Mommy and Daddy Have an Argument, and It Makes Kina Uncomfortable

It’s surprising how little I’ve heard from other parents about whether or not they fight in front of their kids. I suppose it is the sort of topic that we’re afraid might invite judgement (a fear I shared even as I wrote the headline on today’s paper), but conflict is such a significant part of sharing a life together that I’m curious why the topic doesn’t come up more often.

Laurea and I had an argument yesterday in Kina’s presence—something we prefer to avoid—and it ended with me shouting as we walked out the front door of our building, which I am not proud of. Kina, judging by her demeanor and plugged-up ears, wasn’t proud either. Recognizing that things had gotten too noisy, we cut our losses, and I took Kina to school in silence as Laurea made her way back upstairs.

Kina didn’t know this at the time, but I ran home right after dropping her off so that I could catch Laurea before she went to work. We had a calm and clear conversation about what we wished had gone differently, apologized for our parts in the argument, and pivoted to talking about how we would address this with Kina.

I wish fighting were not a natural and normal part of being in a relationship, but it is. The costs sometimes of not addressing disagreement and misunderstanding are, in my opinion, sufficient to merit the occasional clumsy argument when that disagreement calls for it. The tragedy, though, is that a sense of disagreement feels like threat, that the process of encountering that misunderstanding will inevitably put us on the defensive—irritable and irrational—which risks even further misunderstanding. It’s a shitty cascade.

So, if we assume that arguments are normal, and if we further assume that arguments are not our finest rational moments, then it follows that we will all manage at least once to look like fools and jerks in front of The Kid. We try not to—and Laurea and are usually capable of waiting to shout at each other until Kina is off to bed or school—but she’s been privy to a couple of our arguments, and she always remembers them.

So, as Laurea and I sat in our living room, having settled things between us, we resolved to have Kina remember something different about this argument. We wanted her to know how we dealt with it.

When Kina came home after school, I came out of my room and apologized to her for yelling, told her that I shouldn’t have done that, and that I had come home after dropping her off to apologize to Mommy and talk to her about what made me angry. I told her that she could talk to me or Mommy at any time about things that make her uncomfortable, and that we try to talk about uncomfortable things when we need to.

Later, as Laurea joined us, we talked in more detail about what happened, and about how her parents would work together the next time they found themselves in that disagreement. We talked about what each of us needed that morning, and we told Kina what we had learned about each other through resolving our fight. Both of us wanted her to know that the things you can learn about somebody—even and especially when you’re in conflict—are some of the most profound and precious things about who they are.

Kina took this all in stride, without blinking an eye. “Okay,” she said. We moved on. Later, after putting her to bed, I told Laurea how strange it felt to be ashamed of my behavior and proud of how I dealt with that behavior. I suppose it feels strange to Kina, too, in ways that settle in quietly every time she discovers something about her parents. Maybe those things that settle in for her will manifest in her own relationships some day. If that’s true, I want the recognition of her own anger—and the power to both own that anger and heal it—to be one of the things she can take hold of.

How and when you disagree matters a lot, and as parents, we never want our disagreement to wash over our child; we do not want to show our child that kind of pain. At the same time, we know that we are flawed and emotional and human, and that our kid is a flawed emotional human herself, and that in the presence of those flaws, the greater skill sometimes is how you recover from those arguments. How to love each other. How to learn about each other. How to be stronger next time.

It’s how you recover.

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