A Parenting Experiment

Last weekend, the girls and I were doing our usual library, lunch, grocery thing with a run to Home Depot thrown in for variety.

By the time we got to the grocery store, we were all tired and ready to be done and just go home.

But we still had to buy those darned groceries. So we traipsed through the store, hitting the produce section first, getting behind people who felt the need to squeeze every damned orange before selecting the only one they deemed perfectly firm. Ugh.

We’d managed to put blue berries, strawberries and mushrooms in the cart when Olivia announced, “I have to pee!”

When she announces this, she says it in such a tone that suggests that if we don’t get her to a toilet in the next five seconds, there will be a mess and it won’t be her fault. In the past two years or so, she’s been able to hold it for longer than that, but she seems to think that the moment she declares she needs to go, we need to make it possible for her to go right that second.

So I sighed and made my way from the produce department to the bathroom, which, of course, was all the way across the store. I was irritated that my seven year old needed to pee when I wanted to pick out five cucumbers and a couple of heads of lettuce. Ugh! The injustice of it all.

Obviously, I knew this reaction was unreasonable. We’d just come from lunch, of course one of us needed to pee. But knowing that didn’t actually ease the tension in my shoulders as I pushed the cart or take away my fierce desire to growl at the lady in front of us who was moseying her way through the store. I wanted her to get out of my freaking way!

While in the restroom, I decided to stop being such a grouch. I know, so simple, right?

Except, I took it a little further, I started speaking very softly and patiently to my children. Even though I didn’t feel soft and patient, I spoke to them as if I were the most saintly mother in the world.

It drove them both nuts to hear my talk like that. But it also lowered my blood pressure. I felt my shoulders relax. My anger and impatience dissipated. When Alyssa announced she had to pee fifteen minutes after we’d visited the restroom for Olivia, I didn’t sigh, I didn’t have to grind my teeth to stop myself from growling at her (mother of the flipping year, right?) I just turned the cart and headed back toward the restrooms, asking Olivia if she needed to go again since we were heading that way.

Of course, it helped that the sound of my voice irritated Alyssa to no end, which amused me as much as my own physical results from the experiment.

I’ve tried this a few more times this week, just to see if it continues to work. And what do you know? It does. It also still annoys both the girls, which is a bonus in itself.

It was a little experiment of faking it until you make it. I told Alyssa that, actually. I told her I was faking being patient and calm and it was working, I WAS calm and patient. I suggested she pretend that my voice didn’t annoy her so much but she wasn’t interested in being a participant in my experiment. She was too busy trying to put me in a headlock to stop me from being a calm, loving, patient mother. Some people are just impossible to please.