The Tantrum Singularity
Children as adorable natural disasters
I am in the middle of some kind of tantrum singularity. As I started working on a huge writing project about the shared parenting experience of dealing with toddler tantrums, I was stymied by my actual toddler having frequent tantrums, and then, nature had its own tantrum, which caused me to have a tantrum.
There’s something about watching my daughter absolutely lose her shit in a hotel lobby, her body becoming somehow stiff and floppy at the same time, the volume of her screams rattling my teeth in their sockets, that feels like witnessing a force of nature. A male wren dive bombing a hawk that’s attacking its nest with no regard for its own survival, a tidal wave drawing the lapping surf into itself in the service of destruction, lightning transforming a redwood into a towering inferno, a 21-month-old human throwing herself to the ground because she drank all of her juice. Terrifying. Majestic.
Tantrums are natural, I’m told. Nothing I’ve seen about my own daughter has indicated that she’s exceptional for her age– little kids just freak out, with regularity but with no warning. This happens because small children can’t self-regulate. They get all these feelings before they have the mental tools to manage them. Mother Nature hands out emotions like an unscrupulous salesman at a gun show. No need for any demonstrated skills at all in handling this rage! It might randomly start firing off! If you need help, ask your parents. (But what if the parents haven’t developed the skills necessary to regulate their own emotions, you say? Impossible!)
My family and I have been away from home for the last week-plus in Northern California, in a part of the state known as the “Emerald Triangle.” It’s called that because emeralds are green, like marijuana plants, and so much marijuana is grown up there that sometimes when the wind changes direction you can smell the dankest pot in in the entire world illicitly growing nearby. (In this part of the state, every business accepts cash and it is best to stay on marked trails.)
But we didn’t go up there for the weed. We went up there for the sights, and the weather. The Sonoma and Mendocino coasts are gorgeous and not as crowded as Big Sur, which last time I was there four years ago was choked with Teslas. The weather along the coast north of San Francisco is cool and cloudy, a break from the heat of Los Angeles. August is a good time for a change in scenery. I’m a temperate-blooded person at heart; sometimes a girl just wants to wear a sweater and read, or do some embroidery, or stare placidly off the oceanside cliffs and think about sea shanties.
Unfortunately, nobody got to enjoy much humming on the seaside cliffs, because a “working vacation” with a kid too young to fully entertain herself simply means that the parent with the more flexible schedule spends the time the working partner is working entertaining said child, and the parent with the less flexible schedule spends all the time they’re not working on taking the toddler out of the house so the main caregiving parent can slowly unclench their jaw.
And a “working vacation” with a toddler who is well into her dysregulation phase is even rougher– the times the working parent is not working or managing the stress of the caregiving parent are “family time,” which consists of the toddler yelling gleeful nonsensical syllables every time the parents try to converse (actually pretty cute), or screaming angry nonsensical syllables every time the parents try to converse (less cute, but still sometimes a little bit cute).
When you have a kid and you don’t have outside support– like when you’re on vacation, or when you can’t afford childcare, or you don’t have family nearby, or when your kid’s daycare shuts down because somebody caught foot-and-mouth– you don’t get to hang out with your spouse much, and then in the few moments you can steal, you often find yourself talking primarily about the kid. She did something funny. She did something very un-funny. She did something new. She did something that was funny but that we didn’t want to let her think was funny so we had to try not to laugh. The longer I live inside a nuclear family as a parent, the more convinced I am that the nuclear family structure is a scam designed to sell more kitchen appliances. Two people is barely enough people to take care of one toddler. You need at least one more person to occasionally tap in. Vacations can get rough.
Just as I was at peak readiness to return home and to the simplicity of our normal routine, nature had other plans. A hurricane was headed toward Los Angeles, which meant that we had to make a decision on the fly to extend our time away for long enough for the danger to have passed and for any cleanup to have begun. We didn’t want to risk being on the 5 during high winds and rain, and at the time the information that we had could not guarantee that we wouldn’t.
So we split the return trip into two legs. Things did not get easier, although it was nice to be tired in a totally new setting. The drive from the north to the halfway point home took almost twice as long as Google Maps said it would, and by the end, understandably, our daughter was screaming that she wanted meatballs. (Honestly, same.)
Yesterday, I watched at least a dozen harbor seals leap and splash their way across Monterey Bay in a serpentine line. I watched an otter snag a crab from the seabed, close enough that I could hear the crunching sound as it gnawed on the animal’s legs. I am sitting in the same place again today, watching a group of otters floating while holding hands. It’s really fucking cute, but I’m scared today like I was yesterday, because my daughter is once again sleeping in a playpen mere feet away, and she’s only about ⅔ through her nap time. If she wakes up too early, she’ll be in a rotten mood for the entire 5 hour car ride home, and she won’t go to bed in her own crib, and she’ll wake up throughout the night– I can see the falling dominoes of one screwed up nap, and I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle it.
There was an earthquake in Southern California on Sunday, just as Tropical Storm (née Hurricane) Hilary’s floppy wet arms started slapping at Los Angeles. Friends who were actually there received something called a “shake alert” on their phones just as the jolt started. I wish somebody would invent something like that for toddler mood explosions. “She doesn’t like this cup! Duck, cover, and hold on!”