She was kicking and screaming. I was looking over my shoulder.
My daughter is now a fully fledged toddler and with her new found steadiness on her feet comes an ever-extending will and the first glimpses of tantrums.
I was out with her last week when I nipped into a cafe to give her some lunch. This place is a cafe by day and experimental music venue by night. I’ve spent many evenings here with John but have never been during the day before. Turns out the noise level is A LOT lower in the daytime. The cafe was busy and almost all the tables were taken but there was a hush over the entire place. People were quietly working on their laptops or having seemingly serious conversations very discreetly.
So as I got Méabh out of the pram, wrangled a high chair over only for her to kick and scream and refuse to go into it, I was very aware of how much noise we were making. It’s in situations like this that I realise what I believe about what other people think about children and their behaviour.
The whole arena of your child ‘behaving themselves’ in public is very fraught. We all have confused feelings and ideas about it. A friend told me a few weeks ago she’s been ignoring her toddler’s tantrums at home and it’s working very well – the drama usually peters out within a minute. But in public she finds it hard to endure even a few seconds of her child screaming for fear of what other people think.
Another mother I know was talking about her baby still waking up in the night for a feed when she said, “It helps to remember that babies are not bad, manipulative creatures.”
I’ve noticed that for a lot of people there’s this turning point in parenting. At first, pretty much everyone is very gentle with babies. Their needs and motivations are not questioned; they’re only a baby after all. But over time something else begins to creep in. By the time your kid is 2 or 3 if you’re seen to be too gentle with them you might get criticised. People start sternly saying things like, “My child would only pull that kind of behaviour once,” or “They’re going to ruin that child,” or “ They need to teach that child who’s boss.”
This tells us something about what we think about human nature. It tells us something about what we believe about ourselves on some level. Many of us carry the belief that left to our own devices we’re inherently bad or lazy or wayward. And so we must police ourselves – and others – to be good and productive members of society.
This is the biggest hurdle we face when it comes to gentleness. I’ve said before that I believe being gentle with ourselves and each other is the answer to all of our problems. But we don’t trust ourselves enough to be gentle with ourselves. We don’t trust each other enough to be gentle with each other. Somewhere deep down we fear that if we’re not beaten into submission our darkest traits will emerge.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that if we treat ourselves and each other with fierce and vulnerable gentleness then our finest traits will emerge. Our real selves will emerge.
