When Adults Argue and What the Children Actually Hear

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Unlike most adult mother/daughter combinations, even the birth of my own children didn’t make the relationship between my mother and I any better. We simply just don’t see eye to eye often. And, really, that might be an understatement. We almost never see eye-to-eye is more like it. I do my best to exercise restraint in that my mother is my mother and she deserves my respect for that reason alone. And, often times, my husband and I do things on a certain schedule or in a certain way because of my mom’s preferences.

She was never really outspoken about her dislike for my decisions. As a matter of fact, she was quite the opposite, the Queen of the Silent Treatment. She once went six weeks without speaking to her husband, all the while living in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, cooking meals and doing laundry as if nothing was wrong. However, she didn’t utter one word to him. She firmly believes in punishing people who oppose her.

Since my own children were born she has been much more outspoken. She is much more emotional since learning that she has cancer and when she thinks we aren’t handling situations the way we should in reference to our children, she doesn’t hesitate to speak out. The problem is, I never say anything to her about any of this until…………you guessed it, until I’ve reached my level of complete intolerance.

And, the end result is an argument. And, by all standards of healthy and fair arguing or disagreements, this is so off the deep-end of completely wrong that I really can’t give you words for it. In the past, she has got into a screaming battle with my husband for picking up our older child when he was about 4 because he wanted to go home with my mom, we told him no and he was hitting at me. My husband intervened and my mother lost all her marbles. I don’t think she even realized he was hitting at me when she flipped out. Other arguments contain phrases like “I know you never liked me anyway” (from her to me – but honestly, I make jokes all the time about how she doesn’t like me, so I guess it’s a mutual feeling. You don’t have to like to love by the way).

As it is though, in the past, my children haven’t really understood what was going on. Until about 2 weeks ago. A simple issue between me and the children, just a battle of preschooler wills and I turned ugly when my mother intervened by saying, “I don’t know why ya’ll (me and my husband) had kids in the first place. ”We were all loaded in my truck, kids buckled in and mom and I arguing. For the record, my husband and I rarely even disagree (and I know that sounds dreamy but it’s just the truth, it took me four tries to find this wonderful husband, so don’t question the validity of the fact that we just don’t argue, we simply don’t). So, when the argument with my mom that escalated to yelling and brutal words, my children became quiet. At one point during the 10-minute battle of words, my five-year-old even said, “Can we just go?”

Fast-forward to a few days later and the boys learned that I was going to be headed out of town for a couple of days. They both became extremely clingy. Neither of them opted to go to church with my mom, which has never happened. The five-year-old followed me around for two days hanging on to my pants leg. My mom wasn’t the person caring for them while I was gone, it was my husband and a sitter as my mom had a chemo treatment during that time. That was on Monday, January 11^th. Although they did both go to church with her this past Sunday, they both opted to come home after church (again, something that has never happened, we normally have to force them home before she heads back to church at night). And today is the first time the five-year-old has even asked to go see her and the seven-year-old asked to go see her after school but once we pulled into her driveway, he changed his mind.

In the meantime, both boys are clingier than they have been since we sold the daycare in July of 2008. The five-year-old asks to sit in my lap often during the day for a few minutes at a time. He gets in my face, plays with my hair, tells me he loves me and just generally loves on me. The seven-year-old will do similar things although he just wants to sit in my lap while watching a show in the evenings. Both boys are acting odd, to say the least. .

Both boys go to bed in their rooms but migrate to our bed sometime after midnight. And my heart strings broke into a million pieces last week as the five-year-old would put his hands in my hair and twirl it while saying “mommy, mommy, I love you mommy”. Neither of them has called me mommy in quite some time. They were content to go with their dad to basketball on Saturday morning and let me come later since they were going early for photos but both of them asked their dad numerous times how much longer it would be before I arrived. Neither of them mentioned my mother even coming to their game, which is unusual as well. She rarely misses games.

I can’t say for certain that this behavior is related to the argument and I’ve tried to get them to talk to me about it but neither of them seems to want to discuss it. The oldest is usually pretty open and tells me what’s on his mind. He will even ask questions about activities he has heard my husband discussing when we thought he wasn’t paying attention. But, the younger one has never been that open and he refuses to even talk about it at all. When I’ve asked him, he just gets closer to my face, rubs my face longer, twirls my hair more and lingers longer than the time before.

What do you think?Is it time to just sit them down and point blank talk to them about the arguing?I’ve tried the discreet method and just asking “is something wrong you want to tell me?” and I get nothing. Should I just be blunt and bring up the argument and ask how they feel about it?After all, that very well may not be the culprit of their recent change in behavior. And if it isn’t, do I really want to re-open that wound?What would you do?

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