This Just Got a Lot Harder-

Today at the park I asked one of my sons to stop pushing a rotating circle-thing so his little brother could get off. He flagrantly ignored me, kept pushing, and baby brother got dragged and scraped on the ground. I stopped my son, then calmly told him that what he did hurt his baby brother. Without warning he struck me right across the face.
If I back up a bit, just prior to going to the park I consciously did try to give all my sons as much attention as I could to fill up their 'emotional tanks' and connect with them. As we were getting ready to go, another son tossed our car keys in the air and they had mishappenly landed in a small crack underneath the sealed concrete steps of my brother's house. Despite me and my sister-in-law straining for 20 minutes lying on our bellies and reaching into mouldy dirt with wire hangers, pens, magnets, prayer, and wooden spatulas with the rubber tips removed, we didn't get them. Afterwards, I was a little stiff as I handled my kids, a tad rougher than usual. Having the sliding door close on one of my son's little fingers, crushing and bruising them blue didn't help. Also having another son consistently take his shoes off and throw them into obscure hiding places on three separate occasions also didn't wipe out the black cloud that was gathering over my head.
I could feel the tension in my voice as I struggled not to yell while we walked to the park. It still didn't prevent a meltdown. About a minute before my son punched me in the face, my sister in law said that if she was me, she would be yelling all day long at her kids.
Today was an especially bad day and traveling makes things rough. I realize that my 2x2 situation is very unusual, but having these stressful events that occur both accidentally and on purpose breed more chaos have become the new norm as my kids hit 2 and 4.
I'm not just talking about embarrassing behavior that doesn't look good (although thankyou for pointing that out in your comment, Staci, because that does happen too and I'm learning to let that go). What I mean by meltdowns is when my kids cross a line where their flagrant disobedience causes intentional harm to me and/or their siblings, or drains me of time and energy by cleaning up huge, unintentional, messes and totally enrage me. But the meltdowns are also connected to these weird, stress-inducing, accidental events that I can't prevent very easily.
These stress-inducing events typically don't happen when we're doing our child-driven creative play. But we can't do that all day every day. Life requires us to go to the park, visit our family, and pick up the dry-cleaning. And no matter how emotionally tanked up everybody is, and I'm realizing how desperately important that is now, the bottom line is that with too many little kids around it can get crazy. Exponentially, terrifyingly crazy.
In light of all this, I'm making a bold, possible super-crazy goal over one thing I can control: do not ever, under any circumstances, or for any amount of love or money, lose my temper. Ever. (Although, one stipulation: I may be aiming for progress, not perfection here).
When I lose my temper I can't find it for awhile. Shouting can be very effective, but with little recovery time before the next random crisis of blueberry stains, nuclear diapers, broken lamps or a shoved little brother strikes, it's all too easy to get completely insane. Yelling and turning into witch-face makes my kids cry. It breaks them, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot and sometimes into too many pieces. The anger ripples through everyone, giving the thumbs up for all my little guys to lose it too. In the Dalai Lama's book on the Power of Patience, he says outbursts of anger plant the seeds of anger in others- "that person does not hang on to anger but passes it on, perhaps repeatedly." Acting in anger diminishes our virtues; if left unchecked anger can destroy us. Staying with patience is strength, it brings immense power.
But I found that when I kept myself checked, the anger eventually explodes anyways- bigger, uglier and guiltier. In Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, Geneen Roth has a focused approach. She believes in the importance of facing deficiencies, of being with a yucky feeling instead of drowning in it or escaping from it or numbing away from it. "All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope." Skeptical at first, I've had some success with her ideas. She believes there is great power in feeling anger without acting out in it. "When we allow ourselves to feel the full heat of anger without expressing it, a mountain of strength and courage is revealed."
Seriously? Could that actually be true? We'll see...