How to Get Perspective and Avoid Being a Frustrated Parent

There are, occasionally, certain aspects of the BC years I miss.

BC as in Before Children. Call it the fleeting wistfulness of an occasionally frustrated parent.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back for the world. In the aggregate, it’s hard remembering what I laughed at or found joy in before Sprocket and Tater came along. But yes, despite the larger attempt at unbotheredness, sometimes warm memories of talking to adults about grown up things or brunch with friends after having slept for ten hours have mocked me from afar. It’s usually in a moment of cacophony. Like recently when Tater wailed like a war widow from his crib, one of the dogs snorted snot directly onto my eardrum wanting fed, and Sprocket chipperly announced through her monitor, “I want to get up, please!”

All at 4:45 in the morning. Just, please, put the coffee in a syringe and slam it directly into my brain stem.

The state of things typically improves as my brain and body limber up under the influence of movement and caffeine. But not always. Sometimes the wheels seem to come off the day early and send me careening toward being a frustrated parent. It might be Tater has to be serially shuffled from baby station to baby station, defying diagnosis as to what’s bugging him. Sometimes Sprocket decides in the opening moments of our day that I have committed some grave sin – saying “Good morning,” perhaps, or asking her what she wants for breakfast, or having the gall to not be her mother rather than myself – and am unworthy of civil conversation as a result.

Sometimes, usually when Tater has just settled into a deep sleep, my dogs will bark to warn me our dear neighbor John is nefariously walking from his house to his garage. Or that Elmer and Joyce, the couple in their 90s from around the corner, are casing our house yet again as they walk by on the sidewalk. Or to tell me they need let out to murder the murder of crows who’ve made themselves mortal enemies by virtue of existing in the vicinity of the backyard.

Sometimes my wife takes it right across the jaw at work (usually figuratively, thankfully) and I struggle to know how to best support her.

Sometimes the house conspires against me, popping a water seal here and a light bulb there, just when I’ve got a dozen other irons in the fire.

It’s those days that can chew through my reserves and start hitting raw nerves. I feel like a desperate character from some cheesy old movie, running around with a wet blanket and dousing one fire after another. Nothing is seemingly good enough. Every meal is rejected, every suggestion balked at, every toy strewn through the house. It all threatens to bother me and make me a frustrated parent.

Those are the days when I tend to see some analogue of my old self on a restaurant patio, usually luxuriating over a drink. It’s hard not to bristle. Why am I sentenced to drudgery and frustration and constant motion when Dudley Do-Nothing over there gets to blithely stare into space over the rim of a chai latte for the better part of an hour?

To spare Dudley the indignity of my punting his teacup out of his hands, among other reasons, I’ve had to find ways to come to terms with and plan for the trickle, or torrent, of frustrations that can threaten to turn me into a frustrated parent:

Babies are just the worst.

They’re just drudgery sometimes, no way around it – and that’s if you can survive the initial onslaught of onlookers. Sure, you get your goochie-goo moments sprinkled in there (and thank God for those, otherwise you’d be hard pressed not to crawl between your box spring and your mattress and never come out). A lot of it is just a slog of slinging food in and diapers off between successive dropoffs in one baby bucket after another, all with scant sleep – and when your reserves are low, you’re more vulnerable to becoming a frustrated parent.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten for babies is treating crying like a foreign language. Just like I wouldn’t get overly irritated at a foreign tourist on the street trying to communicate with me in a language I didn’t understand, I try not to get overly irritated at my son for the same reason: We just don’t know each other’s languages. We focus on their not knowing ours, but the reverse is true, too. Their cries mean something, we just don’t always know what. Reframing things this way has made Tater’s crying seem like less of a drone.

Another helpful bit of framework is to remember babies are just balls of reflex and instinct. They are incapable of motive, or conspiracy, or being spoiled. They’re a hot mess of sunshine and spit-up and rage and weirdly colored poop whose issues you shouldn’t take personally, because they’re not personal. They just got unplugged from the Matrix. Everything is novel. They’re working on it. They’re going to be a frustrated baby a lot, but your being a frustrated parent in response will be completely lost on them and make every situation worse.

Toddlers can, somehow, be even worst-er.

