Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-05-25 - 8:53 a.m.

What I'm Feeling Right Now Is...

Younger Daughter, after stalling as long as possible - and she's got a very long possible - finally stomped off down the hall to her room, as instructed. But her last words made me smile: "I HATE you, Mom!"

I know a lot of parents don't let their kids get away with this kind of talk. Their father, for one. I don't know WHAT he'd do. Probably pop a blood vessel in his brain (hey, set that aside for further consideration...)

I do. I let them say it. Actually, we have an agreement that they can say whatever they like in the privacy of their own rooms - but right this minute I am not inclined to go argue with her whether she was actually OVER the threshold of her room, or in the hall in front of her room, or if she had one foot in her room and one in the hallway and anyway the foot wasn't the part that said it hated me, and, well, you get the idea. She would love nothing more than to engage me for another ten minutes on THAT topic, and I'm not biting today.

From her, it's always, "I hate you, Mom." Never just "I hate you." She's got to put that "Mom" in there. That's why it makes me smile, although it's a damn good thing she can't see the smile from down the hallway - excuse me, in her room. It's the worst thing she can think of, the worst words that come to mind - but I'm still and always Mom, always the safe place to say that kind of thing. She has to acknowledge the relationship, even when she's so pissed at me that she can't see straight.

This is the child that used to hit, years ago. I understood it, although it shocked me at the time. Her older sister, verbal early, articulate, and capable of cruelty and kindness in equal measure, tortured her no end. She discovered quickly that she could take her younger sister to the limit and past it in a very short amount of time, and younger sister - with no vocabulary to fight with -would resort to bopping her one. I had to intervene, although I secretly sympathized; if I were the bopping type, older child would be high on my bop list, too.

But we don't bop, in this house. Or slap, or bite, or whack, or punch, or hurl plastic turtles into one another's faces. So we had The Talk, and we had The Talk again, we had it so many times together she could recite it, and she was probably only three years old.

I remember getting agreement through most of The Talk - the part about getting very very angry at someone, and how that happens to everyone (even grownups), and how there are some things that are okay to do when you're mad, and could she remember some of those things we had said were okay to do? She could, and we listed them - but then she looked at me with those big brown eyes and said with heartrending candor, "But Mom - when I'm really mad, I just want to HIT!"

How are you going to argue with THAT?

Oh, sweetheart, yes, I know you do. I really do know. And that feeling won't go away for a very very long time, either. You'll want to hit and hurt because someone hurt you, but you can't, so you sit on the impulse and learn to say it in words. You start with, "I HATE you, Mom", and keep working on it, and years later you'll be able to choke out the therapeutically correct, "I feel very hurt and angry when you say things like that to me....", and by that time the urge to hit will mercifully be pretty well buried. But you've got a long row to hoe between those two phrases.

If you ever get to like words a lot, the way your Momma does, you can do all kinds of things - like making snide comments about your father popping a blood vessel in his brain - so you don't get the urge to hit. Having words can be like having your own big bucket of plastic turtles.

But even if you don't want to learn to use words that way, you can't hit. We live in a place where that's the agreement, and it's a good one: we don't hit each other. The grocery checker will not reach over and pop me one for forgetting to tell her about my coupons, and I don't go and box your teacher's ears for giving you a C+ on that Civil War project. Of course, sometimes we give people guns and make them go out and kill each other, but that's an aberration I can't begin to explain. And nobody, nobody is ever going to get away with hitting YOU, at least as long as I have any turtles in MY bucket.

Non-violence; it's our choice, in this house. But sometimes it means listening to some loud ugly feelings. As a grownup, it means letting some things go. Quietly. While smiling.

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