Most days, my husband leaves for work before the boys and I are out of bed. Mondays are the only day that he gets to stick around for a glimpse of our morning routine: there’s the struggle of getting our snoozy kindergartener out of the top bunk, the repeated reminders that the second grader must brush his teeth before creating inventions from masking tape and Dixie cups. Monday mornings can be particularly challenging, so having everyone together for that hour usually starts the week off right.
The first Monday of this month was also my husband’s birthday, so I set the alarm and got up first to make coffee and a birthday breakfast. In honor of the extra special Monday, I decided to skip the Aunt Jemima instant mix and whip up a pancake batter featured in the New York Times cooking blog. I corralled the boys, they scribbled out homemade cards, and we stuck a single blue candle in the center of the pancake before my husband came downstairs.
As we all dove into our Monday morning feast, smiles faded as we began jawing on the dense gummy dough disks on our plates. I’m not sure if I made an ingredient error or if there was a recipe typo, but the pancakes were downright inedible. With the huffiest of all Monday morning grumbles, I pushed the pile of dirty dishes from the counter to make room for the toaster so that I could crank out some frozen waffles to eat on the walk to school. My kindergartener began intensely whining about a microscopic scab on his kneecap, while I frantically packed lunches and hunted for missing library books. By this point, all the birthday spirit I had felt when I woke an hour earlier had been obliterated. My husband tried to laugh it off, but I was CRABBY. I pouted as I dumped the rubbery FLOPjacks in the trash; I sighed dramatically as I zippered lunch boxes. I winced as the kindergartener’s kneecap injury became a level 1 trauma and his sirens began to wail. My husband gave me a “thanks anyway” half-smile as he hurried out the door.
As the morning went on, I reflected on these minor morning mishaps and realized that my pancake-induced dejection was severe and immature. As it so often does in life, reality did not match the still-life portrait of a birthday breakfast table I had painted in my head. Things did not go my way, so I threw a fit. It was a bona fide mommy tantrum complete with eye rolls at my cheerful husband, sharp and impatient replies to all the “Mommy?” requests, and general moping for at least 20 minutes. My expectations were not fulfilled, I put forth effort and I failed, and I felt disappointed, frustrated, and frenzied as I was forced to move on and face daily responsibilities. While the root cause of these feelings was trivial, I realized that the emotions were not. I thought back to my annoyance as I bandaged the invisible injury on my kindergartener’s kneecap. His sustained shrill whining was certainly incongruent to the occasion, but he was wrestling with some amalgam of Monday morning emotions that were real.
I often find myself responding to my boys’ tantrums from the logical adult pedestal. When one of them loses their mind over not getting a green fruit snack in their package, I attempt to point out the inanity of the situation, how unfounded the outburst is, and then enumerate all the reasons why red and yellow fruit snacks are just as delicious. But these cathartic releases have nothing to do with rational thinking. While we generally get better at managing the outward expression of intense emotions as we age, it is a defining human characteristic to feel them. While I can’t promise that I will successfully stifle my grin or curb my frustration the next time one of my kids launches in to histrionics over a bunched up seam in a sock, I do think that confessing my own mommy tantrums might make me have a bit more empathy.
