The Longest Shortest Time

The Song You Made Up

*NOTE: Please read this one to the end, where I make my first ever request for YOUR audio! —HF

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For awhile there, Sasha did nothing but scream when she was with me. If other people were around, she would giggle and play tag and show off her (yikes!) tricks on the monkey bars. And if I was nowhere to be seen, I hear she was loads of fun. But when it was just me and her, it was screaming, screaming, screaming. All the time.

Sometimes I would know what was setting her off: I wouldn’t give her ice cream for breakfast, or I’d leave the grocery store when she’d kick me from within the shopping cart, or disappointment over Daddy staying late at work. But a lot of the time I had no idea what the problem was. I had heard this story on Morning Edition a couple of years ago, which talked about research showing that tantrums aren’t logical, and that the best way to handle them is to just back off. This video was included in the story’s blog post, illustrating a typical tantrum:

Once the kid hits a fever pitch scream, the researcher said, you know the tantrum has reached its peak. That the anger will soon be replaced by sadness. Because who can keep up that kind of energy for longer than a few minutes?

I’ll tell you who: my daughter.

For her, the fever pitch can last for hours. And there is nothing I can do to stop it. Not even doing nothing.

Or so I thought.

Here was our routine. Mornings would begin with Sasha running into our bedroom at 6 a.m., demanding that we get her breakfast. And if we didn’t jump to attention immediately (which we never did, because who does?), she would hit us. Poke our eyes. Yank the covers off of the bed. We tried a lot of things to get that behavior to stop. But ultimately every attempt would end in screaming. If it was a school day, she’d scream the entire way to school. She’d stop while she was at school, and then pick up right where she’d left off when I came to get her. Screaming in the car the whole way home. And it would pretty much go until bedtime. Sometimes way, way past bedtime. I was burnt out, to say the least.

One morning, just after my husband had left for work, the screaming kicked into full gear. This was not a school day, and I really didn’t know how I was going to make it through another 11 hours of this. Sasha was on the kitchen floor, an absolute hurricane of arms and legs and roaring, and I was trying to stay calm. Just telling myself to remain passive until she worked through it. Then she yanked her shirt off. And her pants. And her underpants. I wasn’t too surprised. Angry stripping had become a new addition to her tantrum repertoire. But this time she did something different. She yelled at the top of her lungs, “I want to be a baby! I want to be a baby!” She didn’t usually say anything that would give me any clues about what was at the root of her aggression. So I perked up and attempted to tackle the puzzle.

“You want to be a baby?” I asked her.

She nodded and the screaming morphed into loud crying.

I started racking my brain, trying to figure out why she might want to be a baby. “Do you miss diapers?” I guessed.

She nodded again, but it didn’t seem like I’d hit it exactly. She had been really proud of her potty-usage lately. Babies, babies. What could it be about babies? Oh, right! The day before we had gone to meet Sam, newborn to my friend Karina of episode 6. I think I must’ve made a big deal about Sam, and Sasha must’ve been able to tell that I enjoyed holding him. She had been touching him lovingly too, so it didn’t occur to me that she might’ve been jealous at all. After all, he wasn’t my baby.

“Was it hard for you to see me holding baby Sam?” I asked her.

This time she nodded with vigor and the crying turned into hyperventilating breaths.

“Did it make you wish I’d hold you like that?”

“Yeah,” she whimpered.

“Do you want me to do it now?”

“Yeah.”

I carried her over to the couch and cradled her in my arms. “This is how I used to hold you,” I said. “This is the position you’d be in when you ate from me.”

Here eyes were locked with mine. She was mesmerized. It was the most quiet we’d had between us during waking hours in months.

“I used to sing you songs,” I told her.

“What songs?” she asked.

“You Are My Sunshine mostly. And then there was one I made up.”

“Sing it,” she instructed.

So I did.

baby-parts-square

I touched each body part, naming it and singing about how I loved it,  just like I did when she was a baby. And when I was through, she asked me to sing it again. And again. I must’ve sang it for about an hour, adding more and more verses. Fighting back tears all the while.

And I will tell you. We have not had a screaming fit since. I mean, okay, we have your standard toddler tantrum every now and then. But nothing that makes me dread waking up. I think partly it was the song, and revisiting her babyhood together. But mainly, I think the change came from the fact that Sasha is starting to be able to verbalize her emotions. Last week she did this in a big way a few days after my niece was born slightly prematurely (congrats, Josh and Nana!). “I don’t want another baby to be in the family,” she said all bleary-eyed. “I want to be the only baby.” She got it out, and we moved on. For the first time in longer than I’d like to admit, I have been seriously looking forward to spending time with her. Instead of wrestling through hours and hours of screaming, we do things like play hide and seek in bamboo mazes and lie in the grass chewing on chives.

bamboo-maze-1bamboo-maze-2

After the singing incident I called Alyson, the mommy-baby social worker I sometimes talk to, and she said she thought it was really interesting that the song I made up was about the body. Sure, she said, lots of moms sing about their babies’ body parts, but she felt like I was particularly fixated on it. And that maybe because my core issue when Sasha was born was bodily—the busted episiotomy, not being able to walk or stand up—maybe, just maybe I was making up a song about loving her perfect little body because mine was so broken. She said now that she was thinking of it, maybe we all make up songs that relate to our core issues. Her mother-in-law has an issue with attachment, and her song was about keeping her son close; Alyson’s issue has to do with family illness and her song dealt with that. I ran this theory by Anne, my music teacher friend from episode 1, and she said that her song was about poop, and, yes, she does have an issue with poop.

So now I bring this to you. What song did you make up to sing to your baby, and does it relate to some core issue of yours? Please leave answers in the comments. BUT ALSO. I would love it if some of you would take a moment to record yourselves singing your song (we won’t judge your singing voice!) and email it to me, along with your analysis of what it means. Also include your name and where you’re from—or tell me if you don’t want me to use your name. Recording yourself is so easy to do now on phones, so you have no excuse. Do it now, before it slips your Mommy mind! Sorry, dads, didn’t mean to exclude you. Your singing is welcome, too. If I get enough submissions, I’ll make a special episode with them. You guys, this will be so cool if it works. Help me make it happen?

*UPDATE: You can hear the story with the made-up lullabies that listeners submitted in episode #25!

Baby photo: Richard Frank

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