Tantrums, his and mine

I recently got ‘verbally warned’ at work for being too ‘aggressive’. Hands down, I raised my voice. I have been speaking my mind since a course of CBT alerted me to the fact that I am ‘a people pleaser’ who became ‘trapped’ by agreeing to do stuff that I didn’t want to do, and then feeling ‘resentful’ after. It was a pattern I recognised and have since tried to stop doing it. However, when you’re paid to do a certain job, I guess there’s only so much you should argue.

Ho hum, I got my wrists slapped.

Luckily, the day after was the day I fell off the cliff – the ‘disagreement’ happened to be the day of the staff Christmas party, on a boat, in bleakest January, naturally. After shouting down a colleague who had told me it wasn’t ‘my place’ to have an opinion about certain strategical matters, I proceeded to drink too much of the firm’s outlay of free drinks.

The agency where I work likes to down a particularly annihilating mixture of jagermeister and Red Bull, and given my mood, I was encouraged to partake. Needless to say, I was sick on my shoes before being escorted off the boat having sat on the wrong person’s lap.

Therein lies the reason for me not being able to get out of bed the following day, the day I fell off the cliff. It was not the hangover, which I power through at least once a week. It was the shame that accompanied it. But in a way it was a good thing that I stayed home that day. I got my doctor’s note. I knew I’d been acting a little erratic.

I know it’s in my nature to be prone to the odd hissy fit. Since infancy, I bashed my head on the floor from frustration, and have been bashing my head against various metaphorical brick walls ever since.  I know myself that I am highly strung (like a racehorse, I tell myself,) but it’s more like the frustrated, weepy, inward looking anger of the semi powerless – the child inside.

It’s also probably genetic, to a degree. My maternal grandfather had a temper, by all accounts, as did my father (now estranged) and my mum can huff and puff a house down when things don’t go her way. And then came Jonah.

Jonah came out blue and bleating after a difficult birth, and has howled consistently ever since. To begin with, my only weapon against this battery of noise was to stick my tit in his mouth and hope for the best. But as time went on, this method failed to deliver the required results.

As his approached two, he would give as good as he got at regular intervals throughout the night, and sleep deprived and pregnant with Ava, I gave up going in. But when I woke him in the morning, it would start all over again. Like all toddlers, he could shriek over the trivial, but with Jonah, the shrieking could be incessant, over things that seemed out of proportion even to the infant sense of logic.

The shrieking gave way to grumping and still, to this day, aged seven, he can wind up his roar, given badly informed routine changes or inadequate warning or simply asking him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

I’m not going to get into the whys and the wherefores. I’m sure parental mismanagement contributed to the tantrums as much as Jonah’s own perceptions of the world, whatever those might be. But in the process of trying to alleviate both Jonah’s – and my own – suffering, I became a tantrum expert.

My management style operated on much the same lines as the CBT I had received  after Ava showed up, and I fell off the cliff for the first time.

I would simply stop enabling Jonah’s tantrums. I refused to engage with them. I wasn’t cruel or neglectful, I simply ignored them until he had calmed down, then gave him a hug. For the most part, it was a strategy that continues to work to this day. I spend a lot of time actively not paying attention to my son. But when he’s being reasonable, I will give him as much as I’ve got. It’s a simple trick, and it’s not always easy when he’s bringing the house down.

But I would just like to point out the orders of magnitude of patience this strategy entails. So the next person who points out that I’m ‘aggressive’ can expect to feel my wrath. Now if only I could apply the same tactics at work.

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