Toddlers are at a real inflection point in life. Early threes was the peak (for now anyway, knock knock knock on wood) of trying behavior for Sprocket: Hours-long bedtime strikes, door kicking, seemingly straining to invent things to fight about out of thin air. That fire has slowly extinguished down to a low smolder now; still an occasional flare, but nowhere near as long and almost always explainable. We have a normal, sane person bedtime routine now rather than the nightly two hour dog and pony show dragging her feet every inch.

I can still recall myself, the very picture of a frustrated parent, lying face down on a mattress after a stupendously difficult put-down process. I just listened to myself breathe through the blanket for a while. I was relishing the silence before I had to go downstairs and start sifting through the devastation Sprocket had exacted upon the main floor, which looked like the urban aftermath in a Marvel movie.

With Sprocket, I eventually found the best tack was to try to get some perspective. I know it’s difficult when your kid is dominating your vision and howling, but I started looking at the situations as though they were tempests in a teacup. Sure, frothy in the cup, but I didn’t need to dump it in my own lap and own it by becoming a frustrated parent in turn. My policy became to acknowledge her feelings, keep her from throwing herself down a flight of stairs in a rage, but otherwise stay as shruggy as possible:

“I understand what you’re saying. You don’t want to wear shoes today. Sometimes I don’t want to wear shoes either. But there are sharp rocks outside, so that’s not an option. So you can pick which shoes, and I can put them on or you can, but you have to wear shoes.”

The important thing is to rid your voice of any emotion whatsoever. Say all of this as matter-of-factly as if you were reading a Wikipedia article which actively disinterested you. Seek to empower your kids, partner with them, walk alongside them, but don’t give them an impression they have power over you.

Otherwise they’ll invent new and exciting ways of wielding it.

Strive to Be Equal Parts Confident and Humble

Fight the temptation to see swirling chaos around you and surmise you’re doing something wrong. You’re almost certainly not. We tend to view parenting as a science – if we just adhere to this method and follow that algorithm and read this list of sagely books, then we won’t have any issues. The baby will softly coo until discreetly clearing his throat when he wants a bottle. Your toddler will sit primly with hands folded in lap waiting for the supper she’ll soon compliment you for, perhaps inquiring whether she detects a whiff of tarragon.

The reason this is a fantasyscape is simple: Parenting isn’t a master/apprentice relationship.

You could ably teach your child how to be an adult, but they’re not ready to be an adult yet; you’ve long since forgotten what it’s like being a kid, but that’s all they can manage at the moment. So you’re not, as a parent, operating from a place of confidence in having a handle on material you’re dutifully passing down. You’re learning and growing right alongside your kids, just in different subjects.

Parenthood is a rocket you have to finish building mid-flight.

It’s the process of helping kids observe and learn about the world around them that we call “parenting,” not simply the act of our learning best practices and dutifully executing them. Case in point: I heat up with anger like cast iron. It takes a lot to get me to the point of being a frustrated parent, but once I’m there, it’s hard to dissipate. Sprocket is aluminum foil, though. She can be in a blind rage, then ninety seconds later launching into prose about me being “the best Dada I’ve ever seen or saw.”

I’m still bristling, though, because I’m all worked up about the nonsense 91 seconds ago that, in my mind, hasn’t been resolved. We’re not done here! Why does she get to walk nonchalantly away from the flame-engulfed garbage truck of nonsense she drove right through the middle of the house?

But what would that look like, honestly? An armistice signing in front of the toybox? Her making a formal attestation of acknowledgment about the wrongness of her tantrum? It’s ridiculous when you take it to this logical conclusion, but the knot in my neck is hard to work out in the moment. It’s a flaw I’m working on…it’s slow going, but that’s the name of the game. Constant refinement, on fire, in mid-air.

The brunches will come back. Just with kids in tow this time. And they’ll still be frustrating, in as-yet unknown ways. But I’m prepared. As they complain about their beverage, or the flavor of jam on the table, or the scratchy tablecloth, or whatever they decide to seize on that day, I’ll be unbothered. Their complaints will be but distant braying as I greet the waiter and make a nod toward Dudley:

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

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This post was previously published on THEUNBOTHEREDFATHER.COM.

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