Battle of the strong wills

To give you an idea of how my weekend went, I’ll tell you that I spent Saturday night searching for my copy of “The Strong-Willed Child” because I was clearly in need of some serious parenting assistance.

I finally found it in the bottom drawer of my nightstand along with an issue of People magazine dated August 4, 2003. It’s the issue I brought to the hospital when I went in to deliver Caroline.

I keep it for sentimental reasons and also because the cover story is about Angelina Jolie, long before she ensnared Brad Pitt and had fifty-eight children.

Anyway, I originally purchased “The Strong-Willed Child” when Caroline was about ten months old. Oh, what a sweet kid I was.

I thought my ten month old was strong-willed and was all like “Help me, Dr. Dobson. My baby will stand up and hold on to her crib railing for hours and refuses to lie down! What on earth do I do about this huge problem?”

I’d like to go back and slap some sense into myself. Rookie.

Now I’d be like, “Hang on to those crib rails all you want, sweet girl. You’ll get tired and fall down eventually. It’s called GRAVITY.”

Caroline will turn five in one week. And, honestly, if the last three weeks have been any indication of how five is going to look, then let me say for the record that I am really going to miss four.

Four has been mostly delightful. Five is starting to seem like a visit from an obnoxious relative who eats all your chocolate and then kicks the dog.

On Saturday she threw a fit of epic proportions filled with more drama than Scarlett O’Hara fleeing Atlanta. I’d like to say that I handled it with dignity, grace and patience, but I was fresh out of all those things. I’d had it.

In fact, P had to send us to our separate corners so that we could both calm down.

It was ugly.

And it made me feel like a failure.

I spent most of Saturday night trying to figure out where I’ve gone wrong. Am I too hard on her? Am I not hard enough? Am I not teaching her the right things?

Then, about midnight, I heard her little voice over the baby monitor.

“Mama? Mama?”

As I walked in her room, she immediately stood up on her bed, reached for me and said, “Mama? I love you.”

I held her close, breathed in the scent of her damp hair, and said, “I love you, too. You’re the light of my life.”

And for that moment she was ten months old again, not holding on to crib rails for stability, but to me.

That’s my job. Even when it’s hard.

Even when I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.