A lot of my mom friends talk about being “touched out”. It comes especially during those earliest years when your baby cannot physically separate from you. All the nursing, all the cuddling, all the carrying, and all the tiny sticky fingers all over your everything: it all adds up. There comes a point when you just don’t wanna be touched anymore.
My kids and their long legs can now move pretty quickly all on their own. They haven’t needed me to feed them in quite some time. The days of their bodies needing my body for survival have faded. But still, my little ones want to be all over me. They want to hold my hand, they want to be carried, and they want to be hugged. I will never, ever stop wanting that. It is an honor and a privilege to be loved by these girls, and their touch is one very important way that we stay connected.
But recently, I started to let it creep into an annoyance.
“You don’t like hugging your kid? You monster.” I know, I know. It sounds truly awful. But it’s not like that, I swear. The catch came when my dear beloved darlings started exerting their independence and began looking for ways to do anything other than what I asked them to do. Whether it was picking up toys, at least trying the food on the plate, or putting on socks (put on your socks, FOR THE LOVE PUT ON YOUR SOCKS!), they soon realized that they technically had a choice to obey or disobey. If they didn’t actually want to do something, could they find a way to avoid it? They tested out ways of delaying the desired action. Could they cry about it? Could they scream at me? What if they ignored me? And then, the coup de grâce: they could ask for a hug.
Hugs became a nuclear option. The one thing I could never refuse was a hug because I am not a monster. No matter what ridiculous limit they tested, no matter how stubbornly they’d dug themselves in, if I heard them say, “Huggy, Mommy,” then I would drop everything and hug them. And they knew it.
This ushered in a terrible new era in my parenting when I thought I needed to decide why I was being asked for a hug. Did they truly need my physical and emotional closeness to make the right choice in this contentious moment? Or did they just hope to distract me from the fact that it was now the eleventy billionth time I’d asked them not to dump sandbox sand in the kitchen? Could they see me getting angry and decide to deploy strategic huggy requests as a bold counter-insurgency strategy? And for that matter, why on earth did they insist on calling it a huggy instead of a just plain hug? Was this all part of the cuteness distraction?
I was trying to reason with my kids’ hug requests. I started to feel like something was wrong, here. Like I had over-corrected for being touched out.
A little while ago, I found myself blissfully alone in the car. I could, therefore, listen to news radio like a grown woman instead of endless repeats of Kidz Bop songs. (I no longer remember the real lyrics to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”.) While enjoying NPR and the feeling of mature adulthood, I listened to a story about twin sisters who wrote a book on stress response, especially in women. I heard them explain how our flight-or-fight stress reaction is meant to have an equal and opposite peace and gratitude reaction meant to close the stress cycle. However, most people don’t experience this sort of resolution to their stressful experience. We go through our days with the constantly building effects of stressful situations piling up on us.
They had a few suggestions for how to intentionally invoke an ending to the stress response, including physical activity. But then they went and spoke right to my life with their suggestion for the 20-second hug. When you hug someone — really hug them, not just a quick reach-and-pat but a full, body-to-body embrace — for at least 20 seconds, you communicate safety and security to your body. You relax. And you find a sense of having reached a safe place. You complete your stress cycle and return to health.
What if, in those high-stakes moments of preschooler versus parent, we needed that sense more than ever? What if my kids knew on some strange level that we would be better able to resolve our conflict if we took a minute to hug? And not just the quick, grudging squeeze, but a real hug? What if my long-legged kiddo crawled up into my lap and I wrapped my arms around her and we just sat and hugged? The task at hand wasn’t going anywhere. Her socks would still be on the floor, ready to be put on at some point, and we’d both be a little calmer and centered to face that (apparently formidable) job. A hug could never be anything other than exactly what we needed.
My motherly task is to make my girls productive members of society. That means teaching them how to be helpful workers, how to be good listeners, and how to follow directions. But it also means teaching them to understand their emotions, deal with stress, and ask for support when it is needed. In our family, this probably means hugs. No more eye-rolling, half-hearted hugs for me. It’s time to get back down on the floor, even when we are mid-struggle, for a full-bodied 20-second hug.
As it turns out, they’re not the only ones who need it. Sometimes a huggy is the best balm a stressed-out mama can receive.
