We’re Being Held Hostage - By a 2-Year-Old

In a world where the nearest self-improvement listicle is a mere click away, we’d expect people to be able to solve any personal problem by now. For those with the willpower to see it through, creating a seamless daily routine in order to focus on the things we really want to focus on is actually fairly achievable. If you’re ambitious, even more so. I had that wrapped up and done quite some time ago, with every hour of every day planned out neatly, creating a very satisfying cycle whereby I could look back at my week each Sunday afternoon and be very happy with what I’d accomplished and where I was headed.

I’m a problem solver at my company, it’s just what I’m good at. The kind of big problem that no one wants to touch, that no one has time for? That’s the kind of thing that has me rubbing my hands with glee. I’ve developed this sort of narrative in my head that with my willpower and seamless routine I could solve just about any problem, that my talent of thinking strategically and being able to focus until a task is done were, for all intents and purposes, my superpowers.

What’s the old saying? “Pride goeth before the fall”. All of what I just said seems to have gone out the window in the last week or two. All it took was a stubborn two-year-old child who refuses to sleep. It’s funny before you have children, you think the solutions to issues that children have are so simple. “You just have to do x until it starts working”. You think that other parents are clueless. You think they lack persistence and they just give into the child.

That’s until you have your own.

My daughter has decided over the last two weeks she doesn’t want to go to bed, something we’ve never had an issue with before. I won’t bore you with all the details, suffice to say that the last couple of nights, she hasn’t gone to sleep unless we were all in our bed together, and this didn’t happen until 11 pm.

What people don’t realise is that toddlers have weapons. The weapon of choice for mine is screaming as though she’s possessed by a demon. She doesn’t give a shit that mummy and daddy need to sleep, she doesn’t care that she needs to sleep and she doesn’t care that people have to go to work in the morning. If she doesn’t want to go to bed, she’ll scream like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. You can tell her all you want that “we’re the boss, you’re being naughty, you need to sleep” etc. It doesn’t do shit. “Oh, you just need to let her cry it out”. Yeah, thanks for that advice, we tried that. She screamed like a banshee for an hour and a half, and far from tiring out, she got worse as it went on.

The point of all this isn’t what we’ve tried or the ins and outs of my child’s sudden sleep disorder, but the sudden grounding that a child’s problems bring into one’s life. One day you feel as though you’re conquering the world, that you have it all figured out and there is nothing you can’t do or problem you can’t solve. And then a 2-year-old decides she gives zero shits about any of that and turns it all upside down.

A good friend of mine put the problem perfectly in perspective for me recently. He said “all the things you’re best at, like intellectualising, reasoning, finding flaws in arguments or perspectives, they’re all useless in this situation. You can’t reason your way through with a 2 year old”.

What’s the solution? I don’t know right now. Thanks to my love of stoic philosophy, I can look at the situation and realise that, rather than being a catastrophe, that this too shall pass eventually. For the time being, though, it’s brought me plummeting back down to earth in the realisation that the stubbornness of a two-year-old is a more powerful force than the best-laid plans I can put in place.

Also written by me:

Work Sucks…Why we hate our jobs, are dissatisfied with our lives and can’t be happy.

Pampered, privileged and annoying as hell: why SJWs need to borrow a clue.