You Don’t Listen!

I just read a pretty fascinating and disturbing article in the New Yorker about water torture techniques used by American soldiers in the Philippines–following the war against the Spanish in 1902 or so–during the fight against rebel forces. It more or less involves forcing water into someones body until their stomach is grotesquely distended and then using your foot to force the water back out and then begin the process all over again.
I’ve never been subjected to this kind of conscious torture, but I often feel as though I am a prisoner being driven to insanity at the hands of some kind of super genius captors. My children just don’t listen to me. It happens often. It drives me totally fucking insane. I know what to expect. I know what will happen and yet still, it makes me fly into a rage that I just can deal with. It’s not simply that they don’t listen, but then whine, protest and cry when they have to deal with the results of not listening. I ask them to clean something up. Clean it up in time to do this, I say. They ignore me. I ask again and again. They ignore me. I explode, they do some kind of half-assed variation on original request and then we don’t do what I promised, because there’s no time.
Intellectually, I don’t totally understand it, because I know what’s happening and how it will happen, because it is almost always the same. But still, it is so infuriating. I always think back to a twins class we took when Lisa was pregnant. We watched some videos, shared some stories, looked at some diagrams, etc. Then a woman came in who was–and is still I assume–a single mother of twins. She talked about how insanely hard it is to have twins, especially when they’re new borns, and talked about the frustration. They will scream and cry, she said, and it will drive you totally insane. You’ll want to pick up the baby and just throw it across the room, she said. Whoa, Lady, I thought, maybe you, not me. I was in my final year of liberal arts education and feeling perfectly capable of overcoming any obstacle with simple reason and intellectual understanding. How could I let myself get to that point, I thought then, I understand that the baby will cry because it has needs. I can meet those needs. If i can’t meet those needs, well, I will understand that and not let it affect me. I thought something like that then and I was proven horribly wrong within a couple months or so, whenever they started to really scream, and I’ve been unable to intellectually overcome the irritation ever since then. Fuck you Lewis and Clark!