Vol. 82 - When One is Easy, the Other...
On fleeting phases
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Anyway, onto the newsletter.
“Every phase lasts two weeks.”
It’s one of the best pieces of actionable parenting advice I ever got, doled from my sister’s husband, father to three great kids (my nieces and nephew). He qualified it, however, assuring that his adage applies not just to the difficult3 phases, but to the good phases, too.
In other words, endure the tough, enjoy the easy. Because soon, everything will change.
When kids are small, this rule of thumb works like clockwork. At least it did for my kids. When they were newborn, infants, and toddlers, my babies seemed to evolve preciesly on this two-week timeline my brother-in-law told me about (except for the rare outlier, like our son’s six-month-long sleep regression that had him waking up at 3am every morning, ready to attack the day).
Of course, this metric still seems to apply to our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. For our son, a few weeks away from turning six, however, his evolution is a bit more protracted. Still, as he always has, as kids always do, our son is maturing in spurts; in phases.
And right now, he’s in an amazing phase.
He listens and cooperates with ease, which allows us to give him more freedom as he explores the world around him. He’s articulate about his emotions and we can see how he’s slowly becoming more adept at managing them. He’s becoming ever more kind toward his little sister, ever more ready to put her needs before his own.
This phase was preceded by a particularly rough stretch, one during which it felt like Emily and I were doling out nightly consequences for poor or violent behavior, for completely ignoring his parents and, sometimes, putting himself in unsafe situations.
But it seems, at least for now, that’s in the past. And it’s great. A wonderful phase in which Emily and I can see glimpses of the little boy he’s becoming.
And so, because parenting is often one long series of Murphy’s Law, and because being a parent is hard as fuck, our daughter has just entered the roughest phase of her young life.
Normally a peach, an utter and perpetual ray of sunshine that is nothing but smiles and laughs from wake-up to bedtime, she’s found her voice and her opinions in a major way. Coupled with the fact that she’s on the precipice of speaking, frustrations are at an all-time high. Outbursts, normally atypical of our little girl, have suddenly become regular. Meltdowns are always right around the corner.
Some call it the “Terrible Twos” but I’m not interested in calling a two-year-old—my daughter or anyone else’s—terrible. Turbulent, maybe. Trying. Tough, if you want to stick with the alliterative. But hardly terrible. No two-year-old is terrible.
Anyway.
I don’t begrudge our daughter. It’s part of her growth, her evolution. I love that she’s finding her voice and her opinions. Still, it doesn’t make it any easier when she’s face down in our driveway, in the rain, screaming because I told her she can’t drive our truck to the kids’ museum.
That my kids’ phases aren’t working in concert is nothing new in our household. I don’t know if it’s the fact that one was born in winter, the other in summer, and their clocks are just off or if it’s something I’m reading too much into. Whatever it is, it seems that whenever one is easy, the other is anything but. Maybe, just as I was, kids are just innately programed to fuck with their parents? Who knows.
My brother-in-law said the phases last two weeks. He never said they’d work together to make it easy on us.