The energy thing seems to be evening out during the week, but the drain is still hitting me good midday on weekends. Yesterday, I woke up cheerful. Oddly happy, though I didn’t get to bed until ten-thirty. None of the family was up yet, so I came down and did some recording on the novel. I got about five pages done when my wife came downstairs with our son, and I played with him for a while. I asked my wife if it would be all right if I did my run earlier rather than waiting for our daughter’s post-lunch nap, mainly because I’ve lost the energy to push myself out by then, and she suggested I do it during our son’s eight o’clock nap, so I got out and did six and a half miles.
When I got back, I was feeling good and I took both the kids to the library and the park and walked through the arts fair down the street while the booths were being set up. I took the two-kid stroller where my son got to sit in the front and my daughter sit/stand in the back. And that thing is a behemoth. I kept having to step on the back edge and use both hands to prop it up and clear the curb when crossing the street. By the time we got back, I could feel it, my energy was dipping. I ate a yogurt and string cheese and popped a B12 vitamin and put on coffee. The thing is, I’m okay with it happening after I’ve already done my run for the day. I can get my daughter down for a nap and get a quick nap in myself. I only need fifteen to twenty minutes, which I actually got lying on the living room floor while my wife made our daughter lunch, then I’m good for the rest of the day, but I need something.
Despite the energy dip, I had a good Saturday, excepting a brief moment during the morning when I was playing with my daughter. She’d cupped both her hands over my ear, and before I realized what she was doing, she screamed at the top of her lungs directly into it. My ear drum rattled painfully. The pressure made it feel like it was going to burst. My body seemed to just take over, and I grabbed her pretty quickly and thrust her away from me. Not as gently or carefully as I would have liked. Has this type of thing happened to anyone else? My reaction scared me because it happened without forethought. It was as if my body, being assailed in such a way that could have seriously injured one of my senses, took control. In retrospect, it scared me because I worried I could have hurt her when I pushed her away. It’s been coming back to me all day. How could I have reacted differently? It wasn’t even like getting angry and losing control. There wasn’t anger in it. It was instead a simple reflex. I’m not sure there’s anything more frightening.
In the end, she was fine. I held her close, and she cried a little bit, more because my reaction had scared her than anything else. But this bothers me, mainly because while I might have joked here previously that I don’t think it’s a bad thing if your kids are scared of you, I don’t think they should be scared of you physically. My meaning, to be clear, is that I think your kids should recognize your authority and power to enforce a punishment such as taking away privileges or sending them to their room. I suppose to some extent what I want to hear is that this isn’t an unnatural bodily reaction to a potentially harmful stimulus, but I’m not even sure that hearing that would make me feel that much better about it. I would really prefer it if nothing like that were ever to happen again. But kids don’t always know the harm they could cause. I just hope that she’s learned. I really don’t want to get a call from pre-school that she ruptured a kid’s ear drum by screaming into it. I sat her down and talked to her, and she seemed to understand that what she did is not okay. As for me, I’m not sure there’s a lesson here, which is why I find this problematic. You might be able to train your body not to react reflexively when it’s in danger, but overall, I’m not sure that would be a good thing.
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