I can remember being a kid and being so pissed off that I told my parents I wouldn’t join them for something I really wanted to do. I wanted to go to that fancy dinner or that concert, but something else had happened that made me upset, and I threw a tantrum. I got mad, slammed my door, and said I wasn’t going.
Usually I was tortured and simmering with resentment the whole time they were out. Mad at myself that my explosion had left me home alone. Feeling like they had deserted me and didn’t care because they had actually gone. Wishing someone would come back and convince me to get out of my anger.
Now here I am, the mother of teenagers who can throw a similar kind of torturous tantrum.
We were going to a gala magic show, something we look forward to every year after a week of magic shows in the streets. They are incredible performers, masters of their audiences in the way stand up comedians are, playing with us as much as performing for us.
We had arranged to go with another family. Their kids are friends with ours. And there was a budding and withering teenage crush in the mix. One of my kids had told one of theirs that he liked her. She liked him too. And somehow this thing that had been easy and playful between them became painfully awkward once it had been named. A friend was sending him messages telling him he should kiss her. He barely knew what to do with the fact that she liked him, much less what he was now apparently supposed to do about it.
That evening, because of timing, we couldn’t go to the restaurant we had planned on and chose somewhere closer to the theater. This became the disaster.
He refused to eat with us. He stayed in the car. He got angry and waited for us there. He dismissed every plea and request that he come inside for dinner and then every attempt to get him to join us for the show. We got rudeness. Anger. Aggression. Frustration.
We thought we knew the underlying story. But he was completely convinced it was about the pizza. And maybe that is where parents get themselves into trouble. Because sometimes we can see that the size of the reaction does not match the thing in front of us. We can see the girl, the embarrassment, the pressure, the awkwardness, the fear of doing the wrong thing. We can connect all the dots. And then we start to believe that because we can connect them, we know what is happening inside our kid. We don’t. He may not know either.
That leaves us in a strange position. Something is clearly happening. He cannot tell us what it is. We cannot tell him what it is without taking something away from him. And meanwhile, he is being an asshole. So what do we do with that?
He gets to have whatever feelings he is having, even if he cannot explain them. And he still does not get to treat everyone around him badly because he is overwhelmed. We do not have to decode the feeling before we put a boundary around the behavior.
I can say, I don’t know what is happening right now. You may not know either. But you cannot speak to me like that. You cannot punish your sister because you are angry. You cannot make everyone else pay for what is happening inside you.
And then there is the harder part: leaving enough room for him to figure out what is happening without doing the figuring out for him. As parents, we are tempted to explain our kids to themselves. Especially when we can see something they cannot yet see. We want to say, this is about the girl. This is about embarrassment. This is about feeling rejected. This is about being scared. Maybe we are right. We still might need to keep our mouths shut.
Later, when things have settled, the conversation can change. Then we can talk about what happened to everyone else while he was having whatever experience he was having. His feelings are his, but his behavior affects everyone around him.
He may never arrive at the explanation we had in our heads. He may understand it differently. Or he may only be able to say, I don’t know why I lost it like that. That is somewhere to start. Because eventually what we are trying to help them build is a little space between having a huge feeling and making everyone else live inside it with them.
And in the meantime, there I am, standing outside a hot car trying to convince my kid to come eat pizza. I know something bigger is happening. I do not completely know what it is. He certainly doesn’t. He is treating me like shit, and I am having plenty of feelings of my own.
I am also not really sure what I am supposed to do. Keep trying to get him out? Leave him alone? Let him miss the dinner and the show? Stay close without making his distress the center of everything?
And I still have to decide what kind of parent I want to be in that moment.
