In the News
Tue., September 24, 01:20 PM
I never thought of myself as particularly creative. I work well with creativse people. But I usually have to do a little “creative borrowing” to come up with a posting.
Ordinarily, the subject matter for a diary derives from one’s everyday life. For years I had some terrific stuff to write about and nowhere (nor time) to write it. Nowadays, well, I work a few hours each week for a lawyer. Boss Lawyer is a pleasant enough fellow, but not particularly ambitious, and there is seldom much going on here – a few divorces, personal injuries – and I seldom actually meet the clients. Exciting life at home? If you’ve read a few of my entries, you know that life at home is mostly working around the geezer.
So I pick up ideas from the newspaper, or something I saw on television, or from other people’s diaries. (Not stealing, you understand, just borrowing.) What I don’t understand today is how come no one – all you moms out there – has said one word about Ms. Toogood, who didn’t live up to her name and was caught on videotape disciplining her child. Note that I said “disciplining.” There is a possibility that she wasn’t really punching the child, despite how bad it looked. It was bad enough, of course. It shouldn’t have happened. And it’s even more horrible to contemplate all the punishment that doesn’t get into the public eye.
Now why did the surveillance camera just happen to be following this woman? Evidently she had evoked some suspicion during her unhappy run-in with the store’s personnel. So not only was she mad enough to transfer her temper to the child – who had perhaps been what they used to call “fractious” – but someone was pretty ticked off at her as well. All this is what I’ve learned from various news sources. Now comes my own take on this – sort of.
Taking care of kids is no picnic. It can be very hard work indeed, even if you’re not the person responsible all day every day. I cannot imagine trying to raise a child without a husband, although heaven knows that some husbands are worse than useless. (Actually, I think it works best if you have three or more caregivers.) You grow up, you get married, you have children – in that order. Mandatory parenting and anger-management classes imply that the parents haven’t grown up yet. Some people never grow up completely, and that can be a good thing. But I maintain that “my fourth child” – the geezer – is the reason that my three little ones lived to grow up. He took the pressure off me.
Of course, it was his idea. Early in our relationship he told me he definitely wanted to have children. He thought that six would be a good number, although after the third one he conceded that maybe that was enough. As usual, he was taking the pressure off me.
I’m a fairly even-tempered person, but remember, I had three babies in three years. Among other things, that means that I had three in diapers at one time; you cannot expect a three-year-old to understand why she has to use the toilet if her siblings do not. I recall one day when I realized I had been in the bathroom for the entire morning, and I hadn’t once sat down myself! And perhaps that was the easy part. I was such an intense mother. (I can laugh about it now.) Along with providing their physical needs – which included breast-feeding – I was making sure they could Cope With Life. They had to learn to talk. (I really felt good when they talked to each other. They had learned the concept of communicating.) They had to learn to read, and I was teaching the older ones their letters while I fed the youngest.
I talked to them constantly, I used books and television and anything else I could find to fill their little minds with what the world was all about. If I explained as much as I could when there was no urgency, there was less probability of conflict when it was necessary to say, “…because I said so.” When they asked why they couldn’t have things they saw in the store, I would tell them, “because I’m a mean and rotten mother.” Y’know, that worked. And as annoying as they might be at home, for the most part my little ones behaved in public. No touching what was not meant to be touched. “That is not a toy.” No loud crying. No lying down and screaming. It wasn’t done.
Discipline took place at home. When explanations didn’t work, I applied an open-hand swat to the place Nature provided. (Open hand because that hurt me enough to stop me at one.) It was a sign that Mommy’s patience had been stretched beyond endurance.
We didn’t do “time-outs,” except for me. When I absolutely couldn’t stand it any more, I would leave them with something that occupied them, go into my own room, knit two rows and come out. Why knit? Because I could measure how much I had done, how long I had been away. If I had decided to read, I might get caught in the book and never come out.
In the long run, of course, I had it easy. I paid the bills, but I didn’t have to worry where the money came from, because Husband faithfully brought home a paycheck every week. He swept the floors and did the dishes, carried laundry up and down stairs, and never complained that the house was less than perfect. And he absolutely loved his kids.
Some mothers prefer to keep the kids as active as possible during the day and put them down for the night around six. It wouldn’t have worked for us. Starting with the first baby, I kept her on two naps a day, so that she would still be ready to play when her daddy came home. And daddy was always ready to play with the kids, at the end of the day when I absolutely couldn’t stand them for one minute more.
Knowing that I could be at my wits’ end in a comparatively comfortable situation, I can’t be completely judgmental about a mother who doesn’t have it as easy. No, she shouldn’t be hitting her kid. Yes, she does need to learn some anger management. Yes, she probably became a mother before she was mature enough to deal with it. You can’t say what might have been, what should have been. This is now. She has to deal with her life, and the best Society can do is help her learn how to do it. Thank God she is not Susan Smith or Andrea Yates.
