I whined to my friend, Stephanie, “I have this fear that one day Noelle is going to come to me and say, ‘Mom, you never spent enough time with me.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, but I tried! I tried to spend a little bit of time with you everyday, just the two of us.’ And then she’ll say, “Yeah, but it wasn’t enough.’”
I carry this mother guilt around with me. This guilt when I see my daughter getting ansy, or whiney, or fussy, or obnoxious, that this is all boiling down to the fact that I don’t play with her enough, I don’t spend enough one-on-one time with her.
I know where this anxiety comes from. It comes from the fact that I know clearly, to the core of my being, that my daughter’s love language is quality time. I could hug her and kiss her and cuddle with her ’til I’m blue in the face and every time she’ll squirm out of my arms and bound away from me distracted, or blankly listen as I shower her with compliments only to say, “Mommy, will you play with me?”
Here are the things she says that break my heart.
Over breakfast, while I’m bouncing Nathan on one knee and feeding him (because we don’t have a high chair yet) and also simultaneously trying to scoop a few bites of egg into my mouth before it gets cold. “Mommy, can you come play with me?”
“No love. I’m trying to eat breakfast.”
“But who will play with me?”
Or take this one time, I parked at the top of the hill and left Noelle and Nathan in the van for a minute while I ran a couple grocery bags inside. I came back out and Noelle hollered at me through the open door, “Mommy, I need somebody! Nathan is with me, but he can’t play with me!”
How do you, as a mom, turn down the pleas of your child for attention? It breaks my heart every time. And it’s not like I don’t play with her. I do. I very deliberately set aside time during Nathan’s naps to build things with her, do science experiments with her, paint things with her, or play her favorite “Huckle Cat” board game over and over and over again.
But, back to my whining at the beginning of this post, the time I spend with her never seems to be enough to top off her love tank.
“I think I could play with her from sun up to sun down and she would still want more,” I complained to Steph.
“I get it,” my friend said sitting at the end of my table, eating quietly while I badgered her with my worries. “I’m like Noelle too. I could stay here until 3 am and not feel ready to leave until you kicked me out.”
We smiled at each other. And I understood. Stephanie’s love language is quality time too. I can appreciate it in my friend, but apparently, not in my daughter. I was grateful to Stephanie for taking Noelle’s side, for showing me in an instant how normal and even healthy my daughter is.
That’s when I had the epiphany. “I guess I’m waiting on a 4 year old to tell me when it’s enough. I’m waiting for her to get all filled up and let me off the hook.” It’s just never going to happen. I have to create the boundaries for my daughter and lead her in this.
On the heels of this epiphany came a second. If I am confident that the time I am spending with my daughter is deliberate, intentional, full of love and ENOUGH, she will feel the same way. But if I am constantly fretting that I’m somehow letting her down, and not giving her enough of myself she will also learn to interpret our time together in the same way.
Bottom line? To a point, I create the narrative for my daughter. I tell her the story of our love for one another, our relationship, and she lives into that story.
Isn’t that a terrifying and wonderful all at the same time? Here goes nothin’…