A quote from a mother not coping with her toddler: “I was so angry with my toddler son when he was tantrumming and refusing to eat, that I grabbed a tuft of hair on the back of his head and pushed his face into his bowl of spaghetti! His face was covered in spaghetti sauce! The look on his face was of total shock but I was still so angry that I did it a second time”!

A group of mothers who had young children got together over coffee one morning. One of them bravely started to confess her worst behaviour with her children and recounted the above situation with her toddler.

Another mother then said “I was so angry with my toddler who was screaming and screaming that I rammed his pushchair into a wall. I knew it wouldn’t hurt him because the front wheels would hit the wall first and I just wanted to give him such a shock that it would stop him from screaming. He wasn’t hurt but I was still raging so I slammed him into the wall again.”

One of the funniest mums then burst out laughing and said “It’s amazing what you will do to get your kids to stop them from their tantrums. My son was throwing a tantrum in the queue in Asda and everyone was staring at him and at me. He was really letting rip. He had done this so many times, and I had tried every parenting tip in the book and nothing I could say or do stopped him from throwing these tantrums. This time, something snapped inside me: I threw myself on the floor beside him and threw my own tantrum. I pounded the floors with my fists, I kicked and kicked my heels into the ground, I thrashed my head back and forth all the time screaming at the top of my voice. Everyone was stunned into silence including my young son who stopped his own tantrum and looked on dumbfounded at his mother throwing her own almighty tantrum! Eventually, he bent down and said in her ear “Mummy, can you get up, you’re embarrasing me!”. She said that he had not thrown a tantrum since! Her strategy worked!!

One of my ex husband’s friends (who is a trained criminal psychologist) related to me the time when one of her babies had been screaming for such a long time that she could no longer tolerate the sound. She went into the baby’s room and thumped the pillow a few inches from her child’s head with frustration. She said she thumped it several times til she had got her rage out of her. She said that she did this because she was so enraged with her baby’s screams that she had wanted to hit her child; this was the closest she came….

All these women are from very good, solid, middle-class homes, with educated, profesionally qualified mothers….They are not from impoverished, drug/alcohol addicted backgrounds and all of them live in comfort with the average amount of stress.

These are all true stories from friends I know in Kingston. None of them have Bipolar; in fact, none of them have been diagnosed with having any form of mental disturbance. None of them have had their children taken from them. During this coffee morning, all the mothers there were laughing at the stories and thanking each other for their honesty. Each mother there said that they had done simarly awful things when they have been at their wits end with their children.

I’m not conding these mothers’ behaviour, nor am I saying that their treatment of their children is acceptable or normal. I was shocked to hear these things yet, if I’m honest, also strangely comforted to hear that other mother’s lose it with their kids too at times.

I haven’t done any of these things and yet I’m the one who’s been told that, because I have Bipolar, I am more at risk of harming my children. None of these mum’s have been told that they have something wrong with them.

So what are the worst things I’ve done as a parent?  I’ll be honest here, painful as it is and you can all be judge and jury as to whether the things I’ve done are so unusual in parenting experiences that the children shouldn’t be with me.

When my eldest daughter was a baby, she screamed so much one night that I screamed back with all my might. I didn’t shake her or hit her, I just screamed too. Then I put her in her cot (gently) and left the room, slamming the door and phoned my mum sobbing with frustration feeling a total failure and feeling terrible for shouting at my baby who, after all, was only being a baby.

When she was a toddler and I had my second son who was only a few months old, all of us came down with a bad bug. Both she and my son were waking me several times a night; she with her illness, he to feed every hour and a half (breastfeeding) and me with my chest infection. I had just fallen pregnant with our third child and was exhausted from the first few weeks of pregnancy as well as from looking after a 2 year old, a 6 month old baby and my third on the way. I felt exhausted, ill, feverish, resentful, desperate…One morning, at around 6am she woke up and threw an almighty tantrum on the stairs. Her tantrums often lasted for an hour at a time. My son then woke up wanting to be fed. My husband wasn’t there to help and my mother was just about waking up in bed. I was trying to cope with all this on my own. I lost it with her. I picked her up roughly and put her in the “time out” place which was our downstairs loo, yelled at her to stay in there until she stopped tantrumming and slammed the door. I was so enraged that I thumped the door (I didn’t hit my daughter at all). Unfortunately, the bit of the door that I hit was glass and I lacerated the tendons in my hand and had to undergo plastic surgery to my hand. My daugher, understandably, was totally shaken by the experience of watching her mother put her hand through the door.

When I was taken to hospital for my hand, the admission nurse asked whether I was post natally depressed. I said I wasn’t sure. I was then assessed and my reading for post natal depression was high and a course of anti-depressants were prescribed.

Social services were informed and my daughter was placed on the child protection register. The health visitor said that I was considered to not be a cause for serious concern because I had chosen to hurt myself in anger rather than hurt my child. I was horrified that I had lost control of my temper in that way. It took my daughter a few weeks before she was back to her normal self.

