Queen Mab loves to write little notes to people. She'll scribble a little, draw a heart, and announce that it's a letter for Nana, or Daddy, or Auntie Kate (she's started pronouncing the "au" in Auntie like "ah," which is really delightful) So when I discovered while unpacking a bunch of little notepads left over from high school with my maiden name on them (I didn't write many notes back then!) I gave them to her.
Then Valentine's Day happened, and the deluge began.
There were little notes EVERYWHERE. Little hearts, little stars, little scribbles, piled up in the corners of the kitchen and the pantry and getting soggy on the bathroom floor. It was madness. I gathered fistfuls of them to recycle.
One day, though, she asked me if I would draw her a heart.
So I did, and I hung it in the entryway doors so she could see it as soon as she came home from school. She was ecstatic.
She liked it so much, in fact, that a week or so later as she and I spent a pleasant hour drawing together, I made her this.
Of course she loved it too.
But it wasn't until several weeks later that I realized, as I swept up still more little scribbled notes, that if this was how she was trying to communicate her love to us, maybe that's because this is what would make her feel loved. So I scribbled this down one day and stuck it in her lunchbox.
When she came home from school she was practically bouncing. She loved it! She told me how happy she was when her teacher read it to her!
...
Oh, right. She can't read yet (well, not well enough to read Mommy's scribbled notes, anyway).
So I started sending stuff like this instead.
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| A sauropod having a snack, Mab with her Nana and Papa, a Happy Thursday sunflower, and a tap-dancing Triceratops. |
I like to think her behavior has improved since she's been getting these little notes. But even if it's not, it's still worth the effort, because I know she feels loved. Yesterday on the way home from school, she told me how much she liked the picture she'd gotten that day (the sauropod eating an apple) and said, "You're a really good artist, Mommy. I can tell you put a lot of effort into that."
If I hadn't been driving I would have hugged her. It was hilariously adorable to hear her saying back to me the same things I say to her about her artwork.
And Mab isn't the only one who's benefiting from this. It's hard parenting Mab sometimes. I think it's probably harder being Mab, though. The world is an intense place when you have big emotions, limited life experience, and everyone else is twice as big as you (except the toddler, who is the same size and always wants the exact thing you're holding/doing right at that moment). And when I spent a few minutes every day trying to think of what kind of little picture I can draw that will make her smile, I find myself seeing the world from her perspective. And when she's furious and exhausted and screaming and hitting, it's easier to pick her up and go sit someplace quiet with her until she's calm enough to talk to me, rather than scream back.
I remember reading about an analysis of a bunch of studies on the efficacy of spanking children, which revealed that while spanking didn't actually improve the child's behavior (if anything, it had the opposite effect), it did make the parents think the behavior had improved. When I make these notes for Mab, I feel more connected to her, and that sense of connection helps me parent her more patiently. I lose my temper less, and so even if her behavior is the same, I feel better about it because I'm not losing control over the situation.
Even if her behavior hasn't improved, mine certainly has, and the end result is a happier, more peaceful Mab and Mommy.
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