Facing Demons: Slow Down

It's no secret that things take longer with a toddler. All the things.

That's hard for me. Not only am I impatient, I'm also by nature just fast. I walk through a clothing store and know if I'm gonna buy something or not. My response time (in person) is now. I'm processing the likely end of your sentence before you're verbalizing the middle.

And while I'd love for this to be a brag, it's often not. It means I would've walked by my wedding dress if it hadn't been for Cassidy. I say "no" and realize actually yes, or "yes" and realize actually no. I answer a question you weren't on your way to asking and now you need to start your thought over from the beginning.

Now, a lot of the time I am right about purchases or what you're saying or what we should do, but I'm not sure the stats are quite good enough to justify my obsessive urgency. And I might have always known that but never gotten around to working on it if God hadn't sent us Elle.

Not only are toddlers the ultimate...modifier, but many of our parenting choices exacerbate the slowness. We want her to have the time/space/permission to explore the world and build her skills, which lately means waiting thirty to sixty seconds for her to go down the single step from the laundry room into the garage.

It isn't that she's being stubborn or dillydallying; she's actually trying her little best. The step feels like a cliff to her, and she wants to do it well. She'll squat down, but then decide that isn't the best approach. She'll slide one foot off the edge, but realize she needs to brace herself, so she'll grab the door frame, but she's still standing too far back to reach the floor, so she lets go and repositions and tries again. Then she decides no, that doesn't feel right either, so she tries sitting on her booty and scooting forward. Yes, that's it. Scoot, scoot, scoot. Deep bend at the waist...straighten up...yay! Beaming, clapping, so proud. So beautiful.

So slow.

We have places to be, places we're probably ten minutes late to already. The garage is hot. We are hemorrhaging AC and I'm holding a thousand things and my arm is going numb.

And in the middle of all that, Elle is learning to be a person for the first time, right in front of me.

As I was driving to Mom's birthday celebration today, God sent me a thought that seems obvious now: What if being in the hard, slow, difficult is the thing? I don't need to "get to" anything else. The goal for this season is NOT to be comfortable, not even to have fun, but to be in the moment with my baby, whatever that is. So I'll get a bit hot. So we'll loose eighty cents of air conditioning. So my arm will be a little numb.

Is that really so bad? Can't I just take a shower later, skip a tenth of a coffee, shake out my arm?

Maybe I need to stop rushing, whether that means rushing to the car, rushing to nap time, or—God forbid—actually rushing through precious toddlerhood. At the end of the day, what am I trying to get to so fast? The restaurant will still be there and my family will still love me. My TV shows and books aren't gonna expire.

It's not my turn to eat hot food or sprint to the car or get dressed in one uninterrupted act. It's my turn to watch Elle pick a clover flower and track an airplane across the sky and point out every dog on every bag of dog food in the store. I've been running an imaginary race with no prize at the end.

As I say to Elle a dozen times a day, "that's so silly" ☺️

~Stephanie

Facing Demons: Feel the Feelings

Facing Demons: Feel the Feelings

Gabe and I don't believe in distracting Elle from her feelings.

There's definitely a place for redirection ("We're not gonna play in the trash can, but you can pull things out of the recycling"; "We're all done with chalk for now, but we can read a book when we go inside"), but if Elle is crying/scared/throwing a fit, we think it's important that she feel those feelings and process them, rather than cheer up at any cost.

To me, this goes along with the "meltdowns are not teachable moments" idea I touched on in The Riskiest Post to Date. When Elle is in the middle of big feelings, I try to hold her (if she's open to that) and say absolutely nothing, at first. I want her to know that her big feelings don't scare me, I can handle her even when she's difficult, and I'll be on the other side when she gets there too, but talking to her does nothing but contribute to overstimulation; she can't actually hear me in the moment.

After she's felt her feelings and begins to calm down, we'll either talk about what went wrong—like if she fell out of a chair, I show her why she fell and what she can do differently next time—or move on to something happier. We don't want Elle to be an adult who can't stand to be in her feelings long enough to come to peace with them and move on healthily.

Well.

Sunday night, Gabe and I got into a stupid fight after Elle went down. Afterwards, he stayed in the living room and I went upstairs to tidy up Elle's room. I walked up the steps, seething, and pulled out my phone to get a podcast going to take my mind off things.

Oh.

In the middle of Elle's room, I realized I was doing the exact thing we don't want Elle to do. Instead of sitting with my feelings and sorting through what they were trying to tell me, I wanted to drown them out with the story of someone getting murdered.

I put my phone down and sat with a sigh.

"Fine," I muttered. "What am I feeling?" I was mad, frustrated, discouraged, a little sheepish. The fight was stupid, but I could see how it had happened. I knew a podcast wasn't going to make me feel better, nor was the TV I planned to watch after cleaning Elle's room.

I picked up my phone again and texted Gabe: "Well that was a terrible way to end the weekend."

He responded with three texts in a row, honoring my side of things, owning his own, and offering to talk it through if I wanted to come down and talk. I did, so we did. None of that would have happened if I hadn't forced myself to face my feelings instead of distracting myself.

People talk about the importance of "feeling your feelings" instead of "thinking your feelings," and I'm not good at that. I don't quite understand what it means. I don't know if what I did Sunday night was feeling my feelings or thinking them, but either way, I know it was a step in a right direction. Too often I try to ignore my feelings because they're inconvenient/annoying/confusing/inevitable. I don't want Elle to do that, but if I'm going to teach her a better way, I'm gonna have to start some trial and error.

~Stephanie