On Temper Tantrums & Standing Firm

This is a guest post by my wife, who is much smarter.

Deb:

I’ve decided that everything is about age. Bob and I got a puppy from the pound cause day-to-day life has been so boring of late. We named her Scout and handed her to our ten-year-old dog, Gus, as if we were giving him a trip to Bimini. She’s about thirteen weeks now and still deals with the world with her needle-like fangs. She’s one of those dogs that cocks her head at you cause she’s trying to figure out what you want from her. After a decade of sweet English Labradors, I’d forgotten how smart puppies act. It’s not that Gus is a dummy, but he’s never cocked his head except to let us know that he has an itchy ear. He’s managed to get what he wants by being pleasant and accepting that he can’t have that squirrel. But, now this little Rottweiler mix of something is reminding me that determined gets what it wants by being demanding.

Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas (not quite sure cause it’s all a jumble of needing evaporated milk and having only condensed) I went to the grocery store to pick up a few of those odd things which exist only for holidays. It was one of those huge places where you can buy a decorative bed pillow or some shoes or milk. They make me nuts cause my brain can buy either shoes or milk.

Anyway, while staring at some shoes I heard the unmistakable
first scream of a toddler tantrum. We all know it–a kid in the cart who’s old
enough to know the word, ‘no’ but also knows that in a store full of people
that a meltdown can turn a no into yes cause that parent is thinking of the
sanity of others.

By the time I’d hit the candle aisle which I told Bob many
years ago would be an excellent way to convey a pathogen cause we were all
prying off a glass lid and inhaling deeply–the tantrum had been raging for
about seven minutes and was building into full shriek mode. 

I overheard one of the two women already snorting candles
say that it sounded like they were going for it. Odd that I instantly knew that
‘they’ was the parent and not the kid. The other woman said I saw him and he’s
about three and a half and his mother is ignoring him. 

Yes, she was going for it and gonna outlast him and not give
in and soon a man joined us as we all began sharing the times that we went for
it with our own puppy-child. Some of us admitted to leaving the store at that
time cause it’s too embarrassing to see the looks of fellow humans who haven’t
raised a child and think that toddlers are real people but smaller and that
reasoning works. Some of us had stuck it out in the soda aisles hoping that
cardboard and aluminum was an effective sound barrier till the kid was an
exhausted heap lying over a bag of potatoes and making those little exhausted
whimpers before passing out and drooling all over the lettuce.

But, I’d had help in the form of a woman about the age that
I am now who’d known that I was trying to go for it, but I was checking out my
fellow shoppers with a look of despair which told her that I was gonna fail and
that box of Junior Mints or whatever was soon going to be in his sweaty little
hands.

By now there were six or seven carts piled up as we
discussed the dilemma of the young mother pushing around the amplifier set
at eleven.

 It was nice to have a group discussion of fellow
adults all sharing the same opinion on one topic because it’s not ever been the
way our country was designed to work since the freedom to disagree is sorta the
reason you have freedom at all.  And we were all of the opinion that she
was too far in to back down now, but we were also all losing our collective
marbles cause that kid wasn’t giving up anytime soon. 

I said will someone watch my stuff cause I’m going in. They
all said sure in unison cause it was either leave or lose thirty years so we’d
all have ear buds in and notice nothing anyway.

We were all of that age where shopping and personal music
was as bizarre a notion as the self-service check-outs. And none of us wanted
to leave our little piles of baking powder and food coloring and odd sprinkles
just to return later cause not like we had those things in the cupboards. I did
thirty years ago but I had more need of sprinkles throughout the year cause of
the inevitable, “Mom, I need fifty cupcakes for the bake sale,
tomorrow”. 

Age changes even the contents of the pantry, but it’s also
age which walks bravely into the fray of disintegrating mother and toddler
tantrum. She wasn’t hard to find in that big store, I will say that. 

She was in her early thirties but probably looked
younger when she walked in, and initially said no about whatever.  I
write, ‘whatever’ because it’s never the thing but rather the battle and he was
too old because everything is age and a year younger and he’s still wondering
why you’ve brought me to a place full of things which I can have by asking
nicely. That extra year is where the ask is no longer the issue but the
willingness to accept an arbitrary no is the issue. And she was struggling
because she knew that everyone in the store was caught in their own minds
between ‘give that little shit whatever he wants so he’ll shut up’, and oh,
dear, you’re in too deep to cave now. But, I had my memories of the
grandmotherly woman who’d helped me win my battle and thus the forever war of
when no means no and just because I said so.

