Guilting at Windmills

Our weather was particularly schizophrenic this weekend, with Saturday topping out in the low 80’s and Sunday never making it above 45°.  And since freezing us cold-intolerant Cajun pansies isn’t enough, the temperature drop was accompanied by a really horrible cold rain all day Sunday.  I know.  I shouldn’t bitch.  We get maybe 4 days of “cold” a year.

Anyway, knowing that the weather was going to be crap, I had arranged for Stella to have a friend over.  Her mother and I had decided that instead of exchanging gifts this year, the girls could bake ugly cookies and do arts and crafts.  As y’all know, I excel at ugly baking.  And I had the perfect idea for the kids; on Facebook, I had seen one of those Pinterest-y video clips of someone’s hands rolling sugar cookie dough into perfect little balls, then rolling the perfect little balls into beautiful sprinkles, then jamming popsicle sticks in, baking, and producing perfectly round, cute cookie lollipops.  You know how I always say my cookies end up looking like tumors?  These were tumors on a stick.  It wasn’t anything the girls or Felix did.  We were duped by online charlatans.

Anyway, after baking and ornament decorating, Stella started to unravel a bit.  I’ve noticed that both she and her father tend to be pretty sensitive mood-wise to major barometric pressure changes, and boy, did we have a lulu that day.  I’m not sure if pressure sensitivity is a recognized thing or not, but I definitely see it in my household – the onset of extreme bitchiness and orneriness when the weather flip flops.  Anyway, Stella started with a lot of whining, yelling, and back-talking.

After several calm warnings, including one whereby I pulled her to the back of the house to tell her that her behavior was unacceptable and I would send her to timeout if her bullshit behavior continued, I finally had to send her to her room.  She screamed, she cried, she kicked the door.  She was missing the fun, and couldn’t she complete her sentence once her friend left.  Nope.

When she emerged a few minutes later, the friend and Felix were eating some ugly cookies and popcorn, watching the Grinch.  Stella was moody as she rejoined the party.  When her friend’s mom came to pick her friend up, she continued to cut up.  It was the worst day ever, and she hadn’t had any fun.  Total drama, y’all.

Yeah, the weather makes this one edgy…

I got a bit irritated, and said wow, I knew that play dates were horrible, as was cookie baking and arts and crafts.  I must be the worst mother ever.  Stella agreed.  I told her that maybe Santa would bring her a new mother for Xmas.  She looked horrified.  She told me I was beautiful.

And I felt like a total asshole.  The biggest asshole in the world.

“Mom, did you really just say that?”

See, I adore sarcasm.  It’s my language.  It’s what I do.  I’m not even aware of it most of the time.  But Stella?  She doesn’t get it.  At all.  Maybe it’s carryover from her language delays.  Her semantic/pragmatic sense of language isn’t the best.  “W” questions don’t come easily for her, especially “why.”  Sarcasm may as well be uttered in Mandarin.  And I had used sarcasm to threaten her with a new mother without even thinking.  I felt like a monster.

Parenting fail.  I apologized to her for making a really bad joke.  She said OK, but referenced my “bad joke” the rest of the day.

Maybe I can consider this payback to all of the really awful knock-knock jokes I’ve endured and been forced to participate in for the past 8 months?

No, sweet girl. I’m not going anywhere.