"I love my son, but..."

One of my friends is at her wits end with her son. He’s about 15 months old and has been getting super upset if he’s not stuck on her like stink on poop. It’s been going on for almost 2 weeks. She gets home from work, her time is precious, and lately her choice has been to either hold her son or listen to him scream and cry until bedtime. She can’t do anything—when she makes dinner he screams and claws at her feet. Even playing with him doesn’t suffice…he needs to be held to feel content. The clinginess is affecting the whole family. Big sister is feeling it—her evening routine and special time with mom has been disrupted. Family dinners, which they value and work hard to make happen, are being strained by this behavior. A few nights ago my friend just handed the little guy to her husband and went and sat down in the basement just to escape the crying for twenty minutes. For the record, he’s not sick. She thought that at first, but it’s since been ruled out. Kind of a bummer—an ear infection would have been such a fast and easy fix.

My friend and I were recently on our way into the city for a girls’ night out. One of the first things she said as she stepped foot in my car was, “I love my son, but I really don’t like him right now.” We then talked about the clinginess and tossed around ideas for how to bring things on the home front back to homeostasis (if there is such a thing, right?!). We were with a third friend and the three of us had all worked together at a therapeutic day school with intensely behavioral and emotional little kids. Behavior shaping and limit-setting was the bread and butter of our work, so we really thought hard about how to squash the clinginess and screaming. I think the concept of the Oedipus Complex even came up! We thought and talked and by the end of the ride, the conclusion we came to was that her son’s behavior may “just be a phase” of development. 

Sometimes, things really are “just a phase” and your kid has to “grow out of it,” as simple and excuse-like as it may sound. Sometimes you’ve got to ride it out because there’s no apparent rhyme or reason and you could drive yourself mad trying to figure it out when in reality, you never will. Some phases don’t make any damn sense—your kid stops eating vegetables for 2 months, all of a sudden someone’s afraid of the car, and remember those weird times you yourself went through in junior high school? No sense! While we know you love your kid, you might not like your kid very much while you’re going through one of these times. You’re not excited to be with him/her through it. It’s normal to feel like this, so save your mom guilt for another time. My friend might just to have to weather the storm with her son and do what she feels is best for the family in the moment (to hold, or not to hold). And take twenty minutes a few more times in the basement to maintain sanity. A professor I had in grad school used to call this “sitting in the suck.” When things suck and there’s nothing you can do to solve the suck, you have to sit in the suck till it’s over. But, like all things…this, too, shall pass.