Tuesday morning, I was ready for a battle.
It began when Keira decided to throw a tantrum because Riley was wearing one of her (many) jackets. This was on the way to her regular dancing class. In a nice punch, as we were in the MacDonald’s carpark (mumma needed a coffee hit), I spied not one but three nits in her hair and as I stood there, rifling through her locks with her screaming, I had peripheral vision of people walking past us, with the looks plainly on their faces, “Oh gosh, she’s NOT, is she? She hasn’t got…you know…?”
And I felt like emerging from the car, with a nit between my fingers to shout, “That’s right folks and the next person to give me an ‘ew-gross’ face is going to cop one of these from me! Kungfu style!”
So we went to dance class; and before I get the “Hang on, you still went?” question, let me assay your worries by stating that my daughter point-blank refused to have anything to do with the class, to have anything to do with the other kids, so there was no threat of spreading the nuisance. Instead, we sat sadly on the sidelines, me all the time saying to myself, “Let’s get the HELL out of here,” but I wasn’t going to give in; because that was exactly what Keira wanted.
I am not a patient person, and although I say that parenthood has made me more patient, really, if I was to be honest, that’s a big fat lie. So for the rest of the day, as we returned home and I treated my daughter for nits again, I did my best to suppress that ball of anger I get, the nasty one that tells my daughter, “NO” all too quickly, all too unjustly in some sort of revenge for minor misdemeanours. Not for the nits; more for the behaviour which she is supposed to be growing out of, but instead is, possibly, getting worse.
Naturally, karma bites back at those who are mean, and my punishment later that day was to witness my daughter, so quickly, so without any warning, trip over a chair in the lounge room and go head-first into one of our windows, shattering the glass everywhere. The noise was dreadful enough, and as I saw her pitch over I expected her to fall out of the window and down onto the deck, the shards impaling her little body. Luckily, she didn’t. However she did clutch the back of her skull and wailed – understandably – for several minutes. At this point, my heart was racing and quickly detected there was no blood, no glass, no bump in her hair. A miracle.
The next half hour or so was spent finding glaziers, vacuuming up mess and generally trying to keep the children out of the area. Keira fell asleep on the couch, and I fully panicked, expecting her to be suffering from a concussion and it was ALL MY FAULT FOR NOT DETECTING IT.
Yet, she awoke without harm or sickness. I taped a tablecloth over the hole, which meant we had a biting draught for the rest of the evening. That was the least of my concerns.
I went to bed that night comparing my mood, my outlook, my mentality from the one at the beginning of the day, to the end’s.
It was nothing; all nothing compared to that moment of breakage. When any possibly number of horrible combinations could’ve come to pass. But it didn’t. So what if she had a tantrum? So what if the other mothers in the dancing class thought she was being sulky and reticent? So what if the nits had come back?
So what indeed?
The alternative was so much worse.
Some days I think I am an okay mother. This was not one of those days.
