“Sitting in my house, I can hear my son screaming and
crying, which must mean the bus is here. I’ll interpret it as the harbinger of doom.”
As I typed that tweet, I questioned my mothering skills. I
was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea and my phone, listening to my son
scream and tantrum outside, and my first instinct wasn’t to help him – it was
to make fun of him. It made me feel like a crappy parent for about thirty
seconds until he walked through the door and I learned the entire fuss was over
a wet post-it note. That amount of drama should only accompany a botched
kidnapping attempt – or at a minimum some type of bodily injury.
I wonder what my neighbors think. Am I supposed to panic and
rush out the door every time my child wails? We discuss proportional responses
at home, but he is theatrical. What makes him great on stage also makes him
difficult to parent. He feels everything and expresses all of it and sometimes I
feel guilty about trying to squelch that. There’s a fine line between teaching
him to handle his emotions and criticizing his personality. Our emotions make
us human. Too often, the process of growing up becomes not a lesson in learning
to control our emotions, but a lesson in ignoring them.
When my son is upset, he shows it. He knows why. As an
adult, I still have trouble showing emotion in front of people and sometimes it
takes me hours, if not days, to reflect and figure out why I feel the way I do.
I look away and concentrate on something mundane if I feel like I’m going to
cry. I swallow my anger and grit my teeth because I never want to be perceived as
“creating drama”. I busy myself with daily activities if I don’t want to think
about something that bothers me. Essentially, every emotion I feel is expressed
through quiet detachment.
But what is creating drama? And why does it have such a
horrible reputation? Drama makes people feel. It makes us discuss and recognize
our faults. Essentially, drama is conflicting emotion. So what is life if not
drama? Isn't all great art, theater, and literature something that makes us feel? We all want to feel connected on a human level. I don’t want to win a competition of who can feel the least. I want to grow,
learn, think, and make people – even myself – uncomfortable at times.
For all his faults, my son does make me feel emotion.
Usually that emotion is anger if he’s screaming at the bus stop, but it’s
something. It’s real. It's uncomfortable. It’s life. Luckily, I have a nice set of also-very-real industrial earplugs
I can use to tune him out until he goes back to school next Tuesday. Perhaps I
should offer the neighbors a set as an early holiday gift.
P.S. If you read this for Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam you are probably sorely disappointed. I'm not original enough to come up with a title and I kept thinking of their "Lost in Emotion" song, so I listened to it multiple times and then couldn't make the video link in. Frustration. This particular emotion I'm feeling now is frustration. Someone give me a cookie.
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