The Corner: Mother Appreciation Parties

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I can easily trace the genesis of Mother Appreciation Parties to my meeting with Julie and her 13-year-old son, Brandon. I recall reading the intake worker’s notes regarding the referral mentioning “temper tantrums.” By then, I was very familiar with temper tantrumming in many of its varieties over the years I had been developing and trying out my contextual “temper tantrum party approach” to such excesses of behavior. 1 But I have to admit I was entirely unprepared for the history and context of Julie’s concerns about Brandon’s tantrumming. Julie, despite her age of 40 or so, looked as if she was weary with life itself. On first meeting, she immediately set about telling me what she considered to be the back story to Brandon’s tantrumming. She met and married Brandon’s Kiwi father overseas and then emigrated to New Zealand to make a home for the couple here. He was an international businessman whose travels took him away from New Zealand for various periods of time. From the very beginning of their marriage and even more so after Brandon’s birth, he would scream at, revile, and beat her if any of his whims or demands were not urgently attended to. The beatings were frequent and often led to injuries requiring medical treatments. However, she was tolerant of this because of her fervent desire for her son to grow up having a father, and she thought there was nothing she couldn’t endure to see this longing of hers come to pass. During her husband’s absences overseas, she was determined to devote herself to her only child, doing everything imaginable to foster his initiative. During his father’s residences in New Zealand, she spoke of how Brandon would withdraw into what she referred to as “a kind of hiding himself away.” Brandon did agree when I asked if he had, in a manner of speaking, led two lives, one under his mother’s care and another during his father’s periods at home? As I might have expected, mother and son looked very kindly towards one another throughout this discussion. However, Brandon went on the alert when Julie said that when Brandon turned 11 and, as she put it, “started having a mind of his own” and was no longer will