THE OUTER LIMITS

on learning new stuff, changing plans, & surviving our own emotions

I took a swim class a few years ago at the Y, and to the instructor’s enormous credit, I did not drown. I learned how to swim freestyle. I still feel like a sack of rocks tied to the thrashing central spire of a washing machine when I swim, but I can do it.

One of the tortures the instructor subjected us to was speedwork. Everything in a pool, even treading water, felt like speedwork to me— left me gasping and thinking I’d come this close to inhaling at least a quart of chlorinated hell and having to be resuscitated, poolside, by someone who would speak with exasperated sorrow of me at their dinner table that night. But Saint Kevin of the Y didn’t seem to notice that I really thought I might die; three times a week he prescribed sprint 25s or 50s (anything beyond that was not applicable for me, since past 50 yards I become so panicked and oxygen-depleted if I’m trying to go fast that I resort to dog paddle and find a floatie to grab). His parting advice to me, as I tried not to cry and situated my goggles in the least fog-prone position I could find, was “swim smarter, not harder.”

I understood what he meant, and occasionally felt some degree of mechanical functionality when I was able to focus on my form. But I never became what anyone could call efficient. I yelled to Saint Kevin over the watery din that I felt like a damn washing machine one time, forgot about it, and then a week or two later when I got sick and had to miss class, I got a voicemail from a number I didn’t recognize. “Hi, this is the Maytag repairman. Get lots of rest, and feel better soon,” was all he said, and hung up.

He pushed me to do things I feared and loathed, and also wanted me to stop doing them when he knew it wasn’t good for me.

*

“I mean, this is still hard, but three is SO much better than two,” I said to my husband a few weeks after our twins turned three.

<Pause for knowing, anticipatory laughter>

After a short scenic tour, we pulled in to Tantrumville. I thought I knew what a tantrum was before. Even my daughter, who this morning offered a softer blanket to my son because he was upset about bonking his head, often makes noises I find incomprehensibly grating and doesn’t stop until well after she’s gotten whatever it is she wants. It almost seems recreational. I have to urge myself to laugh at these sounds, the way I say “smile” to myself at the top of a long hill when I’m running, because I know it will help fix my exhausted form and increase my perception of my own energy reserves.

I find it so tremendously taxing to be around a tantruming child, especially my own (see extraordinary conflict aversion plus chronic anxiety-driven guilty conscience plus noise sensitivity), that I sometimes stand and stare, completely addled and nearing panic. I tremble a little when I hear them coming on. What if he never stops? What if we’re up all night and I become even more exhausted than I already am? What if I’m doing something terrible, by not responding, or responding a certain way? What if there’s something really really wrong? I short circuit and all I want to do is yell. Or walk out.

I have tried both. Neither gets either of us through more quickly, or with less strife. In fact, both yelling and leaving in a huff seem to make things far, far worse. So I’m stuck doing the long work of learning.

*

Recently, I’ve discovered a few things. One is that my son is super self-conscious. This hurts me, since I’m pretty sure it’s entirely my fault, like global warming and world poverty. The other thing is that he gets low blood-sugar in a flash, which is also my fault, both genetically and for not feeding him enough. (I feed the child incessantly, and with a manic degree of thoughtfulness.) Another is that he speaks the thing he fears as though it’s fact, which can sound perverse and self-destructive (no idea where he gets that).

So, as long as we’re in the pool… in Kevin of the Y fashion, I’ve analyzed the finer points of our Tantrum form, and built a sort of check-list I can use to address each key element, so that I can swim smarter, not harder:

—To alleviate self-consciousness, I frequently put some or all of my attention elsewhere for periods of a few seconds to a few minutes during a tantrum; when I sit down near him, I sit facing 90 degrees away rather than looking right at him; when I speak to him, beyond briefly acknowledging the pain he’s feeling and the troublesome nature of his ongoing actions, I keep it to narratives about things that interest him and have nothing to do with tantrums (tractors, microphones, bathroom fans, vegetables, his grandparents, any situation in which one needs to call the fire department, etc. My Emergency Sustained Improv Monologue skills are becoming more and more robust).

—With repeated gentle reminders from my husband and the nanny, I’ve learned to address my son’s low blood-sugar by surreptitiously placing favorite foods within reach on various surfaces and pretending I don’t care whether he eats them or not. (Most get thrown, but the odd thing makes it into the piqued little body, and eventually the carbs get to the brain and help us out in a small but not insignificant way.)

