Being Proactive with my Son

As regular readers of my blog might remember, I am working on my quickness to anger. With the help of my own continued focus on my behavior, I have really made a lot of headway, but I am also noticing that I have a lot of work to do. Last week had been a real test of my willpower. I have had a muscle spasm in my back since New Year’s Eve. Thankfully, I had a prescription refill available for me through the pharmacy. However, the medicine, when I have been taking it, has made me not only tired and groggy, but also cranky. This is not a good way to feel when you have your six year old son around.

Because of my own awareness of my resolution, I knew from the beginning that I was going to have to be cognizant of how easy it would be for me to get angry. I knew that things that I usually saw as insignificant were likely to set me off, now. When I picked up my son, I was already feeling irritated. I can’t even pinpoint why I was feeling irritated, except that my back was really hurting me a lot, and I hadn’t taken any medication since the night before (the pharmacist told me not to drive while taking this muscle relaxant.)

Because of my pain, I didn’t feel like doing much more than driving either. I really wasn’t in the mood for my son’s general volley of questions (he always wants to know the “why” of everything, or know “what does that mean” – in general, I always answer these questions because I would like him to maintain his natural sense of curiosity). He started asking me questions and I could already feel a wave of irritation rolling over me. But then I realized that he really had no concept of how I was feeling – none whatsoever. As much as I just wanted to blurt out, “Stop asking me questions!” I bit my tongue. It was a split decision. I knew in that moment that I needed to show up as something different from what I felt, at least until I could make my son understand how I was feeling and why.

So I stopped him and said, “Noah, I need to talk a bit about the way I am feeling. I want to finish what I have to say before you ask me any questions.” Being a natural for asking questions, I knew that I was going to have to tell him more than once to hold his questions until I was finished. This is part of “knowing your audience.” Because I knew the way my son was, I knew what to expect from him. I briefly explained to him my problem with my back. I told him that I was going to be able to be the normal Daddy I was because I was hurting. I told him that we would be doing a lot of low impact stuff at home because I was going to have to take some medicine that was going to make me very sleepy. And because I was going to be sleepy, we couldn’t go other places.” He wanted to ask me a question at this point because he didn’t make the connection between the medicine and not being able to go out to places. I reminded him that I wanted him to wait until I was finished before he asked questions.

He did wait, and he did listen. And he still asked me a lot of questions! He played mostly by himself while his Daddy continued to recuperate. After I had a nap, and the pain had subsided a bit, I was able to help him with a puzzle.

If I hadn’t taken the time to have this talk with my son, our day would probably have turned out very differently. Given the opportunity to recover, I was a much more fun Daddy than I would have been if I’d just decided to snap at my son every time he said something that irritated me – which is probably how I would have been if I hadn’t been proactive.