Lately I’ve needed a challenge of some sort. At first I thought the challenge I desired was with my career. You quickly showed me that I should not take on any other challenges at this time and for that … I thank you.
You are my challenge and I want to make sure that don’t make too many mistakes along the way. Avoiding mistakes with you require a great deal of patients, deep breathing and control. Did I mention patients?
The thing is, I understand you. I get it. However, your sense of reasoning is way off due to only being 3.5 years old. You have all these rules about your hair, your clothes, sleeves on your pajamas, your bath towel, your blanket that covers you up at night … EVERYTHING!
For instance, this morning while I was getting you dressed for Mother’s Day Out you immediately looked over at the clothes I had picked out for you to wear and said in your whiniest voice, “Those shoes hurt my feet.” It is always something. The shoes are comfy tennis shoes (the Converse Chuck Taylor’s that Maema just bought you) that fit you perfectly. Somehow, you manage to walk around the house for hours in 2-inch high heel, plastic, princess shoes without one complaint. So for about half an hour Hassie Clare and I had to listen to you whine, cry and hop around the house like you were in major pain. Then I had to hold you down while I put Band-Aids on the back of your feet because you insisted that the tennis shoes were giving you blisters.
Then there is your hair. The only way I can prevent a major meltdown is by pulling a tiny ponytail of only the top part of your hair over to the side with a bow (see every picture for the past 6 months). The ponytail can’t stick out – it must lay flat. The ponytail must be loose and the bow perfect or your head might spin off. You keep telling me that when you are 4 years old you will let me fix your hair a different way. We shall see!
The funny thing is that you have these meltdowns almost every morning that I get you dressed and ready for school. Then we get to school and you are a perfect angel. You never get in trouble at school. In fact, no one would ever believe that you are anything but a laid back, easygoing kid.
You are independent and strong but at the same time you have the most sensitive and innocent soul I’ve ever known. This makes it difficult to parent you. I find myself handling you with delicate, white gloves. You break so easy and so often. I don’t want to break you. I want to teach you other ways of handling your dilemmas (this is my official challenge statement)!
Part of the difficulty for me is that your cry breaks my heart. When you look at me with those beautiful, big blue eyes with gigantic alligator tears running down your face …. all I want to do is scoop you up, tell you everything will be alright and give you anything you want.
I’m writing you this letter because someday if you have a little girl and you are concerned that she is possessed because … oh I don’t know … her sock line isn’t perfectly straight with her toes or God forbid there are fuzz balls on her socks ….. and she screams and spits for 2 hours while saying every bad word she knows (booty, poo poo, stinky, poophead). If you call me to tell me all this and all I do is laugh … you can’t get mad at me. Because I will be picturing your precious little toddler face and reminiscing about the challenge I took in 2010.
I love you disco,
Mommy
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