The Hulk Within

Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. I still find it hard to believe that these words actually left my mouth and were directed at my three-year-old daughter. And while she probably didn’t get my slightly ironic, post-modern cultural reference to the 1970s TV show The Incredible Hulk, she certainly got my meaning.
I was at the end of my tether, and she knew it. (The chance of my clothes ripping and my muscles rippling was remote, but not out of the question.)
Friends and colleagues will tell you that I am generally a quiet person, not known for raising my voice in anger or sudden erratic outbursts. My kids may tell you a different story, but then nobody pushes your buttons quite like your kids. (Unconditional love can be hard work).
What should have been a simple task; making a banana cake for a school P&C fundraiser turned into a personal trial and a test of my patience. It smelled fantastic as it came out of the oven, but as I attempted to tip it from the tin, the bottom stuck and the cake crumbled. Not a disaster, but I was on a tight timeline and didn’t quite have the ingredients to make another one.
Given that my cake would probably only raise $20-30 I thought about phoning in an excuse and coughing up some cash towards the cause instead. But male pride got in the way – I wasn’t going to let those P&C super mums think I couldn’t make a cake!
I knew I could improvise my way around not having enough eggs and only having frozen bananas, but what I hadn’t really factored in was the attention span of a three-year-old.
Friday is Dad Day for me and Jemma and, after spending the rest of the week in the company of qualified carers, she has an expectation that I will take her out on the town for a good time. (We can get a lot of mileage from the library, the supermarket and a café.) And this cake business just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
I tried to engage her in some colouring in whilst simultaneously creaming the butter and the sugar for the second time (and splattering it all over the walls for the second time), but she just kept pushing.
I wasn’t attending to her wants and she wasn’t respecting my need to get the job done, and therein lay the recipe for conflict.
There was no gamma ray induced transformation, but, like Dr Bruce Banner, I feel I am on some kind of quest to control the beast within because I don’t like me when I’m angry.