can I do a quick scream?

12:35-1:04 pm, with footnotes

three kids and I are home from our park/library outing later than intended, i need to get lunch ready in a hurry but not sure what to make. could do something with tortillas? but i was going to use those for dinner tomorrow, ditto sliced turkey—we have bread, but no peanut butter—how about toast, how about avocado and cottage cheese, with everything bagel seasoning?—generally well liked—it’s a plan. as soon as I get them in from the car H¹ and A² are sprinting out different doors into the front yard, into the driveway, where H’s best little friend is suddenly standing like an apparition, her mom had texted me earlier to ask if her bike helmet was at our house, I forgot to respond. I tell H she can play in the driveway for five minutes, i make her look in my eyes and shake my hand to confirm the details of this arrangement, i allow myself to believe this means anything to her, but as soon as I look away and look back she is down the street, on her friend’s porch³. I call her to come home, it’s lunch time, and miraculously she obeys⁴, though as soon as i turn again toward the preparation of the lunch she is screaming, her toe is spurting blood⁵. i carry her in to get cleaned up, she will not wash it in the sink or dab it with a wet towel, toast pops out of the toaster, she is wailing⁶, I have also screamed, the 2-year-old headbutts me in the hamstrings⁷. I stomp really hard 5x on the floor, I go down to pound on my husband’s office door, leaving H⁸ crying on the counter with her feet in the sink. Back upstairs I stare at the toaster, my husband is on the stairs and I demand “can you help me out?”, gesture at the blood, he looks for a band-aid, he says “we’re out of band-aids”, I shout “I just bought some yesterday”, find them on the counter, fling them at him, he applies it to the wound. i say “we have to put a lock on that door⁹, I can’t keep him¹⁰ in the house, i can’t keep anyone in the house.” he takes A downstairs so I can finish the toast unassailed, then i go down to get him back, on the way i pass the basement office and hear there is a zoom call going, I ask my husband “are you in a meeting right now, you can go” and he says “ok” and leaves¹¹ and I get everyone to the table and deal them their plates. They are eating and mostly quiet and I feel better, H says “I got a drink of water to help me calm down.” i decide against trying to round out the meal with a fruit or a vegetable, i don’t have the capacity. i’m not mad at you¹² i tell them, i’m just feeling overwhelmed¹³, sometimes you need to do a quick scream¹⁴, you know¹⁵? they all go in a circle asking “can i do a quick scream?” and when i accede each unleashes a single short loud shriek, which of course turns into a game of screaming which i have to put an end to soon because i’ve only just cooled off 2 degrees and could easily boil over again if three people begin competitively screaming near me. did someone say boiling?¹⁶—suddenly S¹⁷ is pouring boiling water from the electric kettle straight into the powder for the orange jell-o she decided to make. did you measure that? i ask—also be careful—it said add boiling water, she says. how much boiling water? it just said boiling water. it says 2 cups of boiling water, I read from the box, this is why i asked you to wait until I could help you. I try to measure out the rest of 2 cups with my eyeballs, H wants to help—get out a pan, i tell her, again she is crying, she did not want to get the pan, she wanted to make the green jell-o. let’s make the green jell-o on top of the orange jell-o after it cools, i say—it will be 2 colors in one pan. This idea is well received. We will see if it turns out.¹⁸

1. age 4

2. age 2

3. i must act swiftly—if she goes into their house, the mission of getting her home will increase 10x in difficulty. she and her friend have a forbidden romance dynamic, adorable and exhausting—they wail when it’s time to say goodbye, whisperingly prod each other to hide when I’m there on the doorstep and sometimes getting her back requires catching her mid-run, physically hefting her flailing form in my arms, during which time the toddler will have slipped out some other door in some other direction and require recapture as well

