Mommy Tantrums

            If moments of failure are when we learn our best lessons, I must have learned a huge lesson last night.  It came in the form of “Leanna’s” appearance.  Leanna is what my mom used to call me when I was in trouble. (My middle name is Leanne, but it wasn’t enough just to use that, she felt the need to mutate it.)  Anytime I have one of those moments where a grown woman throws a fit of three-year-old proportions, I think of it as an appearance of “Leanna”. (Yes, I know the quotation marks aren’t necessary, but I like the way it looks.)  It was one of those moments where every part of me wanted to find an innocent household appliance to physically assault.  You can be proud that I did not throw anything, hit anything with my fist, or fling myself to the floor and thrash around.  Don’t think I didn’t want to, but luckily I held it together at least that much for the sake of my poor husband who had to endure said tantrum.  I did, however, say things I shouldn’t, portray an attitude unpleasing to God (and my mother), and speak to the man I love in a hateful tone (I mean REALLY hateful, not just a little). 

            Too often, I try to justify my bad behavior with the fact that I am almost always sleep deprived.  None of my children (three year old included) sleep through the night consistently.  Don’t bother giving advice; I have tried every published method out there.  The twins are doing better for the most part, but when they have a bad night, they tend to do so at the same time and for several nights in a row.  Even then, if they both wake up only twice, it means the house is disrupted four times, add in once for Princess, and I have been awakened five times throughout the night.  Dean can sleep through more than I can and tends to fall asleep faster, but he by no means gets that much more than me.  For some reason, if I tell him not to worry about getting up with the twins at night, he doesn’t so much as roll over.  If he tells me the same, I wake up, prepare the bottle for him, and hand it to him.  I guess I just can’t help myself.  Last night was a particularly bad night.

            Dean has been sick lately, and the medicine he is on makes him sleepy, dead to the world sleepy, sleep through a tornado sleepy, you get the idea… After two nights of no assistance, I was just about to the point of sleeping in a recliner with my children in my lap just to get some sleep.  Add to that the stress of a long work week, Dean’s mysterious illness, and other small added stressors, and I was in a bad place mentally.  The twins fell asleep in their bouncy chairs early, so I thought that meant a good night was in store...yeah, right!  They slept for about an hour and a half, and then woke up screaming.  If ever you have been stressed by the sound of your infant screaming for reasons you can not discover, not to be comforted, you know where I’m coming from.  Now take that and double it, add it to you at your most tired, throw in you at your most stressed, scatter some dirty clothes on your floor, drag out four loads of clean laundry that need to be folded, and you’re there.  I’m pretty sure I had an eye twitch.  I decided to put Tank in his bed to “cry it out”.  I put Tinker Belle in her mini crib after she fell asleep sitting up in my lap, exhausted from her nighttime scream.  Dean picked Princess up off the couch where she fell asleep in the midst of two crying babies and carried her to bed.  Then, we settled into our bed for the night.

            When putting the mini crib in our room, I wanted it to be conveniently located to me so that I didn’t have to get up and down to tend to the baby in it.  However, that means that getting out of bed requires me to crawl to the foot of the bed and get down from there.  Tank decided to play his chances at outlasting me and screamed at the top of his lungs (in case I couldn’t hear him) for no less than 30 minutes straight.  He cried so hard that he almost vomited.  When he finally stopped, I flipped on the video monitor to see his position in the bed.  (I can’t just leave it on, because it has been shorting out lately, adding to the stress as I lie there and imagine him in a dangerous position.  You know, because cribs aren’t built to keep babies safe or anything...) I couldn’t seen him, so I got up out of bed for the third time angry.  (Oh, did I forget to mention those other times I got up when I went in to peek at him crying?)  When I say I was angry, I mean it.  I was sincerely angry.  I was angry that I was tired.  I was angry that I needed to sleep so that I could go to work the next day rather than being home with my kids.  I was angry that my kids don’t sleep and other people’s kids do.  AND, if I’m being honest, I was mad at Dean for being sick and my kids for not sleeping well.  I know these feelings are horrible, unfair to those around me, and ungodly, but it is how I felt.  ENTER LEANNA:  When I got up, I mentioned a little more loudly than necessary that it was in fact the third time I got up MYSELF, verbally resigned myself to never ever sleeping again, threatened to hook myself to a caffeine tap around the clock, stomped (oh yeah, I’m not joking) down the hall, peeked in on Tank and realized he had been playing opossum on me.  He didn’t even look around before he started screaming again.  I picked him up and began asking him why it was that he wasn’t sleeping and felt the need to cry.  I got no answer.  Too tired to fight it, I just took him back to bed with me.  I had already begun to feel remorse for the way I acted towards Dean when I went to get Tank.  It may not look like much in writing, but there’s a certain body language that lets a husband know when his wife is throwing a fit.  I think both twins had a little bit of a bellyache, because they fussed most of the night on and off, which added to the anger and the remorse at the same time and further confused my spirit.  We slept with the electric dust buster running most of the night.  (Go ahead and laugh, but I promise it works.) 

