The Distracted Mind

And the arguments just keep on coming! There’s something so frustrating about my mornings nowadays that I generally do not want to go to bed at night because the next morning it all begins again. Little Mango 1 is proving consistently that he is completely uninterested in being a part of this deal of ours: basically we have a deal – I wake him up early to get ready, if he does it quickly he gets to watch cartoons before school. I may sound like an ogre but I don’t think I was ever given that option when I was a kid – I had a strict “no cartoons in the morning” deal which kind of sucked! So I came up with this plan – this way he gets something he wants, all he has to do is a handful of things I need him to do to get ready – it sounds perfect! But perfection, it seems, is always something quite unreachable. I’d settle for him to be able to put his clothes on properly. He has a thing against putting underpants on – ‘I hate putting underpants on!’ I say, ‘Mate, every boy hates putting underpants but we do it anyway!’ We’ve had to redesign our entire way of thinking – I decided that all the things he likes doing (watching cartoons, playing lego, reading books – everything!) would now all depend on his doing what we ask. That may seem a bit harsh, and I don’t want my family to sound like a dictatorship, I really want a team approach to everything we do and that will be fine as long as all the kids do it OUR WAY!!!! :)

He is generally just a very distracted boy: he gets caught up in other things along the way. He goes to get dressed and he sees a light sabre toy on the ground so he naturally has to pick it up and play with (who wouldn’t?). He doesn’t mean to frustrate us - that’s just the way he is. A great example: he has this thing where sometimes he will come out of the room several times after bed for a wide range of trivial excuses. The best came the other night after he exited his bedroom for the fifth time that night. It went like this:
‘Get back to bed.’
‘I just want to….’
‘Don’t care – go back to bed.’
‘I just want to ask you something.’ As he slowly advances.
‘What?’ With an angry, uncaring tone.
‘I just need to ask you something.’
‘Okay! What?!’
‘Umm….’ racking his brains trying to think of anything, ‘what are fans made out of?’
'Fans?'
'Yes, what are they made of?'
‘Steel.’ Simple. Final.
So he puts his hands up square to his body, spins on the spot and marches back out of the room as if he’s a robot. Back to bed. I looked at my wife, and we both laughed.

The problem is they are distractions to us as much as they are distracted away from us. Little Mango 1 has an argument with us, where he is disagreeing with everything we say no matter how ridiculous his side is, and then he’ll say, ‘Well I’m going to storm off into my room then.’ I’m, like – okay! Which is hilarious for me and a funny way to end an argument. Little Miss Mango is bossy and yells a lot, but the fact that she walks around like a lumberjack, barging and bashing into things, with this cute girls dress on is hilarious, and I will pretty much give her anything she wants as long as she stays this funny. And Little Mango 3, well – babies are just distractions anyway, mostly when they’re yours. I could sit there staring at hime for hours, even if he didn’t burp and fart like a hairy old man – I love the way he scunches up and then kicks ferociously until he farts, and it sounds like a full grown man fart too! A little vulgar, maybe but still very funny! So, in a sense we will also be doing certain things, most of them nowadays being something that will help move the day along positively, and we will get distracted by them in one or more of the ways I have just described. Our house is like Willy Wonkas office – everything is half done.

So as much as I want to stop Mango 1 from this distractive mind, there is something very charming about the way it works. Although I want him to be functional in a real world sense, I don’t want to push him so far that he loses this altogether. There is something very definite going on in his mind, something fantastic and very original, and I think we sometimes push our kids too far away from who they truly could be in hope that they will be somebody normal and fit in with those around him. As much as he frustrates me, there is something very endearing about him that I like very much. And it really…. oh hang on, he’s just come out bed again (grrrr!), I’ll just….