4. reading this now, from a place of much greater regulation, i feel to ask myself: why try to control it all so tightly? why not let her play, let her eat lunch later, let naptime and all of it slide by a few minutes or more—what else do we have to do? but this frightens me, because naptime for the baby is screen time for the big girls and alone time, work time, writing time for me, and to jeopardize this precious window—my heart races even to think of it—is to jeopardize everything

5. running barefoot a week ago she scraped her toe on a rough sidewalk and keeps reopening the wound because she keeps running barefoot

6. i feel sometimes deficient for experiencing so little concern, so little fellow feeling when my children injure themselves—sometimes we are with others when they hurt themselves and others express something like empathy—I just can’t, unless things appear truly serious, muster it. perhaps I am a cold mother, or perhaps my supply of compassion is drained daily by 8 am, they hurt themselves a hundred times a day. the physics of walking, running, climbing is brutal to learn but it just seems like they should learn it faster?

7. the headbutt, not painful just maddening, is for some reason what sends me over the edge. my instinct is to make a mental note to research this later, to find some sort of evidence that a very mild physical discomfort registers as the most intense pain to someone in a state of overwhelm (unfortunately the same findings would have to apply to my children’s overreactions when they’re touched with comparable mildness). later, after i’ve eaten and breathed, while putting him down for his nap he will headbutt me in the face and this is when I just start weeping. “What’s wrong, mom?” he says over and over until I say “I’m sad.” “Be happy!” he says four times. “You headbutted my face,” I sob, then turn off his lights and leave

8. earlier today she opened a jar of nail polish and painted half her face and half her brother’s face in Sally Hansen “Beet-ing Heart”, as well as a plush pokemon creature and miraculously none of my clothes even though she did this inside of my closet. the two spent 30 minutes in the tub while i scrubbed them with different solutions recommended by reddit until finally just calling it with about 70% polish removal achieved

9. we had a child lock on the door that led out to the driveway/street which the 2 year old first figured out how to unlock and then promptly broke — we need a replacement but as of yet I have been unable to properly research what alternate design would best fit our needs

10. A

11. what is this world we live in where i am on the verge of breakdown and you have to go back to a meeting to talk about something you don’t even care enough about to ever explain to me? if you’re here and i’m here and i’m in distress and you can’t even comfort me then what is our partnership for? what is partnership for—i don’t know how to ask for what i need, I got bored of talking about it three years ago, I can’t make you responsible for the feelings that i do so little to solve myself. did your coworkers hear me scream? do they know you had to leave to help in a “crisis” which in the end amounted only to a bleeding toe while trying to make avocado toast? i can’t even handle that without calling in backup? a mother without a partner working-from-home has no choice but to tend all emergencies with her own two hands—what would I have done then? i’m soft. i only knocked on the door in case you were free, i didn’t mean for you to hurry out if you were busy

12. i am trying a new thing where i try not to police or regret my overflows of powerful emotion, just make sure everyone knows not to take them personally

13. this morning I went on a run, 2 miles, without hip pain for the first time in months—my app told me it was by best mile time ever! new PR! Maybe it spiked my cortisol too much. Maybe I can’t run. Maybe i can’t emotionally run I mean, even I can physically. But I thought running was supposed to make you less stressed

14. I don’t even know what phase of my menstrual cycle I’m in. I think I need to finally educate myself and start tracking my moods at different phases of my cycle. It would be nice to be able to blame that mystical force which is also so conveniently real

15. i also think I should research how to reset or rest or retrain your nervous system, why have i never seriously done this? i think because doesn’t seem like something I would do. it seems like if I have to work on fixing my nervous system it would be an admission that I don’t deserve to just scream, and I think I really do deserve it

16. this weekend a friend gave me a copy of Ducks, Newburyport because he had two of them. noting the tome on our dining table the next day S asked “what is this book about?”, which gave me the opportunity to explain stream of consciousness to her. by way of example I tried to narrate out loud my own stream of consciousness, which I realized was not possible to do even close to honestly

17. Age 7

18. It comes out flawlessly.