Ode to a Two-Year-Old and Coffee.

I took a sip of my morning mug of coffee and saw my hands were still stained with red. Red paint from yesterday. The day before, my two-year-old had happened upon the open Amazon package I’d left on the coffee table. I was in the kitchen dishing out dinner. Meanwhile, he unscrewed the lid from a bottle of red acrylic paint and poured its contents onto the carpet. Then he opened yellow and experimented with that too. By experiment, I meant did his best imitation of the spin cycle of the washing machine sloshing yellow everywhere — at least, that’s what I imagine was going through his developing, toddler brain. In just moments, he had splashed and tracked little footprints down the hallway, across the wood floor in the entry and down the length of the living room. I guess this makes a solid argument for an open-concept floor plan (that my 1970-built-house lacks).

 My husband was returning home from a cardiologist appointment for my oldest daughter, a collective four hour trip. Every 6 months for the last couple of years the refrain is the same: heart function isn’t optimal, but surgery timing isn’t ideal. We wait and see. She has Von Willebrand, a clotting disorder that makes heart valve replacement options tricky, so we’re allowing her heart to go as long as it can before any serious damage sets in. Being told your daughter will need open heart surgery any moment in the future is stressful. Being told she needs it “right now” is extremely difficult. We’ve been through three open-heart repairs so far. She’s a brave kid. 

 I say this all to help explain my mental state (as if in having five young kids you would have any mental state besides cluttered and overworked). Having heard the heart appointment went well, I let out the breath I’d been holding in since that morning and began dinner… and then my 10-year-old ran into the room to tell me about the paint. I called my husband in tears and asked if I could sell my two-year-old son to the circus. Not that that’s even a thing anymore. 

But maybe, just maybe, you can relate? With toddlers, there are these brilliant moments where your heart could burst from pride. Then there are the times where the guilt is almost palpable. This morning is one of the latter moments. Right now, said child is dancing around in the living room in paint-stained pajama bottoms, none the wiser to my circus yearnings, and I’m sipping on coffee I keep meaning to cut back on. All night I let the thought that there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my child, haunt me. Maybe it was all the Tylenol I took in pregnancy due to my herniated disc. This is that inevitable ADHD rearing its head. This is only going to get worse as he becomes more capable. I literally had nightmares of him climbing the counters with a waterfall of chaos pouring from the upper cabinets.

Have you been here? Has your child scribbled with sharpie all over the door to the house, ripped open a gel pack from a food delivery service and smeared the coolant into the carpet, proclaimed the word “poopy” without ceasing all day long, ripped the labels off your carefully curated homeschool work bins, dumped shelf work, thrown every wooden circle off the perpetual calendar, broken the antique mirror in the hallway, stuck a lego up his nose… and yes this is just all one child. Baby number four who flipped from head down to breech position after a failed 5 day induction. Baby William. My lone c-section kid. The one I surrendered my body over for fully, layer of layer of flesh and tissue cut, to ensure he’d be safe coming into this world.

I tell myself this morning, with long sips of coffee as I rationalize, first of all, this is temporary. All of it. Every day is a new day. Don’t despair and think every day will be the same. You are human. He is a little human. It’s a marathon, a collective series of events added together that make a childhood, a life. One blip of overreaction over spilled paint is just that. A blip of a memory. One I’m recording here for when the next blip occurs. 

Secondly, we learn from our mistakes. William will learn, eventually, not to pour out the paint he happens upon in the future. Maybe not this week, or next year, but eventually he will develop (at least some) executive function. His brain is developing. His prefrontal cortex that controls impulsivity is growing leaps and bounds. I will learn to remember this fact. 

Thirdly, thank God for coffee.