I made my approach to her by creeping by the kid and
ignoring him as if he weren’t there which was harder than you think because I
could feel my eardrums twitching a bit. I said something of no consequence, but
she started to apologize and I barely shook my head no, and she was still lucid
enough to cock her head a bit and realize that I was coming to help and not to
complain.

The screaming intensified for a moment cause the kid knew he
he was close to winning though he’d probably forgotten what, so he immediately
sensed his mother’s tiny withdrawal of her previously focused attention on him.
A three-and-a-half-year-old knows when they’re being purposefully ignored because
they can see the sweat on your brow.

She was one of those mother’s who’d worked very hard for the
right to wear those yoga pants and so I talked of yoga. After a few seconds her
grip on the cart lessened cause I could see some blood returning to her knuckles
and after a few more seconds, the screaming lessened in decibels but not
intensity cause he, too, was too far in to roll over easily now. At that point
I wished I’d really gone to a few yoga classes instead of looking through the
glass of a darkened room in that gym at all those people standing on their
heads with hands cupped on steel buttocks while I meandered to a treadmill.
But, I can fake talk on a lot of subjects and moved to the back of her so that
she’d turn away from him and face me.

By then I was discussing the price of yoga mats and she was
nodding as if yoga mats were twitter trend of the day. And like magic the more
she stopped ignoring his shrieks and just forgot about them the longer the
gasps between hysteria and the more time spent on who’s that old lady chatting
up my mother?

After he’d quieted for about two minutes, I turned and said,
“My grandsons want Voltron stuff from Santa and do you think that’s a good
choice?”  He immediately said no and launched into the merits of
Avengers of all types versus Voltrons of any sort. He was hard to understand at
first because he’d nearly hyperventilated his way into a coma. We chatted about
Santa for a few more minutes and I told him that I’d take the whole Avengers
thing under advisement because he was a smart kid who made a good argument
against Voltron. I said have a Merry Christmas and I gotta go find some
powdered sugar and he said it’s that way and pointed the opposite way of my
buggy. Cripes, cause now I had to go that way and sneak behind a few people
sorting through the hams to get back to the candle aisle. 

Most of my fellow shoppers were gone, but one woman was
guarding my buggy and said–I too had help the day that I drew my metaphorical
line in the sand and went for it. We did one of those lame high fives where we
missed our hands cause reading glasses aren’t just for reading anymore.

I passed the mother and her son a few aisles down and darn
if that kid didn’t notice that I had no powered sugar. Seriously I mentioned
the one thing which I always do have instead of yams or something.

He was very sharp as I suspected because my own one-time
tantrum kid went on to get his doctorate in Materials Engineering and Physics.
Like my toddler he was fighting the arbitrary nature of the no and not the no
itself. It is a difficult thing for some toddlers to accept that ‘because I
said so’ is a viable argument. But, they need learn the lesson only once and
they only learn it by losing that one battle because losing is as much a part
of life as winning.

If you grow up never learning that losing exists then you’ll
believe that winning is all there is.

It took a week for our dog, Gus, to teach Scout, the puppy
with needle teeth, that he would play but not if she saw him as a chew toy. The
more that he snarled and growled and the more she thought it was fun, so he
finally learned to jump on the bed and withdraw since she’s too tiny to climb
there and once she calmed he’d jump down, but right back up at the first tug on
his tail or the one unfortunate incident where she missed his tail and nipped
his rectum. Scout won’t be doing that again and he did finally teach her to
that tug of war which included nothing attached to his body could be fun, too.

 Age is everything and puppies like children learn from
the experience of their elders. Puppies win if they never learn how to lose and
end up in dog parks on a three point leash and toddlers win if they never lose
and end up being president where there isn’t even an argument about the merits
of Avengers over Voltron. There’s only the getting of what they wanted from the
first time they entered the store and screamed till they got it and thus never
learn the arbitrary nature of no. You’d think that a septuagenarian toddler who
played ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ at his campaign rallies would know
that for a fact. But, since he doesn’t and is making his tantrum about
partisanship rather than our joint effort at teaching a very old dog a new
trick? Then the discussion isn’t about walls: it’s about yoga.