When my twin daughters were two, I gritted my teeth and braved out the terrible twos. The books on tantrums could have been written for my eldest girl, who screamed her way through every meal time, insisted on doing everything for herself, and hurled herself to the floor at the slightest opportunity. It’s okay, I thought. It’s just a phase.
And then they were three, and still she screamed. She dug her heels in and dragged against me on a mile-long walk to nursery. Every. Single. Day. It’ll be alright, I was told. It’ll pass.
When their fourth birthday arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief. But the sigh was as shortlived as the temper tantrums were long, and I wept as yet another bedtime turned into a three-hour ordeal.
They started school and I wailed to their lovely, patient teacher that I simply couldn’t handle her. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ I was promised.
Five. Nearly six. The anger inside her is so great that words alone are not enough. She’ll scream, and she’ll hit, and she’ll work herself up into such a frenzy she can’t possibly climb down from it, and then she’ll cry for me to hold her. And I swallow my own anger and hold her tight as I stroke her hair and cry with her, and tell her that she simply has to learn to control herself. I cry, and she cries, and I wonder if it’ll stop when she’s seven, or when she’s eight, or if she simply has a temper she can’t control. If she is simply her mother’s daughter.