Although I apologized to Dean (and God) as soon as I got back with Tank, the fit took all night and most of the morning to fizzle out completely.  I was still angry that I was so exhausted.  Throughout the workday, I tried to put things back into perspective, so that when I got home I could give my family the best of me.  Isn’t that what they deserve, after all?  I had to go to the store before coming home, because we were almost out of everything including: toilet paper (I was praying that last roll would last until I got home), paper towels, trash bags (we had actually been out of those for a couple of days), and other miscellaneous items.  I chose the Dollar General store because it is faster than Wal-Mart.  I was looking for a bill organizer (which I can’t function without) and stumbled upon a book in the book section (Dollar General even has one!) titled Managing Your Moods by pure chance.  The forward is by Mary Graham and the book was put out by the Women of Faith ministry.  I couldn’t even pretend that God didn’t put that there just for me; it couldn’t have been more obvious if he had thrown it down and hit me in the head with it.  You have to love our heavenly Father’s sense of humor.  I mean, of all the titles…. Anyway, I knew immediately that I would buy it, and I flipped to the back cover just to see what it said.  Mary Graham was quoted on the back: “God has created us as emotional beings, capable of a wide range of feelings.  Obviously, His desire is that those feelings to not control us.”  Okay, God, I hear you.  I flipped through the inside, and couldn’t help but stop on the chapter titled “Temper, Temper”.  The main verse for the chapter was Proverbs 21:19, which states, “Better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and angry woman.”  OKAY, God, I HEAR YOU!  It’s true though.  When Dean is mad, while it’s not pleasant, it’s not explosive.  He gets quiet, voices his anger, and goes outside to work it off or turn it into an ulcer, or whatever it is he does.  When I get angry, I am ANYTHING but quiet.  In fact, I can’t say enough.  I can tell you why I’m angry on several different levels and in several different ways if I don’t feel you understand me enough.  I hate it, though, that I can’t seem to keep control over Leanna.  Not only is she unpleasant, she is uncontrolled, which is what this control freak hates most about her.  Also, she leaves me groveling to those around me, which I HATE to do.  I know that part of my spiritual growth is learning to tame Leanna into something lovely and humble.  I don’t want to get rid of her spunk (I think of her as the type to cut off the guard’s ear in defense of Jesus, just like Simon Peter in his love for the Master), I just want to harness her energy into something glorifying to God.  Maybe then, I won’t have to rename her, she could just be Rea.  I hope that this post doesn’t just act as a humorous moment in your day.  While I obviously don’t mind laughing with you at myself, I want other women out there to know they are not alone in their fits.  We live stressful lives, after all.  Sissy sent me some scripture the other day, and one of the verses I loved the most said, “I will seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 33:14).  It resonated with me then, but means so much more today.  I have been her mentor for a long time, but God has grown her into a wonderful accountability partner for me.  I’m so glad that sometimes she is now the mentor, not the mentee.  It helped me realize that sometimes I need to pursue peace rather than unleashing Leanna on the world around me.  Maybe you need to make the same promise to yourself. 

For those of you who are known for your mommy tantrums, let’s make it our goal together to be better.  Here is my prayer for us all who suffer from Leanna syndrome: “Dear God, we love you.  Forgive us for our anger, led us through our stress, and comfort us in our despair.  Help us to seek peace and pursue it.  Help us to show love, not anger.  Help us to control anger even when we feel it is justified.  Help us to be more like you.”