Mission Control

I think I may have a control problem. You may be wondering how this could possibly be given my laid back, low key personality. Shocking as it may be, I am beginning to become aware of this constant state of tension in which I hold myself. For example, my nieces are eating rolls in the kitchen. No plate. One knife between them. Leftover rolls scattered across the surface of the table - also known as: making a mess.

Some alarm goes off inside me. Houston! WE HAVE A PROBLEM! There is a mess being made by preschoolers, and they don't even know. They don't even know that someone will have to come along behind them and clean it up. Their little roll/butter eating rampage will create unnecessary work for others. Perhaps they expect I will clean up the disarray they've left in their wake. 

And I am not even their mother. I am their aunt. 

Hence my conclusion that I may have a control problem. 

I cannot monitor every single thing my nieces do while staying at my house. If I did, I would probably have to follow them around with a wet washcloth and a broom. In addition to that, their little minds pump out the simplest questions imaginable. "Is this your house?" "Where are you going (as I walk from the kitchen to the living room)?" These are very elementary questions that, given just a little bit of thought, could be answered with a tiny bit of reasoning. Part of me is riled up at the thought of someone not putting forth the effort to reason out where I might be going when they can clearly see I am moving from the kitchen to the living room. 

Then I remind myself that they are children. They have not yet acquired the reasoning skills necessary to make the short leap from "kitchen" to "living room." Yet there is a part of me that expects they should know. They should be able to do that because it is not that hard. Another part of me suspects espionage. They are plotting against me in order to drive me crazy and manipulate their way through the domain which is my world. They can be sweet. They can be cute. They can be little bundles of joy. However, the part of me that wants to control is wrenched up to RED ALERT because these miniature humans squirm around logic and whine their way over even the simplest of reasonable structures. 

All these things are whirling through me, and I feel like my sense of control is being taken away. Not control of myself per say, but of my circumstances, or maybe my surroundings. These two little persons don't have everything they need to transverse the breadth of human interactions with each other and with the world without creating some kind of disorder. How much effort will it take to train these little minds to understand the importance of straightening up behind themselves, and not leaving their mess for someone else to clean? At what point in their tender little experiences do you ask them to take responsibility for their actions and whatever consequences they ensue? How do you do so without shaming them and guilting them into these actions voluntarily? Is it really voluntary if they are so afraid of feeling shame or guilt that they'd rather do the action than feel those things? What is the big picture anyway? 

There was a time in my life when I felt like I had the answers to these questions. I felt secure in my ability to act with swift and sure power to carry out a judicial decision. I felt confident that my decision would produce a desired result, and that result would be good. Now I question pretty much everything. I am not even a mother. It is a wonder civilization has progressed thus far.