That’s the worst thing I’ve done to my children.

Other things have included: being so angry with them all, that I shut the door to the house (didn’t lock it) and stormed outside to the end of our drive (about 3 metres in length) and sat in my car with a cup of coffee for 15 minutes to calm down. I could see the house from my car window so I could ensure that they didn’t come out and nobody went in. The children were 8, 6 and 5 at the time. This happened once in total – never again.

I’ve smacked my children when they were toddlers: my eldest daugter when she was a toddler got smacked around 4 times (a smack – not hard hitting), my son around 3 times and my youngest daughter around 2 times. I quickly learnt that smacking ( although highly endorsed by my parents generation and indeed our school system whilst I was still at school where they had the cane), doesn’t work. All it does is to encourage the children to hit each other and others. So I don’t smack. I now resort to shouting when I lose my cool, walking out of the room, slamming doors and being very grumpy.

I have been learning increasingly effective parenting strategies though and gradually I’ve been increasingly able to stop shouting (not 100% yet!) and to walk away when I feel the temperature rising.

According to my exhusband and the Judge, I have also hurt them emotionally by telling them too much about the Court case. Our children were living with my ex husband and I all through the 18 months of litigation and during the actual 10 day High Court hearing. Every day during that Court case, my exhusband and I left the house, caught the train and a taxi and went to the High Court and then came home again the same night. The children knew that we were going to court every day. They knew that the CAFCASS officer had come to see them because they were deciding who the children should live with. They knew that my exhusband was saying that I wasn’t well enough to look after them.

Unsurprisingly, they asked questions – intelligent, perceptive, direct, uncomrpomising questions and asked me to be honest with them in giving the answers. I tried not to give them too much unecessary and upsetting detail, but according to the Judge, I gave them too much information which has caused them distress. I’m not sure how she concluded this given that she hasn’t even met the children, nor was she present to hear the conversation, nor was it recorded…..My children still say that they want me to tell them honestly when they ask questions. I’ve talked with 3 psychologists about how to answer these questions without damaging them emotionally or psychologically, read numerous books on divorce for guidance but apparently I got it wrong.

In short, I have never broken any bones, stubbed out cigarettes, been drunk or on drugs whilst looking after them, left them in the house on their own (which both my ex husband and various nannies have done), not left them in a car on their own (apart from in the garage forecourt whilst paying for petrol), not lost them whilst taking them out, not starved them…….any other thing that I’ve overlooked?

Oh yes there is! I was so cross with them one day that I wrote a long letter describing how I hated their behaviour when they were being so naughty. I described that I felt like hitting them (but stressed that I didn’t do so), that I was such a bad mother, that I was a failure etc. In fact, writing out all the things I was feeling was following the advice of my psychologist who told me that one of the most effective ways to deal with anger is to write it all down on a piece of paper and then throw that piece of paper away. Unfortunately, I didn’t throw it away – my husband found it and used it in Court as evidence that I was an appalling parent.

Yet the two incidents I describe above – the hand through the window and going out to my car for a coffee were brought up in court as classic examples of why I shouldn’t be allowed to parent my children. The letter merely showed as concrete evidence that I was too psychologically disturbed to parent the children.

The fact that my ex husband repeatedly smacked the children when we were married and still does (regularly, I’m told by my children) doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that the CAFCASS report states that my youngest daughter is frightened of him because “he picks me up by my middle and throws me on the bed when he’s angry with me”, doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that he has often shouted at them, threatened them physically, shaken them, slammed the brakes on the car yelling at them that he will “put them out on the pavement” unless they stop screaming, doesn’t seem to matter. The other emotional/psychological things he says and does all don’t seem to matter either.

The fact that my children are scared of him doesn’t seem to matter. They are scared that he will hit them, they are scared that he won’t take their fears seriously and so don’t tell him when they are upset about something, they are scared that he will continue to hurt me. In fact, it was the children who told me that I should go to the Domestic Violence unit because they read the leaflet in the doctor’s surgery and said “Mummy, you should go and talk to these people, because that (the violence) is exactly what daddy’s doing to you.” The fact that the children have witnessed him hitting me and threatening to hit me and shaking me whilst swearing at me and shouting, doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that he hid a knife under his bed together with his porn magazines and videos, doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that, whilst the children are still living with him, he has gone out to lap dancing bars and come home very drunk, doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that he has left the children in the house on their own, doesn’t seem to matter.

Apparently, he’s the “well” one with no mental or psychological problems and is a ”fit” parent, but I’m not.  

Well, what do you all think? Are these things I’ve done appallingly bad? Am I misguided in thinking that I am a capable parent?

Let me know you’re honest thoughts and please do share your worst parenting stories or those of a friend – anonymously – and maybe a picture can emerge of what range of parenting misdemeanors are sufficient evidence of such bad parenting that the children should be taken away from a Bipolar parent…..

Phew! That was brave of me to share those things….

 

My children are telling me that their father is hitting/smacking them when they are with him. They tell me that this is happening around twice a week.