“AM I DOING THIS RIGHT?” MODERN PARENT CONTEST
My Failed Promise To Never Fight In Front of Our Kid
Dejar de gritar! Stop shouting!
This post is an entry in Modern Parent’s “Am I Doing This Right?” writing contest.
Ya basta! Enough!
This image of my 3-year-old standing between my husband and me with her long slender arms stretched out as if to separate us, and yelling ‘Ya Basta’ (‘Enough’ in Spanish) is etched in my mind as an epic parenting fail. One I always imagined I would avoid.
I always thought you don’t fight in front of your kids. If you have to discuss an issue, you agree to do it later when no kids are around, you ‘park’ the issue and get on with the day-to-day. For the last year though, the ‘day-to-day’ is all-consuming and ‘later’ never comes.
Our daughter stopped infant school in March 2020 and has been home every day since then. She has a part-time nanny who helps with her education and I can go to work and my husband can get stuff done. We live in Cuba. There is always a lot of stuff to get done.
Hubby barely wants to leave the house anyhow, worried as he is about COVID and catching it in some unexpected way. The fact that I go out and work irks him because I am taking more risk, but the alternative is not having food to put on the table and with his appetite and my 3 year old, that is not an option. I need to eat too, of course, but I still have a chunk of baby weight to lose!
Our living situation has become a pressure cauldron, one from which my husband and I rarely escape together, child-free, to just take time out
Going out at all involves masking up, not forgetting the hand sanitiser, getting our toddler to pee one last time. Restaurants and cafes are all closed so if she needs a toilet while we are out, she’d need to squat behind a tree, she is not likely to co-operate with that.
Coming back inside involves dropping shoes at the door, then heading straight to the shower, dropping street clothes in a pile to be washed, and washing hands before everything else. If other people come to visit, I have to be ready with the chlorine-mix spray for the underside of their shoes, then suggest a place they can leave their bag that we can later disinfect.
When we leave the building in the elevator, I try to remember to touch nothing, or at least not with my fingertips. If I do, and my husband sees me, he gets very stressed and whips out his anti-bacterial gel. If our toddler’s mask drops down even a centimetre, he scolds me for not noting and yanks it back up.
My husband and I never argued before we had our child. Medium writer Kristina God recently mentioned how marriage expert John Gottman found that two-thirds of couples saw a big drop in their relationship satisfaction and happiness in the first three years of a baby’s life. Yeah, that figures.
There are days when all his constant fretting drives me mad, even though I do see that he is mainly right. This all exhausts me, we argue, I tell him ugly things, sometimes it feels like we are just releasing pent-up energy. Our daughter sees this all. She should still be innocent and playing somewhere with other kids.
Instead, she is caught up in this Groundhog Day of two adults spending WAY more time together than they ever anticipated when they met 2 years earlier, one of them a risk-averse Cuban, the other a Brit who has reined in her risk-taking side to be a good Mum, but still, you gotta live.
When I was a kid in the UK, I played outside in the rain, cold and snow, created holes for the worms so I could dig them up and put them back in, jumped in every muddy puddle I could find, and as I remember, never got sick. My husband had asthmatic tendencies growing up in Cuba and for his first 8 years was kept home a lot and wrapped in wool. No surprise then we view parenting pretty differently.
He grew up in a big family where mainly everyone got on, there was drama, tears and laughter, but they pulled together. Family was everything. Meanwhile in the UK, my Mum and Dad fought like cats and dogs, my sister and I too, and as neither parent had a relationship with their sibling, my sister and I grew up without cousins, aunties, people who were not our parents but still family.
I swore to God I would not let my kid grow up hearing arguments all the time, that she’d be happy and stable and have example parents to look up to. Then when she was two, coronavirus happened, and now I have to hope I can still keep my promise.
Looking at the bigger picture, our daughter is a very happy girl who spends most of her time screaming with laughter, singing, creating stories with her dolls, cuddling with me, helping Dad to clean beans or Mum to bake cakes. We have moments all dancing together or cuddling in the mornings and when everything is good.
I do my best to show her happy parents that love each other, and hope that that is enough to balance out the times when the poor girl has to be the one to tell Daddy to stop shouting, or Mummy to stop talking when ultimately, both of us just need a break from it all. I just wonder to myself if we are messing her up, or if we are OK in this difficult time. Are we are doing this right?