Coping Mechanisms

It’s no secret that parenting is tough, a lot tougher than any of us expected. On our best days, raising kids can be, for the most part, pretty mundane - routine and with any luck, uneventful. More often, childrearing (and for the sake of this blog, motherhood) is incredibly frustrating. The job is dirty and thankless. Sure, parenting is a unique and fabulous and worthy and incredibly rewarding experience, but the tricky thing is that we tend to only notice that part of it in retrospect.

So what can we do to keep our chins up during the here and now of parenting? Over the years I have cultivated a limited but effective arsenal for coping with the worst parts of parenting. Sure I’ve tried the basic tricks for navigating particularly tough situations. Let’s say baby is screaming inconsolably, every fiber of your being wants to shake baby (but somewhere you heard that that might be a bad idea), you put baby down and count to ten silently, and then baby is magically quiet and happy and fed and wearing a clean diaper…

But somehow conventional coping mechanisms seem to fall just a bit short. Here are the two the things that work for me in particularly tough situations.

First there is vacuuming. Vacuuming really is the perfect foil for mother-homemakers caught in the midst of parenting’s ugliest and loudest situations. Vacuuming is a great choice for any situation that involves any amount of noise. Take the crying baby example from above. Let’s say instead of counting to ten, you grab your vacuum and head for the nearest carpet, not only do you not have to listen to your baby crying, you are getting something done! Feelings of guilt and inadequacy over not being able to console your child are immediately canceled out by feelings of accomplishment (your cleaning!) and peace (the neat hum of the vacuum cleaner drowns out the little one’s wailing). This trick never wears out. The more kids you have, the more opportunities you’ll have to use vacuuming to drown out their crying, their whining, their fights and their tantrums. And the more kids you have, the dirtier your carpets will be. It’s almost the perfect solution.

Second, is a little imagination game I like to play. If it had a name, it would be called "What if a Grown Up Did This?" It’s pretty simple. When I am faced with my children doing particularly annoying, ridiculous things I simply ask myself - "what if a grown up did this?" Almost instantly, the outlandish behavior of my children becomes incredibly entertaining, sheer hilarity.

Even without your kids engaging in any specific behavior, this can be a useful coping mechanism. Just look at what your kids are wearing and try to imagine an adult in the same outfit. For those of you with babies in onesies, this can be especially effective (unless you don’t want to be reminded of early 90’s fashion a-la Brenda Walsh). Here are some of the most common situations I find my kids in, each annoying in their own right, but incredibly funny when you imagine an adult engaging in the same behavior.

My younger daughter loves to eat. Other people’s food. With her hands. If she sees anyone enjoying a meal, she just can’t help herself, she’s got to see for herself if its worth it (nine times out of ten it is for this kid) She’ll climb right into your lap and dig in. Literally, dig in, with her grimy little hands. This habit really gets me. I have no trouble sharing chips or pretzels with her. It’s the things like soup or salad that really get under my skin. To avoid becoming overly frustrated (I don’t want to squelch her enthusiasm for new foods, it could lead her to the all -colorless-starch diet my four year old has been on for the past two years), I allow myself to consider the possibility of an adult woman jumping up on my lap and helping herself to my tossed salad with her hands. And the woman was singing a little song that sounded like a lullaby but with the lyrics of "chicken nugget, chicken nugget, cucumber" the whole time she was digging through the salad.

When my younger daughter isn’t eating my real food, she’s busy making us all pretend to eat her fake food. This involves a lot of time hanging out in her little tykes cottage and simulating chewing and sipping and licking of things. Often, she is very insistent that she has adult company at these little dinner parties. Sitting scrunched up in a house built for toddlers and drinking invisible diet coke can get old pretty quick Especially when just outside the house are piles of laundry that need to be folded and a new US Weekly with breaking news about Reese and Jake. But just when I feel myself starting to lose patience with the situation, I use my little imagination trick. Just the thought of hanging out with an adult woman who drinks imaginary beverages, is fascinated by the doorbell to her own home, and sometimes, without warning, starts licking the walls of her house, is enough to warrant a few good belly laughs. No need for that Us Weekly now, you’re watching the headlines unfold in your own family room!

My son spends a lot of his time lying down, on his stomach, hands tucked under his front. I am not sure what the attraction is to spending so much of the day that way, but my husband assure me it is normal behavior. I like to instill a sense of responsibility in my kids, so I try to ask them to do easier things for themselves. For example, I’ll ask my son to go to his room and find himself a pair of socks. When he hasn’t returned after twenty minutes (and his two sisters are waiting in a running car), I’ll go up to his room to see what the delay is about. Inevitably, he’ll be lying-face down under his train table, barefoot. Now this I a situation which has a lot of potential to piss me off, the kid is making us all wait, and he’s not even accomplishing anything… but to avoid flipping out, I ask myself - "what if a grown up were doing this?" and then things turn pretty funny. What if you walked into a room and a grown man (wearing a pajama shirt two sizes too small and a pair of plaid flannels) was lying barefoot and face-down under a train table? That would be ridiculous! That would be hilarious! In fact, that might have actually happened to Robert Downey Jr. circa 1999.

I think you’ll find this trick helpful, if only to give yourself a little breathing and laughing room, in what can often be a terribly boring and frustrating job. What’s more, when you start to look at your kids antics on an adult scale, you may find what I have, there’s something like a young-hollywood-meets-SNL vibe going on in your own house. With a little lite beer (another of my not so secret weapons) that can make parenting pretty darn entertaining!