Savism

Just in case this blog gives the impression of the parenting gig being all sunshine and sweetness and laughter, this post should serve as a correction.
As I've had an occasion to mention quite recently, Sava hates breakfast, which now means that we all do, too. After missing school Monday because he did not finish breakfast on time, this morning our cup of patience overfloweth from the start. We gave him fifty minutes to eat the fabled half piece of toast, some salami, and kiwi, and five minutes before his time was up, only a tiny corner of the toast had been nibbled off. In the meantime, I had gotten more frustrated and more angry than ever in my life.
Feeding has been the most difficult part of parenting Sava from the time he was a few months old. We've been through everything, including but not limited to behavior therapy, and for both Rado and me there is a button in our heads that gets turned on by simple events that other parents might not even notice, such as their kid not being hungry three mornings in a row. Once that button is on, our sanity plunges from 100% to 10% in a matter of minutes, and we find ourselves saying and doing things that we never imagined we had it in us to say and do. Rado, being the mellow self-composed half of the parenting unit, usually ends up raising his voice. I, being the intense hot-headed half, take his raised voice as my cue for going nuts. So, this morning with Sava acting ever more nonchalant at our urgings to buck up and eat his food, I pretty much lost it as I never have lost it in my life. I felt like hitting something hard, which I did (the door); I felt like kicking, which I did (a toy truck); I felt like shouting at him and making him feel awful, which I did (by sending him to his room and yelling at him as he cried while I cried myself). He spent an hour and a half in his room, alone, while Raya napped and I recovered my shredded patience. When I felt ready to face him without wanting to hold him head down and spank his tush until he knew exactly how I felt, I went in and gave him a ten-minute lecture on what happens to naughty little boys who do not eat their breakfast; how they end up in a hospital with the doctors poking and probing them in order to figure out why they do not want to eat; how their parents feel like crying every morning because they cannot send him to school with an empty stomach; how everyone's day gets ruined by a stupid thing like breakfast (yes, we teach him not to use the word "stupid," and try not to use it ourselves, but this morning I very much used it and just apologized in the same breath). This all happened also on a morning when we were scheduled to go to the dentist, and for two days Sava had been whining about not wanting to go there, so I was prepared for a meltdown.
After several minutes of my talking to him about his inexcusable behavior at breakfast, watching his eyes go from interested to bored to indifferent--I knew he had stopped listening but had to get those things out of my system, for my sake, not his--he turned to me, in the middle of a sentence, and declared in a most matter-of-fact voice:

Well....I think I am done with this conversation. Let's go to the dentist!!

Deep breath. They grow up.