E. Cheese. While Nan was dealing with Mitchell, who was jumping in the aforementioned mud puddle, Reid had surreptitiously opened a jar of Play-Doh for Rachel, who proceeded to eat the contents. Nan announced that there would be no Chuck E. Cheese and that everyone was going back in the house.

After they did, Nan quizzed them: “Do you know why we went back in the house?”

Reid answered, “Because Mitchell jumped in a mud puddle, and Rachel ate Play-Doh.”

Though the facts were right, the spirit of its wrongness was absent from his response. Nancy went into the living room and screamed like a banshee.

“Have you ever done this?” she asked me

“You mean screamed?”

“Yes. At the top of your lungs.”

Uh, yeah. Like a couple days ago.

Sophie and I were, coincidentally, in the bath. The bath. The bane of my existence. I knew, before Sophia was even born, that I would hate giving baths. I don’t like to bathe myself. It’s so banal—the routine of it. Every day the same damn thing. And to have to do it twice a day is absolute torture. Just one of the myriad of reasons I should only have one child.

It may be that on an unconscious level Sophie is aware of my anti-bath attitude.

Or, it may be that she has sensory issues—a hypersensitivity to touch. When I wash her, no matter how gently, she screams, “You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me!” And the other day, when I tried to clean out her ears, she actually bit me. Hard. I’ve tried to be gentle, dabbing at her with the softest of washcloths, but she acts as though I am scrubbing her with lye soap and Brillo pads. As she grows older, stronger, and smarter, the battles have become fiercer. She thrashes around, soaking me, kicking me, all the while screaming she’s in pain.

But, the other day, I finally lost it. Partly out of extreme frustration, partly out a desire to shock her out of her hysteria, I screamed. I screamed until my throat hurt. It was a primal cry from the very base of my soul that reverberated all the way down my street.

And do you know what she did? She looked at me and smiled.

I will never be entirely sure of what that smile meant. At the time, it felt sadistic. A smile of satisfaction that she had truly rattled me. I pushed through the bath, angry with her and myself for losing control.

Nan offered another explanation—perhaps Sophie didn’t know what to make of the scream. Maybe she was amused by it, i.e. “What is my crazy mother doing NOW?”

All I know is that screaming did not accomplish my goal.

After that bath, I decided it was time to come up with a proactive approach for addressing her bath battle behavior. I now write a checklist of all her body parts on the wall with a pink bath crayon. As I wash each part in a predictable, routine fashion, Sophia checks it off the list. The point of this is that 1) she sees bathing has a concrete end (which we approach with each completed item) and 2) I have given her some control over the process. It was working fairly well, but I still encountered a good deal of resistance around hair and face washing. So I coupled my list with the art of distraction.

When Sophia was a little baby, I sang “Rise and Shine” to her as I sponged her fragile parts on our kitchen counter. I told her this the other day as we worked our way through the checklist. “Sing it to me, Mommy,” she asked. I began to sing, and Sophia was captivated, letting me work under her arms, between her toes, behind her ears, joining me in the chorus, “Rise and shine and give god your glory, glory. Rise and shine and give god your glory, glory. Rise. And. Shine. And. Give got your glory, glory, children of the lord.”

Later, when she requested the song at lunch, I told her, no. “That’s our special bath song. You’ll get to hear it the next time you take a bath.” She smiled at the possibility.

I pocketed the song as a “task-specific reinforcer”—something she will only get to hear when she takes a bath, made more powerful by its lack of availability.

Nan told me that after she calmed down, she took the kids outside to jump in mud puddles. After all, it was the path of least resistance.

And the futile scream was replaced with laughter.

Keeping Score

At the end of each day, I take stock of my “accomplishments,” which sounds harmless. But it isn’t.

Yesterday was a banner day:

1. Read to Sophia (Sophia: "Read this book!" Wham!)
2. Bathed Sophia (Sophia: “Mommy, how do you spell “Kevin?)
3. Cooked breakfast: (Me: “Just one more bite and you can get up from your chair.”)
4. Took Sophia to Spanish: (Me: “Sophia, ven! Come back here! Sientate!”)
5. Picked up farm delivery: (Sophia: “You bought me my eggies?”)
6. Read to Sophia: (Me:“ No. NOT the Dora book. I’m throwing that book away. I’d be embarrassed to GIVE it to someone.” Sophia: “YES DORA!”)
7. Cooked lunch: Me: “Just one more bite, and I’ll sing you a song.”
8. Practiced Spanish with Sophia: (Me: “Dame el circulo mediano, por favor.”)
9. Read to Sophia: (Me: “It’s time for us to get snuggly.”)
10. Ran 10 miles (Kanye: “Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger)
11. Cooked dinner (Me: “Just one more bite and you can have some ice cream.”)
12. Did crossword with Kevin (Kevin: “What’s a six-letter word for “histrionic?”)
13. Read 40 pages of my book (Louise DeSalvo: “If my husband had his way, I think he wishes I wouldn’t have written about our life, wouldn’t be writing about it now….”)

This act of keeping score is how I measure my success as a parent, a spouse, a friend, an employee and a “balanced” human being. If my list meets with my approval, I feel somewhat self-satisfied. If not, I beat myself up about it, focusing on where I think I fell short that day of some invisible ideal that matters to no one but me.

I already know that today is not measuring up: I haven’t exercised (the pool was closed due to a swim meet), I didn’t bathe Sophia (I do it every other day, but I still like a slacker on the days that I don’t), and I haven’t so much as kissed my husband (who had a stomach virus yesterday that I really, really don’t want to catch). There have been some accomplishments, but they are overshadowed by what I deem my failures.

Failure is not doing something poorly; it’s simply not doing. There’s nothing I hate more than a day of doing nothing. Laying around, letting the laundry pile up, letting the kid run wild, letting the minutes pass without getting a single…thing…done. It’s not because I don't enjoy it. It’s because I feel so…guilty. And yet, the truth of the matter is I’d love to be able to fail in this way…fail without the guilt, that is. But I am relaxation-impaired. When I have free time, I fill it.

In contrast, Sophia has nothing but free time. As far as I can tell, she experiences no compulsion to complete a task; she has no obligations to meet. She fills her time pursing happiness and acting creatively. If it is quiet, she’ll fill the air with song. If I turn on music, she twirls. She invents new purposes for objects, new narratives for books. She plays, she dreams, she dances through life.

My demands creep in…take a bath, eat this, put your coat on…and these are moments of resistance, for they seem unnecessary to her. They interrupt her flow. I’ll suggest a new activity, “why don’t we go out and play in the snow?” And she’ll decline, “No, mommy. I want to stay right here.” She sees no need to go anywhere to do anything other than what she is doing in this very moment.

I don’t mean to romanticize Sophia’s way of living in the world. It is not always practical. We do have to eat, and take baths, and occasionally put our coats on, and she probably doesn’t do enough of any of these things.

But when I think about balance, as an adult, I fear I am valuing the wrong things. Balance is traditionally thought of as managing a family, a career and self. But when “self-care” becomes yet another chore, another obligation…it is drained of all its pleasure and restorative properties. When I need a checklist to determine whether I should feel good about my day, I have sacrificed the joy of doing for the joy of getting it done.

I want to stop keeping score. I want to mentally burn my lists. I want to play and dream and dance through life as much as I possibly can…and not be concerned when I can’t.

I want to be more like Sophia.