Sometimes I Hate My Toddler

by Alexis Barad-Cutler

[Everyone gird your loins because I’m about to make a big confession here. And I am especially talking to those moms who seem to never have a negative thing to say about their children. The ones who are always beaming at their offspring, even when the entire roll of toilet paper has been thrown into the toilet bowl and the organic chicken that cost more than a cute shirt from H&M is now on the floor, being happily gobbled up by the family dog. So here goes:]

Sometimes I really hate my toddler.

I really do. Not in a cute, “I want to write him up on my local Brooklyn listserve and try to give him away,” kind of way. (The ad, if it existed, would read: “FF: One almost-potty-trained, high-energy, destructive, whiny, annoying toddler. Will leave on stoop for pickup any time.”) I mean in a base, ugly, shockingly awful kind of way.

I know I am not supposed to say these things. It is very not maternal of me. And when I have said this out loud to people, the response I usually get is, “No, you don’t really mean that.” But yes, I do. The feelings sometimes are so real and so overwhelming. And confusing. They seemingly come out of nowhere and can happen anytime. Like when my infant is sweetly nursing on my breast in bed in the morning and smells so good and makes all these hungry, “num num num” noises when all of a sudden my toddler takes his hard plastic penguin toy and smacks it across the baby’s back.

“We do not hit!” I yell, maybe a bit louder than I should. And at the same time, mildly aware of the mixed message I’m sending, I forcefully shove my toddler away from the baby. The toddler falls back onto the bed, cackling and kicking his legs at us both, hoping to strike a target. Gleeful. He comes at us again, standing up this time and wobbling like a punch drunk fighter. Wack! He smacks the baby once more. Baby flinches, unlatches, and lets out a wail.

“I want to hit the baby!” says my toddler. “I want to hurt!”

“NO!” I say, pushing the toddler away. He is at this moment not my child, but instead my bratty little brother trying to pull my hair and rip my favorite doll’s dress. (How easily I can transport myself back in time, and shrug on my old childhood skin.) My first impulse is to call out to my husband, to tattle tale on my son like a child to her parents and say, “He’s hitting us and won’t stop! Do something”. Childishly, I want my husband to help me dream up and enforce some elaborate punishment, to make our boy pay. But my husband is in the shower, and can’t hear what’s going down and besides, I need to be able to handle stuff like this on my own sometimes, so this is all on me.

I scramble out of the bed, my breasts still uncovered from nursing, and hold the baby high over my shoulder so that his brother can’t get to him. I hide out with the baby in a corner of the living room, helpless like a frightened woman standing on a chair as a rat scurries across the kitchen floor. I watch my toddler continue his rampage. He throws all of the pillows off our couch, whacks his sippy cup off the kitchen table, and grabs the nice photograph that his teachers from his new school gave to him as a “special gift” to help get the kids comfortable with the new schoolyear, and rips it into shreds.

“I ruined it!” he says proudly, like an emperor watching his city burn. I am livid. He is ruining everything: the quiet moment in bed with my newborn, the house, even something of his own that he prized. My first impulse is to show him that he is going to regret what he has just done. I want to be mean to him. So I say, “Yes, you did ruin it. And now you are going to be sad because everyone else in your class will still have their pictures and you will be the only one who doesn’t. And isn’t that just too bad for you?”

“Yes, it is, I ruined it!” he says again, stomping at the little paper pieces at his feet. “It’s broken! It’s broken!” He dances on the city’s fallen ashes. He doesn’t regret what he has done at all.  I could almost go right up to him and hurl him across the room. Almost.

How does a mother like me, someone who strives to be a Beyond Mom, reconcile these complicated feelings? I view myself as conscious, together, composed, and am trying so very hard to balance “everything”, yet I fall into these strange spells of rage against my toddler. I don’t like it.

In moments like these, I remind myself to take a breath (the breath is so important) and as I am breathing in, I take in the sweet milky baby smell of my newborn. I am reminded that he is here too, feeling my rage, exposed to both the toddler’s and my mood swings. So I meditate on trying to see my toddler for who he is beyond just being an extension of my own body, beyond something that grew inside me and is now navigating the world on his own. I try to see him more clearly. And as I do, he starts to appear to me as not so much a force of destruction but a bundle of raw feelings that are far more fluid and untamed than mine. The same way that I can simultaneously love every fiber of his being but also really hate his guts, he has even more complicated feelings about me too. About how I brought this other little guy into our lives and am showering lots of attention onto him and giving so much of myself, my body, to this other person. My toddler doesn’t know yet how to rein his own feelings in. He does not have the tools. But I do.

The pieces of the photograph are now crumpled and torn far beyond repair.  “Oh no!” he says, finally realizing this. He crouches on the floor, poking his finger at the pieces.  He looks up at me, the smile gone. “I broke it!” he cries.

The spell breaks. I don’t hate him anymore. I feel so sorry for him. The baby and I go over to him and I take him under my spare arm. “It’s OK,” I say. “We can try to get another one. I’ll ask your teachers for another one, alright?” I take him by the hand into his room and insist that we build the toy penguin a castle out of blocks. That is really what he was looking for all along. Some attention and care from me. I know it is hard to attend to the emotional needs of a toddler and the physical needs of an infant at the same time. It is hard, but it is possible. I am capable of doing both.

The well of patience that mothers are supposed to have does seem to have a limit. There are days when I am positive I have reached it. But the thing about mothers, the secret that sometimes we even keep from ourselves is that there are reserves underneath the bottom of the well. We just have to keep digging deeper and have faith that under the concrete surface there is earth, and then moist earth, and finally, the water, a little deeper still.

Originally published on Beyond Mom.