Anger, Freud, and Mothering

“I’m cutting you in half and filling you with poison.”

I imagine the play therapists would have a field day with that one.  Ordinarily, I would simply be happy that the boys were engaging in pretend play of any kind.  But I was still thinking about our doctor’s visit from Friday.

Jeff and I met last Friday with a doctor who works with kids who have a profile similar to one of our boys.  He was encouraging and informative in general.  Occasionally, though, he would drop in a line that my heart hurt.

“Psychodynamic theory would say that many of his anxious behaviors are his way of controlling his aggressive feelings toward you, which are intolerable to him.”

If I heard that about anyone else’s kid, I would probably laugh.  I mean, is it really a surprise that kids are often angry at their parents?  Or that those feelings are scary?  Or that some kids might be so afraid of being mad at their parents that they divert their energies to obsessing about the clock?  You don’t need to be Freud to understand anger and all of the crazy things we do to deal with it.

But it wasn’t someone else’s kid.  It was our kid.  Were we intolerant of the boys’ negative feelings?  Were we so threatening that the boys had to mask all feelings of anger?

I remembered when Zach was three and he was upset because I sent him upstairs for a timeout.  He came down the stairs shaking with anger. “I. Do not. Love. You,” his eyes widening in fear as it became clear to him what he was saying with each new word.

I don’t think I overreacted: “It’s okay to be mad at mommy, but you still need to go upstairs.”

But then I went in the bathroom because I thought I might cry.  I knew it was stupid. Who cries because a toddler says he doesn’t love you in the middle of tantrum?  Still, it shook me up. It hadn’t yet hit me that my kid and I were not always going to feel lovey-dovey about each other, that we wouldn’t always agree that I knew best, and that he might get as angry as I did at times.

I pulled it together. left the bathroom, and made peace with this new stage of development. At least I thought I had.  But the doctor made me question myself.  What if we were stunting the boys’ healthy expression of anger?

So imagine my delight yesterday when the boys, led by a friend who was over for the afternoon, spent thirty minutes killing me in progressively gruesome ways.

“Tie her up so she can’t escape!”

“Now throw a lightening bomb on her.  Yeah!  She’s electrocuted.”

“Kill her again.  And then make her into Frankenstein!”

“I’m cutting you in half.”

And finally, “I’m cutting you in half and filling you with poison.”

Son A wasn’t too sure about this game at first.  When either Son B or his friend dealt me a fatal blow, Son A would rush over to resuscitate me. Eventually, though, he joined in the homicidal fun.  After five minutes, he even smiled.  So did I.

On the inside of course.  On the outside, my tongue was hanging out of my droopy head while I did my best impression of having been impaled to death.  After all, you don’t need to believe in Freud’s death instinct to have fun playing dead.

And you don’t need to be a mother to know that kids have a lot of big feelings, not all of them pretty, and that it can help to try them out on her on a Sunday afternoon.  You don’t need to be mother; but it’s a special kind of wonderful if you are.