Grumphy's Blogararium

Stuck in the middle …

13 Dec 2010 1 Comment

by grumphy in Parenting Tags: affermations, Attachment Disorder, children, Mothers, Parenting, silly games

This week, if I believed in horoscopes, there must have been planets crashing together in the houses governing the family ties.  At least, that is how it feels.  This week I experienced crushing anger, mind-blowing despair, and hilarity of a newly played game.  Seven days, the whole gamut of overblown emotion.

The first was my second daughter, who suffers from an Attachment Disorder.  She has a penchant to kick up a fuss at the drop of a pencil; the frenzy can last hours, and stops all normal processes in the house.  It came to a head this week, when I lost my temper and stormed out of the house, to pace in the garden.  She is only eight, but seems to know every one of my buttons of annoyance, anger and despair.  She also revealed that she has been lying to her therapist for the last year.  I smoked a cigarette in quick lungful, recited some OHM NA PADME OHM, and then re-entered the fray once again. 

I gain grey hairs and crows feet, but I still feel like a seventeen year old.  This, as I’m sure every aging person has ever thought, sucks bigtime.  She cannot help it, she cannot stop, yet I and her siblings, suffer for it.  It is the way it is.

Next up was my eldest.  She is ten, bright for her age, a reader of books and quoter of Harry Potter facts ad infinitum.  Having begged to be allowed to go to town by herself for months, I finally  relented on Sunday, giving her a small sum of money, and a time by which to return home.

I paced, worried, and fretted.  I could not have guessed how it would end.

At the time when she should have been home, I receive a phone call from my mother.  She, in all unlikelihood, had found my poor neglected daughter wandering a supermarket by herself.  My mother proceeded to grind down my daughter of all trust, responsibility and maturity, by issuing rules and regulations concerning how a young woman should behave.  My mother then brought her home, in tears.  At my grilfreind’s front door, she gave me a stern talking to, about how she could have been kidnapped, how she was too young, and how I didn’t know anything  about parenting.  She then left.

I gound my teeth, I smoked a cigarette in one supra-deep lungful, wrote an angry text message and then deleted it.  I began to feel like the filling in some kind of hellish sandwich.

And tonight.  Having watched the two aforementioned daughters in their christmas nativity, with my son sat on my lap, we came home.  They played on the Wii for a while, and then I prepared them for bed.  While settling down my son, who is five, I hit upon a new game.  It is called Catch my nose.  The rules are simple.  The child tries to catch the parent’s nose, while the parent is only allowed to move the head from the neck, whilst singing ‘You can’t catch my nose!’ 

It is funnier than it sounds.

This regained my sanity, blew away the cobwebs, and made for belly laughter the like of which I had forgotten somewhere during the week.  I will be playing the game again, with many addendum rules.

I have a 3000 essay to write, Christmas shopping to finish, the Vesuvius of laundry to wash, and possibly the beginnings of an ulcer.  Yet I find that I am really, really lucky.  There are people out there that only have one hundredth the luck I have.  Though I wasn’t for the whole of the week, I can say, just for a few fleeting moments, that I was content, and that little more could make it any better. 

Thats all.