Our Mommyhood

By JJ Keith, Contributor, JJust Kidding (@jj_keith)

I worry that I’ve unfairly pigeonholed my “spirited” almost-two-year-old. I first began to doubt myself when her preschool teachers reported on her extraordinary helpfulness. “She’s like a waitress,” they said, “always delivering everyone their sippy cups.”

“Really?” I said. “My kid?”

And then I noticed the helpfulness at home. At the end of dinner she sweeps the table with her arm to knock our plates to the floor so the dog can perform his prewashing services. When I change her new baby brother she brings me a fresh diaper and then hurls the soiled one towards the pail, often splattering the mustardy contents on the wall. When I put on socks she piles into my closet to pull out any and every shoe then bludgeon my stocking feet with footwear until I’m all laced up. Sure, she’s not undoing her reputation for indelicacy, but her resounding good intentions can’t be denied.

I feel pretty awful about my mislabeling. Either I had dubbed her a wild child without sufficient evidence or all that wildness was just her acting out against the miserable pregnancy that had prefaced the arrival of her fantastic little brother. Now I’m thinking that I just need to refine my thinking about my cretinous little lamb. What has made her so difficult over the last year or so is her speed and fearlessness, not so much her emotions. I had equated daredevilism with ferocity.

As I continued to contemplate this I decided to (for the first time) look up what being a “spirited child” actually means and yup, turns out that’s not my daughter at all. Okay, my research has mostly consisted of reading just the title of the book Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. I don’t know that I’d call her intense, sensitive, perceptive or persistent. In fact, if anything she’s startlingly insensitive. The first day we dropped her off at preschool she waved to us from the window and then merrily set about her usual business of climbing the walls, now with a class full of accomplices. What she is, is energetic, or what we colloquially refer to around here as “balls to the walls.” Add to that curiosity and excellent climbing skills and you have a monkey on your hands. But still, not so much spirited as it seems the term is used.

So, whoops. What I’m doing over here at Our Mommyhood is writing a column about my spirited child and it turns out she isn’t even spirited; just extraordinarily destructive and preternaturally drawn to romping in busy streets. She is challenging, but not pathologically so. She is simply a little girl who employs every brain cell floating around in her sweet towhead to find a way to move each and every item stored in my kitchen into a pile on the floor even if she has to smoosh every banana and crumble every cracker to do it.

Please look forward to next month’s installment on raising my “balls to walls” child.

JJ Keith is a stay-at-home parent to a prodigiously mischievous toddler daughter and a relatively subdued infant son. She sometimes works as a college writing instructor and periodically takes freelance writing jobs, but she spends most of her time trying to find a balance between respecting her childrens’ budding independence and enforcing the “no eating dog food” rule.

Related Posts via Categories

• Top 3 Kids’ Trilogies of All Time
• 6 Fun Apps to Teach Your Kids Money Management
• Blog Comments

Related Posts:

• The Preschool Decision
• A Study in Contrasts
• Don’t Touch Poop

3 Responses to “Redefining a Label”