Pendulum

It has happened before, and it will happen again. At least I’ve figured it out enough to have predicted it this time.  My kids have switched places.

Daniel and I had a pretty horrendous July.  It persisted straight through our two weeks in Chicago and Wisconsin, placing it easily in the top two most challenging trips we’ve taken. He was a pill pretty much every day.  He was defiant, he was rude.  He treated every suggestion of a potty break as a personal affront, and had more poop accidents than I care to remember.  He napped well under 50% of the time. And though I had family around, I was without M, so ultimately EVERYTHING came down to me. He had his lovely moments too, of course, but there were so many struggles in every day, that’s the overriding memory for me. To call it exhausting and infuriating would be an understatement.

All the while, Rebecca did her very best to compensate for her brother’s behavior.  Sunshine and light. Extra easy-going. Sometimes she’d even be kind enough to point it out for me, in case I didn’t notice.  “Mommy, I’m doing good listening!”

But I knew the day would eventually come.  Daniel would, someday, come down from this peak of intensity.  Which is not to say he would fundamentally change his personality, just tone down the extremes a notch or two (or fifteen).  And so he did, almost immediately after his birthday.  Suddenly we had several good days in a row. Less of the life-and-death struggle that marked every naptime for the previous six weeks. Dramatically fewer random acts of defiance. Cooperation and manners. Much improvement in attitude and performance in potty training.  General sweetness and snuggles and smooches.  Whew.

Naturally, that means it’s Rebecca’s turn to lose her mind.

My get-along girl is now that much bossier, that much more aggressive.  She’s sneaky and sassy.  She has thrown a few epic tantrums, the likes of which we haven’t seen from her in quite some time.  She’s clingier, she’s whinier.  She lost her mind when the (familiar and beloved) babysitter came so M and I could go to a wedding.  I’ve even noticed her doing a very three-and-a-half thing that I read about in Your Three-Year-Old: a sudden drop in confidence in her physical abilities.  Some of it is amusingly dramatic – she collapses on a heap in the floor and is suddenly incapable of standing back up.  The trials and tribulations of putting on her shoes can send her to the pit of despair.  And while she used to scurry up the climbing wall at our favorite indoor playspace in no time flat, she now gets three steps up and then comes back down.

Without the live-in experiment of twins, as well as reading up on this age and talking to those who have gone before me, I’m not sure I would realize both of these sets of behaviors were coming from the same developmental place.  Daniel’s defiance does not have a direct equivalent in Rebecca’s behaviors, they express this unsettled age in different ways.

This will pass, it always does. It will come again, too. If I’ve learned anything in my last three years of parenting, it’s that all the phases are temporary.  Enjoy the good ones while you can, put your head down and get through the tough ones.  They all pass.