Ahoo

Some days my daughter wakes up all a-hoo. There’s no great explanation for it. Maybe she didn’t sleep well. If she were a princess I’d say an evil queen had hidden peas under her mattress. She makes this crank sound -- a sort of nasal, wrenchy, steel-bending-under-pressure-noise that goes straight into the primal reactive core of my brain stem, where panic is seated. That’s the first warning sign of danger – the crank. Her hair is tangled and her clothes are all hiding under things and not only is nothing going right this morning, nothing is going to go right for the rest of the day – and nothing could possibly ever go right for the rest of her life. Ever ever.

The other morning was just such a lovely gift of a day. She overslept for school, and it was clear I was going to go to work without mascara – this was going to take a while. Then inspiration struck. I said, “Hey, let’s start this day over.” I tucked her in bed in all of her clothes and kissed her ‘goodnight.’ In about 10 seconds I ‘woke her up’ with a kiss. She sat up and smiled, and got up, and was just fine. A complete do-over. Mommy magic.

So then, still aglow with my brilliance, I went into my son’s room to check his progress --and he was cranky, too. (Though quietly). So I said, “Why don’t we start the day over? Here, let me tuck you in and then I’ll wake you up again.” I threw the covers over him in pantomime and he looked at me with a sigh of patience tinged with pity and said, “Mom, it’s the same day.”
Hm. So not so magic.