On being sensitive

The other day, my kids were yelling at the same time.  Big freaking news flash; kids yell.  A lot.  Especially when they're hungry, tired, and need everything all at once.  When you have a newborn, people often call this time period the "witching hour", but I now call it the "bitchy hour".  Call the PC Police, everyone.

Anyway, so, yes, they were yelling and crying and wailing for me to hold them because they didn't want to eat the food that I had busted my ass to make, and I had started to get a little "bad cop" on them (i.e. saying, "No, I won't feed you; you're XYZ years old and can do it yourself.  No, you can't sit on my lap to eat dinner; we eat dinner in our chairs..." (But really, who am I kidding; SJL always ends up on my lap).  I couldn't deal with both of them demanding to eat while on my lap, and I couldn't deal with the noise and that feeling of being needed so urgently, so viscerally, so... something in the way that a small child needs his or her mom RIGHT NOW.  I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin and run away with my hands over my (now skinless) ears.

So, I calmly announced, "Mommy needs a time out!"  And I marched into the dining room and sat down for a minute.  Oh, my babies.  They ratcheted up to a full-on volume 12 (these go to 12, not just 11...) and it was quite a sight to watch them wail and reach out their arms to me from a room away.

So, I ended up going back into the kitchen, scooping them both up, and sitting them on my lap, one on each knee, with their heads against my chest, ear to my heart, just the way they like to be held.  Very close.  Chickie actually has to be on the left side or he'll FREAK OUT (more on this in a minute-- I swear, I have a point).  After fighting with each other about not having enough space, I managed to separate them somehow while keeping them on my body.  They calmed down quickly and left a trail of gooey snot and tears on my shirt.  Yeah, that's why I don't own anything nice anymore.  Not like I ever did, but really, there's not much of a point now, you know?  After they were calm, I said, "OK, you know what?  I changed my mind.  You guys want leftover ravioli?"  Of course they did.  And the freaking out stopped as if I had hit flipped the ravioli switch.

Mealtimes are often like this.  I freaking hate feeding my kids.  Remember all the eating (lack thereof) drama with Chickie?  You know, stuff like this.

But that's not what I meant to write about when I started this.  I meant to write about what it's like to have a sensitive kid, and what that has meant in terms of thinking about my own sensitivities.

Chickie is, well, a pretty sensitive kid-- not sensitive in the sense of he's fragile and weepy and delicate, but rather in the sense that he is SENSE-itive.  Like his senses are on volume 12.  The bath water is too hot, and it will take him 5 minutes to poke one toe into the bath while SJL practically dives in head first and starts splashing away.  My hands washing his face are too cold, and washing his neck is too ticklish, to the point where he will scream so loud that I swear the glass nearly cracked and I was partially deaf for an hour (no exaggeration there).

I'll spare you all the details of the food stuff (you got a couple days for that?), but everything is too wet, too cold, too slimy, too green, too unpredictably crunchy.  Textures have to be predictable with no random crunches.  Something like grapes is a non-starter because they are not only very wet but explode in the mouth in a really unpredictable way.  SJL loves grapes.  People always tell me to sneak stuff into his food (you know, bake shit like beets and flax into muffins), but my kid knows everything.  You can't fool him for a second.  And the food can't touch other food-- only one thing on the plate at a time.  And it needs to be wiped clean between different foods, especially if one of them is red (he doesn't like red sauce, except on pizza, but it can't be TOO red, though.  The red-to-cheese ratio has to be just so).

For the first few years of his life, he couldn't be barefoot on wood floors and would wear socks through the heat of summer.  While other 2 year olds stripped naked and gleefully climbed into the kiddie pool, my kid would stand there watching, fully clothed with socks and shoes, shaking his head whenever anyone asked if he wanted to go in.  Why not?  "It's too wet," he said.  Makes perfect sense.  Last summer, I got a glimpse of how the other half (kids, that is) lives when SJL started running towards the sprinklers, stripping off her clothes and running in, naked as the day she was born, laughing away.  And she would always yell out to her brother to come in the water, but he would squirm away like the water was made out of poison and reply, "It's too wet!"

But you know what?  I get it.  Not completely, but I do.  I really don't like big random chunks in my food.  I think a lot of fruit is really slimy.  I detest cold meat.  I also detest food that's really cold, directly from the fridge.  Fridge-cold fruit is too cold; it needs to be room temperature.  Something like pasta salad or hummus needs to come to room temp before I like it.  Chickie even likes his yogurt close to room temperature; yogurt right out of the fridge is "too icy."  And on very humid days, the stickiness of feet on wood floors can make my stomach turn in a way that I can't really describe.

Like my son, I also get that feeling of being overstimulated.  The dinner incident I described at the beginning of this post is one of those times-- everything is really loud and happening at once-- the timer is beeping, one child is crying, the other one is yelling, "mommy mommy mommy MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY" at all volumes, Chickie is doing this weird high-pitched humming noise that sounds like nails on a chalkboard-- and I feel like I'm going to jump out of my skin.

You know how everyone loves Wake Up the Earth?  Confession: I kind of don't.  Too loud.  Too crowded.  Very over-stimulating.  Only this year could Chickie tolerate it; as a baby, he would just freak out (while every other kid had a ball and laughed and stared at all the cool shit to see), and up til last year, he would end up in the stroller, rocking back and forth to soothe himself amidst the chaos, crowds, and noise.  I think everything is on volume 12 for him sometimes.

Again, I get it.  You know the sound of a fork squeaking and scratching a plate?  Makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and makes me jump in my seat.  I can't take that shit.  Chickie will yell, "Don't make that noise!  I don't like it!"  Oh, man; that's my kid.

Kids are funny; they really hold up the mirror for you.  It can be maddening, but it's also comforting to both him and me when I can say, "You know what?  I can understand why this bothers you."  Yes, there's a funny thing about apples.