Monday, November 16, 2015

Hissy Fit

On Saturday we went to the mall. By we, I mean my mom, the girls and I. And by the girls, I mean Alyssa, Olivia and Alyssa’s friend S.

We stopped at Toys R Us before we went to the mall and Olivia got a cheap pink crown that came with some clip on earrings.

She wore the crown and earrings through Barnes & Noble, through the mall to the food court and all during lunch but then decided that the carousel wasn’t necessarily earring-worthy, I guess.

So she handed them to me and…I put them somewhere. I guess.

I think she handed the earrings to me as we were spinning on the tea-cup-esque feature of the carousel. She much prefers that thing to the animals that go up and down. And she wants me to ride it with her.

(Aside: We rode the carousel once and had to sit on a bench because the kid who was first in line got the spinny thing first. No big deal, we’d already purchased a second set of tickets. We waited through a run of the carousel so we could be first in line and get the spinny thing on our second ride. A sneaky little kid tried to hi-jack our turn on the spinny thing but thankfully, I’m bigger and bossier and we got their first. He tried to sneak in around my butt as I unchained the ride but I blocked him and gave him the teacher/mom look that said to back off. He muttered, “Darn it!” I replied, “Sorry dude, we were first in line and we were here first.” He stomped off and Olivia and I quite enjoyed our ride. I felt no guilt whatsoever over blocking out that kid for that ride. End Aside.)

So on Sunday, she asked me for those earrings.

I looked at her blankly.

She reminded me of the sparkly earrings she’d handed to me and informed me that I put them in my purse.

I declared that I knew which earrings she meant but I didn’t think they were in my purse.

She insisted that I’d put them in my purse.

I told her I hadn’t.

She suggested I look.

So I looked. I looked through that entire freaking purse, getting angrier and angrier with each pocket I searched. I ended up taking every single thing out of my purse, fuming the entire time, getting louder in my fuming as I tossed a bottled of ibuprofen across the kitchen table in my ire.

Olivia sat next to me calmly the entire time, watching me throw my tantrum as I continued to insist that I didn’t have her damned earrings.

Once my purse was empty, I showed her triumphantly that there were no earrings in there. Yes, I’m so very mature, thank you so much for noticing.

Then…I thought back to when she handed me the earrings. What else was I holding at the time?

Oh yeah, the Barnes & Noble bag.

I left innards from my purse on the kitchen table, found the bag from the bookstore, looked through it, retrieved the earrings, both of them, and handed them to her with a muttered apology.

Then I cleaned up the table, put my purse back together and searched out my daughter.

I hugged her and apologized for the tantrum I’d thrown.

She asked, quite sincerely, how an adult could throw a tantrum. I told her I’d pretty much shown her how it worked just a few minutes ago, hadn’t I? Then I suggested that maybe it hadn’t been so much a tantrum so much as a hissy fit.

Olivia found the phrase ‘hissy fit’ to be so hilarious that she had to tell Tom all about it when he came in. He’d been lucky enough to miss my hissy fit but I wasn’t lucky enough for him to miss hearing about it.

But get this…I didn’t dwell on it the rest of the day. I let it go. I wasn’t at my best, sure, but I hope to learn from it and maybe keep my cool a little better next time. Because we all know there will be a next time, don’t we?

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