Genesis Of An Argument
Breaking down the break down
It started harmlessly. Actually, before diving into the verbal tussle, it is instructive to describe the routine for a typical weekday morning in the Cookson house.
My wife is usually out of bed 15-30 minutes before me. I will get out of bed sometime between 5:30 and 6. I come downstairs, pour myself a cup of coffee, and then spend the next 15-30 minutes making school lunches/snacks for the boys and lunch for Caryn. Followed by making breakfast for the boys. Depending on the day, I’m hopefully done with this process by 6:30 at the latest. Rory is the morning person among our children, and he will generally wake up somewhere between 6:45-7:15, although he’s been sleeping all the way until wake up time (roughly 7:15-7:20) of late. Most mornings I have to wake Declan up. This means depending how quickly I finish all the meal making, I have a few minutes to sit on the couch, enjoy my coffee, and look at stuff on my phone before the boys get up. It’s a nice few minutes as I catch up on sports news, do a sudoku* or generally turn my brain off for a few minutes before the chaos of the morning.
*I know sudoku is not the most challenging thing in the world, but I enjoy feeling like I’m working my brain a little bit in the morning. But I’m currently mad at the New York Times Games Sudoku. I can fly through the puzzles in “easy” mode, but can’t finish them at all in “medium.” Either the easy puzzles need to be harder, or the medium ones need to be easier because something is amiss.
With the typical morning scene established, now we arrive at the moment of contention. Friday morning I heard Rory come out of his room around 6:25 — a little bit early, and a good 45 minutes ahead of when he needs to be up. The likely cause was the early arrival of the garbage truck, which makes decent amount of noise, which with his window open to let in the spring breeze probably woke him up early. Either way, I go upstairs to check on him and the conflict is nigh.
Upon seeing him, I remark, “good morning buddy, you’re up early.” Harmless, yes? A mild observation with no accusation or malice. At least to my ears. I am merely pointing out a statement of fact — he is up earlier than normal, and earlier than necessary. I suppose inherent in the observation is me trying to lay the groundwork to convince him — however unlikely — to go back to bed for a bit and give me the remainder of my planned relaxation time. Truly though, I think I was just making an observation that he was, indeed, “up early.”
He responded, “no I’m not” with a bit of defensiveness and edge in his voice.
We’ve reached the inflection point. For reasons I don’t understand, he seems annoyed that I would even suggest he’s up early. This is not usually a point of conflict, unless he uses getting up early as a reason he should be allowed to use his tablet (it’s not). Either way, the mood and tenure of this interaction has shifted. Perhaps there was some accusation in the tone of my initial observation that he sensed that I did not. Either way, the stage is set for things to escalate
I responded by saying, “sure you are, this is earlier than you usually get up.”
He respond, “no it’s not, it’s not early!” And yes, that exclamation point is used with purpose, because now he’s mad, inexplicably so in my view.
With the benefit of hindsight my mistake — if we are going to call it that — was engaging at all. Once he offered the initial “no I’m not” there was no path forward in which I was going to “win” this argument. So why did I feel the need to correct him?
There’s the genuine answer and the aspirational answer. The genuine answer is that he did wake up earlier than normal, this was factually correct, and so when he said he didn’t, I responded with facts before thinking of the consequences. Essentially I didn’t take a second to stop and think about what I was doing and got into the parent version of “I know you are but what am I.”
The aspirational version, which has some reality behind it, is that I’m generally a reasonable person who lives in reality. I want to raise kids who can understand facts, and admit when they are wrong. I think that’s a worth goal, it’s probably just not best pursued at 6:35 in the morning with a sometimes emotionally turbulent eight-year old.* Perhaps the more successful parents than me can offer thoughts in the comments on more effective ways to get my children to accept reality and when they are mistaken. I’m all ears.
*Literally as I’m writing this, Rory and I engaged in a nearly identical interaction. Rory commented, “you know, I didn’t really have breakfast.” I responded, “sure you did.” “No I didn’t.” “You had a waffle, an orange, and two cups of milk.” “That’s not breakfast.” (I honestly have no earthly idea why this would NOT be considered breakfast in his eyes.) However I did learn my lesson, and simply stopped talking. He then asked if he could have a bowl of cereal, and I said yes. Crises averted — but lack of accepting reality is still an ongoing concern!
Whatever the explanation, a perfectly pleasant Friday has gone off the rails mere moments after my child woke up. All because after being a parent for more than 11 years, I still haven’t learned when to fold a losing hand and shut up. The bad news is that similar to a petulant child, I chose to not deescalate and instead went back and forth a few more times on whether or not he had woken up early. Suffice it to say he remained unconvinced. The good news is that because he’s a kid he moved on, and the events of the morning proceeded and the minor skirmish dissipated. Life goes on.
Yet I dwelled on this all day whilst spraying an array of terrible golf shots around the course. Partially because in retrospect, the whole thing struck me as funny, and I figured I could milk a blog post from it. Also when your primary job is parenting, as is my situation, it leads to spending a lot of time thinking about parenting errors, even a minor one like this. I interrogate it in the hopes that maybe next time I will think before I speak and avoid this specific conflict. Or perhaps suddenly a jolt of inspiration strikes and the words come to me that help him accept reality. It’s clear which of those scenarios is more likely.