NO they say. And start in with a whine….
Right there is when I begin to lose it…
Intractable problem. Not amenable to common sense solution.
Refusal to cooperate.
So two questions:
1. How to fix the problem
2. Why does it affect me so much?
I feel like it is a normal, decent, even beautiful, wonderful, excellent world suddenly gone hostile and insane. Without warning, without reason. It is the utter madness of a child’s world of selfishness, irrationality…
Like a bucket of dirty cold water suddenly poured on the sunlight of your life…
There is no apparent solution… the children need seperating… being hostile, intractable and uncooperative they won’t stay seperate… they’ll protest mightily at being seperated, each
claiming it wasn’t them and in the doing they’ll accomplish what you’ve been trying to prevent:
Waking their mother.
They’ve already accomplished a destruction of your own chain of thought and actions… Stopped you in your tracks. Taken over your life..
Now any attempt to deal with the problem that you can think of will make things, in the short run, worse, immediately…
This is the constant child threat: to bring noisy insanity into the situation at any time..
And maybe that’s why it affects me so much. Brings a wild anger up in me immediately.
That’s a primitive reaction that in a primitive world would be sufficient to solve the problem – because a display of anger would drive them away… And ‘away’ is all we need. I wouldn’t even need the display of anger I’d only need to quietly and swiftly walk up to them and pick them up and throw them away….
In a bush setting it would work. In a cave… throw them out of the cave…
But here in this setting it won’t work….
But that’s maybe the dynamics, the reason, why it affects me so much.
Now what’s the solution? In this case mother has solved it by waking up and taking over..
In other words the children won. They controlled the situation. They got what they wanted. They defied their father. They woke their mother. The organised the world to suit themselves.
But if that were not to happen – what? how?
To take one child away would probably work. Inasmuch as anything ‘works’. i.e. if might be a noisy fight and chase to get that child out of the bedroom – by which time mum is awakened
anyway…
That one child is going to fiercely proclaim that it is not his fault.
To take two children away would have the same result with the other child this time loudly proclaiming it is not his fault… he was there minding his own business…
In fact you can rarely know who’s ‘fault’ it is. The first child may well have been minding his own business but upon the appearance of the second child, looking to participate and maybe find a playmate, it is the work of but a moment to manifest rejection, hostility, to lash out with a foot, to slap down an extended hand…
Which is what the second child is essentially claiming happened…
But they are both inveterate liars, of course…
And they are ultimately both at fault for neither will help mitigate the situation, each will happily help to increase the drama, the noise level, the unreasonableness – the chaotic,
cacophonic insanity….
So a Solomaic ascertaining of guilty parties is redundant, futile, academic, pointless.
Your dealings with children have to cope with dynamics operating on a much rawer level – a pre-justice level, the level of ‘might is right’, the level of naked aggression, total commitment
to one’s own ends, total abdication of any consideration for anyone or anything else…
This impossibility to solve the problem is very, very common.
You are frequently forced into a situation like a general committing his troops to hand to hand combat, or less colourfully perhaps, a cook making an omelette: you will have to break some eggs, you will have to accept some casualties.
Harm minimisation is what you go for. Cut your losses.
The solution: I can only see one. It is the one mentioned that I think would instinctively happen in a primitive setting. To quietly and quickly walk into the bedroom, trying to give no indication of what you’re up to, and then quickly seize both of the children and drag them out of there and take them to the furthest room you can….
There’ll be screams and scuffles and they may even escape your clutches. They may well wake mother anyway and she may misinterpret what she sees and wake angrily, demanding you leave the children alone…
It all may go to hell in a handcart…
But that’s where living with kids is…….. get used to it