If I hadn't known how it works from my first child, I would have been a psychological wreck with my second child. As it happens, I am JUST scraping by. JUST. I am still not accustomed to it and on the verge of devastation. Desperation.
Let me explain. Around the age near two it seems, the child chooses one parent it will be more buddy buddy with. My first child chose me. For example she really cried hard even if I was going to take the garbage out and leave the apartment. Sometimes I changed my mind and stayed in, damn the garbage, let it stink the place up. I don't want to see my daughter cry.
She would demand that I give her baths, brush her teeth, feed her etc etc. Not always, I mean she loved her Mother too of course, but it seemed she preferred me to take care. You know, it was the bonding thing.
My second daughter didn't choose me... at all.
I know the story, or at least I should, but no, its really affected me detrimentally. Still. Its been going on all this school year. For instance, I wasn't allowed to brush her teeth. Well, as opposed to our first daughter, our second daughter hated having her teeth brushed. Granted, I understand now, some of the back upper molars were slow in coming in and they must have hurt her longer, but it usually took both of us to hold her and brush her teeth. Me holding and taking good care not to break her neck and my wife brushing. They say you should start brushing from the time the first tooth comes in, but I m certainly afraid cleaning her teeth is going to be a mental scar on her for lifetime. I hope not. I don't want her to have fake teeth by the time she is a teenager just because she doesn't clean, just because she associates it with being held down like a rabid dog. Actually many times she did look like a rabid dog while we were brushing.
And she WOULD NOT let me give her a bath or shower. You can guess what happened the couple times Mommy had meetings in the evening around bedtime and was away for bath time. Shower not bath. I was careful not to get the water in my second child's eyes because they hate that. But still it was a torture for both of us. For her by the fact that I was breaking the rules and giving her a shower and not Mommy ("Mommy isn't home and she wont be back before bedtime"). And me on my eardrums and my nerves. Surprisingly I didn't lose my cool and kept my patience. I talked the whole way through the process. "It ll be real quick, just a minute, lets just do your legs, soap time, here, there, everywhere. We almost got it. Its going to be done soon. Its OK, no Mommy wont be back. Just about done. Lets rinse off. We are rinsing off. Just about done. No, Mommy isn't home, she cant do it. Just about done. Yep, just about done. Come on now, lets just rinse off the soap." Against the back drop of "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, wahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I want Mommy, IwantMommy, IwantMommyIwantMommy. Mommy do it Mommy do it." All at above 100 decibels in an echo chamber that is our bathroom. I don't know how they measure nerve stress. What is the measurement for tension on the nerves? Meanwhile, my older daughter is running around happy as a lark, oblivious to the struggle going on, oblivious to the mental anguish that both me and my tiny daughter are suffering.
But the biggest problem is that she wouldn't let me touch her with any clothes. OK, actually when Mommy wasn't home, the biggest problem was the shower. She let me put on her diaper (when she still was wearing them) and her pajamas. The strange thing was that she would not let me touch her with clothes if Mommy WAS home. And this caused me to break every time.
Bedtime should be a family thing and a parent team effort so I wanted to do my part. My wife would give the shower to the younger one then tell me to get her pajamas on while she did the other girl. Oh, boy I'm laughing now in retrospect, but ... not going to happen. I have written that getting on those jumper pajamas or the jumper t shirts were killers, I have to add to that list the diaper. Putting on a diaper is easy these days. Just get it even around her body and connect the tape. But she just did not want me putting the diaper on when Mommy should do it. So she would get the tape connectors unconnected after I got them together. She would wriggle around so I couldn`t get the diaper even on both sides and then even when I did get it on, she knew how to take it off so she would run away from me back to the bathroom and take it off and tell Mommy to put it on. Or she would take it off and then go run and hide in her spot behind the clothes shelf, naked squeezed next to the wall. It was a lost cause.
If I did get it on, best to go straight to the pajamas and get them on too. But that was even worse. She would be wriggling around so hard there was no way I could get the leg in the right pajama leg. If I got it in, she knew how to pull it out, then it would be inside out and I would have to change that. If she got away while I was doing that she might take off the diaper too, back to square zero. Or she would put her leg in the wrong leg on purpose. Or both legs in one leg. My patience had snapped in the diaper faze. Now it was getting dangerous. I realized this and knew I had to step back. If I hadn`t stepped back I would be a yelling maniac, or worse, the yelling maniac, rabid dog. "I¨m going to get that diaper on you. Rrrr Rrrr. I want to put that diaper on. You come here so I can get that diaper on you." It drained me. I was morally fatigued, not to mention tired. But I really only wanted to put her diaper on. That is all I was asking. Is that too much to ask for? "I want Mommy, I want Mommy, Mommy do it, Mommy do it." She ran away stark naked crying. Yep, I guess too much to ask for. My fists were clenched, I was gritting my teeth, "Grr, I just wanted to get on that gd diaper. Rr", I said spewing spit through my grinding teeth.
As I said, devastation and desperation. Frustration, patience gone.
Dads, if this too is happening to you, whoa, take it easy, just give in, step back. We don't want any injuries or worse. Watch out, at your age back injuries are quite common. Spleens are quite sensitive too.
Needless to say Mommy is doing her meetings in the morning. I can be at work after 11. My littlest girl is enthralled with puzzles these days. So Mommy has a meeting at 9.30, comes back close to 11 and finds us happily putting together a smurf puzzle. There you go, no worries. But I still have back problems.
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