Red Lining

Troy’s behavior lately has been off the charts disobedient. He’s testing his limits and our patience, and I’m sad to say that our patience is pretty much non-existent now. He cries about everything all the time. I think this is the thing that drives me most mad…the constant, incessant sobbing. And he’s unintelligible when he’s doing it, which makes it worse. Because if you can’t understand him, then he thinks that he needs to scream to get his point across. But screaming the most important word in a sentence makes it nearly impossible to understand the point of the sentence.

And so it escalates and escalates until he’s a screaming, slobbering mess. And then he starts to scream because he has “burgers” in his nose. And then he screams because he’s choking on snot. And then he screams because the choking makes him cough. The coughing makes him cry, and we’re in an endless loop.

And there’s no reasoning with him when he’s like this. He ceases to listen to you at all. He won’t answer questions, he won’t say things calmly so we can understand, he won’t allow himself to be comforted. In fact, he’s physically violent. He slaps, hits, kicks, pushes, and throws things. This crap will go on for over an hour, and my wife and I are just done. Both of us, ready to check out and leave. Used to be in the past that one of us would remain calm and step in when the other was past their limit. But with his current phase, neither of us can keep it together.

And I mean push us way past the red line. I was so mad at him this morning that I was physically shaking. I had so much negative adrenaline pumping through me that I couldn’t hold it all inside. And what did he do that drove me to that, you ask? He kept repeating one phrase over and over and over and over again. No matter what I asked him or tried to do for him, all he would do was push me away and scream, “I want mama.” But here’s the thing, he’d already made his mama so livid that she had to step outside to cool off. She didn’t want anything to do with him, which I tried to explain to him. But like I said, there was no reasoning with him.

It’s revealed an ugly side of both my wife and I that we don’t like. We’re going to have to try to find another way to handle this, because we can’t go on like this. It’s easy for the daycare teacher to sit there and say, “Stay calm. Don’t meet him where he’s at because it’ll just escalate the situation.” I’m not saying the logic isn’t sound, but it’s easier to say it than it is to live it.