She's mean and she hits. I want to hit her back.

On the way home from the gym yesterday, the Tyrant yelled from the back of the van, “Mom! Open it!”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she was holding a bag of potato chips. “Mommy’s driving, sweetie,” I said. “I’ll open it when---” THWACK. The bag of chips beaned me in the side of my head.
“Well, here they are,” I said.
So you’re on the edge of your seat reading this, I know. Did I slam on the brakes? Pull over and scream until my throat was sore? Eat the chips myself?
No. First I again took note of my 2-year-old’s remarkable aim. Then I opened the chips and tossed them back to her.
She ate one. “I don’t yike these,” she said. She emptied the bag into the cupholder and took a cereal bar out of her backpack. “Open it!”
“Honey, I’m not going to open any---” THWACK. That aim is something, I tell you.
I opened it and tossed it back to her. “I don’t yike it!” She threw it on the floor. Those of you familiar with my chronic roach problems are probably having an “aha” moment right now.
For a long time the Pterodactyl has been terrorizing the family. His screech contains some sort of sonar that penetrates the brain and he’s irritatingly adept at inventing behavior designed to drive me wild -- emptying a basket of clean folded laundry, scribbling on his sister’s favorite artwork, throwing a pencil at me because I didn’t draw an airplane the way he envisioned it.
But he’ll be five in a couple of months, and he’s becoming ever-so-slightly rational. Last night, after I took away his Blankie and Blue Puppy and Fuzzy Pillow because he called me a mean mom, he calmed down enough to get his treasures back and then asked me sweetly to snuggle with him. “Do you still think I’m a mean mom?” I asked. He pulled my face close to his. “Yes,” he whispered. But I didn’t care because at least he was going to sleep.
It’s the Tyrant who has everybody on the run now. We're all bearing scars from her. The boy has a bloody scratch under his eye. My elbow is bruised. She hits. She throws. She bangs. She scratches. She yells. She tells me to go to Time Out about 12 times a day. She’s crazy cute, and she loves to look at me, raise her eyebrows up and down, nod and smile, like she’s letting me in on her secret. But I don’t know her secret. I just think she’s nuts.
My friend Sahmmy (www.sahmmy.com) was appalled at the driving/potato chips story. “Uh-uh. No you didn’t. You pulled the car over, right? And threw the chips away?”
Sahmmy reasons that if I don’t nip this stuff now, the Tyrant will evolve into full-fledged delinquency by kindergarten. “What are you going to do when she’s 13? If she’s even around when she’s 13,” Sahmmy said. I allowed myself for a brief moment to think of an adolescent Tyrant living under a bridge with an eyebrow ring and a tattoo of a cobra around her leg. Ew.
Husband and I are struggling with the discipline thing right now. Discipline is hard work. I don’t like discipline. I much prefer yelling, evil eye stares and stomping my feet. I like my children to be slightly afraid of me so that they can’t tell that I’m actually afraid of them.
I’m not opposed to pops on the bottom. That’s what we call them, because I think it sounds better than hitting my child on the butt. But I don’t think they work, mainly because they’re not painful enough, and I’m not talking about physical pain because I absolutely would never do anything that caused a child more than a second of slight physical discomfort. No, I’m talking regret here. And think about it. Faced with a choice between, say, getting a flu shot and actually getting the flu, but still having to take care of everyone around you as they themselves get the flu and never actually getting to recover yourself except during the long uncomfortable nights when you’re shivering from the fever, wouldn’t you go for the easy short-lived pain of the injection? I’m just talking hypothetically here.
Anyway, a child psychologist recommended a book that essentially lauds “Time-Outs” as the cure for all bad behavior. It’s a decent-sized paperback, and serves as an excellent nightside coaster. The actual Time-Out philosophy has not worked for several reasons, the main one being that the Tyrant will not stay in Time-Out unless we sit on her, and even then we have to sit on her hands, too, or she’ll leave bloody scratches on our backs. She’s very strong.
Our latest tactic has been to put a hook-and-eye lock on her door so we can lock her in her room for Time-Out. I had been holding the door shut, but I started getting calluses on my hands and they hurt, so I asked Husband to install the hook-and-eyes. So far it’s working, though not necessarily as a deterrent. It’s mostly working as a chance for me to catch my breath, regroup, and say, “my children are adorable. my children are adorable. my children are adorable,” 20 times in a row.
If you don’t, upon spending significant amounts of time with young children, begin to have a better insight into child abuse, you need to have your empathy box refilled. I’m not talking about systemic, chronic abuse. I’m talking about the young woman who snaps in the grocery store parking lot because her 4-year-old unscrewed his sippy cup and dumped orange juice on the baby’s face. And the woman was up all night with the baby and hasn’t eaten anything but Cheez-Its all day. How hard is it for that woman to keep her hands to herself in that brief, maddening moment?
I'm not talking about the zany, hilarious stuff. As I'm writing this, for example, the Tyrant is lining up Dixie cups on the window sill and putting a dollop of bubblegum-flavored toothpaste in each one. I'm okay with that. I'm referring to the bad stuff. The hitting, the defiance, the absolute refusal to do something as simple as not spit chewed-up chicken nugget at the babysitter.
It’s hard. It’s very hard. I’m not Mother-of-the-Year, and I know there have been many times that I’ve handled the discipline thing wrong. But I thank my lucky stars every day that my kids came along after I’d been on this earth for nearly four decades, giving me time to ripen and mellow like that excellent Chardonnay I had the other night. Thank goodness I have the patience, or maturity, or age-induced anger management skills, whatever it is, to keep from harming my children.
It’s true that I want them to be afraid of me -- but not because I would ever harm them. As Sahmmy says, it’s good to keep them a little off-guard. I want them to fear me because I’m just a little nuts. Poor Tyrant. I guess that’s where she gets it.