Merryn is a 6 year old kid who sometimes at home with us has a strong personality. Two nights ago she lost it and was trying to take it all out on James. She ran over to him and tried to hit him. I pulled her away and put my arms around her. She tried to bite me. I took her upstairs to her room and told her to take a timeout and calm herself down. I told her I would be right outside the door and would talk with her when she was calmer. The door doesn’t close all the way and was slightly ajar. She was yelling and crying for a little bit but was starting to calm down. She came out and told me she was ready, but then she ran past me and tried to go downstairs. I told her she wasn’t ready and put her back in the room. The door wasn’t closed all the way so I could hear her, but I started putting some laundry away. JJ came up the stairs and said to me “we should give her space.” Feeling a little annoyed because that was exactly what I was doing, I said, “yeah, I know.” Next thing I know, JJ walks into the room. My first thought was that he wanted to just say goodnight because he was heading to class, but then I saw him cuddling her and asking her what was wrong. She blamed me, saying “Mommy ignored me.” He kept talking with her. I felt annoyed and sort of tricked. He had just come up and said, “We should give her space,” and then had done the opposite by going in while she was still screaming and blaming me. I felt like it undermined what I had been trying to do—give her a little space to realize that she should not have hit James and try to bring herself out of the zone where she was screaming and blaming. I went in and said, “what are you doing? I was handling this. You shouldn’t be giving her space to have these ‘mean mommy’ blame-fests. You just said we needed to give her space and then you did the exact opposite.” He said, “I was trying to mediate.” I said “so are you giving her space or are you mediating? You don’t need to ‘mediate,’ there isn’t a conflict with me. Why did you say ‘give her space’ if you intended to go in and talk with her? She’s tired and she was having a meltdown and she needs space just like you said.” He turned to Merryn and said, “go in and lie down and take a nap.” I felt really annoyed because he was supposed to be leaving for his sailing class (which was a birthday gift from me), and I had been looking forward to a night alone with the kids. And I felt annoyed because he had sort of swooped in to “solve” a situation that I was already handling, in a way that I think was positive...at least I was not giving Merryn a space to blame me, him, or anyone else. I said, “JJ, can you just go to class? She doesn’t need a nap, and she doesn’t need you to solve everything. It’s a meltdown. In 5 minutes she’ll be fine and we’ll go downstairs and have dinner and this will all be forgotten. Just give her space—really.” This made him mad and he stormed downstairs. He said, “THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU. YOU ARE NOT NORMAL.” I went down and tried to talk with him about how I felt undermined. That didn’t go well.