—To get myself through listening to the repeated yelling of tortured, torqued utterances, like “I BREAK MY BED AND FROW IT,” “NO MILK, NO BINK, I JUST FROW IT,” I remind myself of my working theory that he’s not *hoping* to make these things happen, but *afraid* that his big emotions will cause him to harm something dear to him.

It all still drives me absolutely nuts because I feel so powerless. Still, just as I remain a bag of thrashing deadweight in a pool, but can swim, the tantrums still cause me a huge amount of stress, but I rarely feel completely broken by them anymore. I’m learning, 25 yards at a time, to get across the water.

*

Recently, I decided to change my spring race from a 50-miler to a half marathon. The “decision” was more of a gradual, confounding, week-long liquification of what I had supposed were internal organs, but were actually probably tumors, than an act of clear-eyed certainty. Still, I think we have arrived at a few eddies of relative clarity:

1) Once you climb off the hospital bed and run a few races, you may not need to find a longer race every few months to prove you are not, indeed, dead yet.

2) If you like something— say, ice cream— it’s not necessarily going to be twice as fun to eat twice as much of it, if your original preferred serving size was already roughly a half-gallon. Therefore, perhaps, running fifty miles isn’t necessarily 156.25% as fun as running 32 miles.

3) Needs shift, desires shift, interests pour their protoplasm into unforeseen shapes and locations like amoebas, and somehow, the Hobby Police never show up with their lights flashing. They didn’t come for me when I put my cable knitting project away for the season; they didn’t come for me when my birder’s audio ID skills got rusty enough to cause me a shocking degree of hesitation as I tried to make the call between Blue-headed Vireo and Red-eyed Vireo. It seems, friends, that those Hobby Police are not going to come.

4) Limits aren’t just what’s imposed on you by chance or fate: you can place your own. I don’t have to push until I drop dead to find out what my limit is; I can decide that I’m done.

*

He had chucked his milk and splattered it all over the cupboards and back door and the floor. He had run screeching from room to room, reciting the toddler equivalent of doomsday slogans, at a fully-blossomed scream, for most of half an hour. He had repeatedly rejected and hurled all his comfort items, thrown his own body against the door and floor. I was at my wit’s end and it was past bedtime. His sister was beginning to cry upstairs because she was worried at all the commotion and at having been left alone. (“Is brother having a hard time?” she’d ask me when I went to check on her, eyes glistening with concern. “Yeah, he is,” I’d say, and sigh, doing my best impression of a grounded mother doing her best. ALL PARENTS-TO-BE SHOULD HAVE TO TAKE ACTING CLASSES.)

I started humming. I went to the base of the stairs and looked up the stairwell, holding my hand out to clasp my son’s as though I were confident we’d both go up any second. “Wanna walk-up, or carry-up?” I said, forcing myself to sound mild and un-invested. It was painful to do because I was so scared it wouldn’t work.

He padded over silently on his bare feet, pressed himself against my thigh, and said, only, “carry,” burying his face in his Raggles— a comfort he had, somehow, finally found a way to allow himself to have.

His dense little body was exhausted, hot, and still. His eyes were closed. I picked him up. Nothing happened. I had to remind myself not to hold my breath. I carried him up into his room, where I quietly grabbed two of his favorite books and did my best to install him on his sister’s bunk in a way that wouldn’t upset her too much, so that we could all begin reading. I felt like I was on a high-wire.

A few books in, we had all moved on. Or my kids had, anyway. I’m still such an adult (read: out of practice at letting go) that I felt the specter of his eruption like a fresh bruise. It’s still a little tender today.

*

I’m an OK swimmer, I guess. I’m a pretty good runner. I try so blisteringly hard to be a decent mom. But I’ve run an ultramarathon before, and I can say with certainty that NO ONE needs blisters, especially when they’re in it for the long-haul.

So here’s what I’ve got: I’ll continue to do what I can. I’ll probably continue to overthink, and to underregulate my own emotions because [shrugs, plays the “I’m a poet” card]. I’ll keep doing the work of learning. I’ll try to make it so my son and I are both allowed to feel.

And then, around 7:30pm, we’ll each practice, again, how to decide when we’re done.