At dinner the next night, when Jake decides to dump an entire bottle of his beloved ketchup on his hamburger, I don't shout, "no!" in an absolute panic, thinking of a rushed trip to the supermarket after the kids go to bed.
Instead, I calmly say, "If you put the entire bottle on your burger, you won't have it for your chicken tomorrow night. It's your choice."
Jake stops immediately. Victory. But not for long. Within a few weeks, Jake begins to tell me he doesn't like the choices offered him.
Did Myers-Briggs work? Well, it left me more accepting of my children's and husband's temperaments. I try not to fight who they are as people. That's left me calmer, and more accepting of their foibles, for good or ill. I don't yell or lose my temper quite as much. A few of the other moms from my group say similar things.
"I think awareness of personality is half the battle," said Susan Wei, a fellow mom from the group who admitted she realized she was harder on her daughter than her son because they shared a perceiver's temperament. "But you'll have to ask me ten years from now whether it has changed anything."
As for me, if my children remember me one day, to quote Penley, as "a model of patience, kindness, and fairness," I'll consider it a success. In the meantime, I am now a firm believer in "getting the heck out of there." We INTPs need our downtime, after all.
©2007 Helaine Olen and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Helaine Olen's writing has been published by The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com, AlterNet.org and
LiteraryMama.com, where she is an associate editor. Her first book, Office
Mate: The Guide to Finding True Love on the Job will be published this fall. She
lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. |
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