Mommy is not About the Blaming, Mommy is About the Solving

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This being the motto I made my older children write temporarily on the chalkboard on their bedroom door. Because it seems like the assigning of blame has lately been an obstacle to actually solving problems. And I will write about this as delicately as I can and let the child I am writing about read it before I publish, but not only did I have one of those moments where I felt like I was on my parenting game, able to see things from the kids’ perspectives and communicate my own insights in a useful way, but it turned into one of those moments where seeing things reflected in my kids’ life made me understand that I have the opportunity to grow a little too.

Mostly my kids are pretty peaceful, not unnaturally so, but we are lucky. They have a lot in common, are generally kind to one another and are busy enough not to have a lot of time to spend annoying one another. There are exceptions — my five year old’s sensibilities and desire to talk about things interesting to a five year old can get on both of his older brothers’ nerves, in a way that makes me suspect they’re slightly embarrassed to have once been five too… they’re so past Captain Underpants and that level of humor, and he’s developmentally just prime for it. We accept this, and if we’re parenting one-on-two, we try never to pair the oldest with the third child because it isn’t a pleasant combination. Still, even my optimistic self has picked up on a slight uptick in conflict between the older two boys, and unfortunately it mostly happens in the morning before school when I am too tired or too rushed to deal with it intelligently and creatively.

Which is why I was surprisingly grateful that the typical thing broke out Wednesday night after dinner. We’d gone for Indian food and our oldest son’s entree, samosa, and cheese naan had all come out flavored liberally with cilantro, and he is one of those people to whom cilantro tastes like nothing so much as soap, and his dinner was thus rendered pretty much inedible. I traded entrees with him, averting disaster, and even told him about ihatecilantro.com, which made his evening. So when we got home, he wanted to change the ninja/anti-pirate rhetoric on their bedroom door to reflect his loathing of cilantro. Only his brother doesn’t hate cilantro, and didn’t want the signage changed, felt betrayed that his brother was changing the rules of their room somehow, that he didn’t have the voice he though he should have in administration of their shared space.

I love that this is what they were fighting about, because it is sort of silly, and sort of not, and mostly easy to dissect, and we could talk about it and the absurdity of it made the discussion a little more fun. And while my oldest son should have been more sensitive to his brother’s feelings throughout the whole thing, he was already feeling respected and listened to enough that he could be mellow instead of escalating the conflict.

One of the dynamics that has been tricky in our family is the fact that I, as an oldest child, often get our oldest son’s perspective, and Raven as a youngest, generally gets the younger sibling perspective above all others. It’s an ideal of mine to see every conflict as having two sides and to honor both perspectives, but I know we don’t always achieve all of our parenting ideals.

One interpretation of many of the conflicts going on lately is that our second son is sensitive, both in the sense that he is aware of and takes care of the feelings of everyone around and also in the sense that he will read into others’ behavior much bigger meaning than was intended. This is one of those double-edged things, and as much as I treasure the first part, I need to accept the second part, but sometimes our oldest is bewildered at how he has triggered an intense reaction in his younger brother and will try to defuse the situation with his sense of humor, only times it badly and it gets taken as not taking his brother’s feelings seriously enough, or even taking pleasure in his brother’s frustration, and it makes his father really angry at him. Am I too charitable in interpreting his behavior? He does, probably, sometimes, enjoy the power to make his brother crazy just as his brother enjoys the power to get him in trouble, and yet they’re both pretty thoughtful, idealistic kids who I believe (optimistically?) enjoy the getting along better than the inflicting.

With a few iterations, the conflict between the two boys starts coming between Raven and me, each of us reliving the minor traumas of our own childhood families, and our second son learns to play up the victim role a little bit more, his older brother looks a little more defiant and misunderstood and angry at us.

So when we started trying to figure out how we could make the decision about the shared chalkboard, it started to play out by the same exact script as every other conflict lately, one child asserting, the other child retreating, and was about to land in the same place where one child looks like the victim of his brother’s dominance over everything, and it occurred to me that while each had found power in the role he always played, each was also trapped by the same role. And we kept talking about what was happening and I wouldn’t let our second son give me the same old version of the story, insisting instead, that if he wanted something he had to honestly ask for it, not complain about not being listened to before he had even really asked.

You think this is taking forever to write about, I was in their room for about an hour, asking them to really listen to what was being said. I had to use all the lightness I could muster, one child would retreat, hurt, and I would cajole, tickle, reassert that I wasn’t taking sides but trying to find a solution, making them repeat our new mantra, write it on the chalkboard. And I worry that our second son could think I am picking on him, that I am asking him to do all the changing, but, truthfully, I am a little excited that he has this chance to grow, to leave behind something that, carried into adulthood, makes relationships really hard (she speaketh from experience here!) That as I inventory how many times I have spent more energy on locating blame than on solving problems, this is something I want to work on too. And so asking him to see this, to let me stand by and help him with it, felt like a gift I could give him.