I was ready for today to be over about 2 hours after it began. I dropped my oldest off at preschool with the two littlest in tow, they like to come for the drive and I’ve become quite fond of our mornings together. All was going relatively well at first.
It was the pit stop at the grocery store where things started to unravel. It was my own fault. My son seems to be coming down with his 48th cold since September, and I should have known better than to drag him into a store. But I marched on anyway, in and out, just grab the bread and head home, I told myself. Well, my kids made it known that they did not want to be there. A tantrum over a cake pop, turned into a fit over muffins, and was capped off with screaming over riding in the cart. Nonetheless, we made it out alive. But I could feel the frustration already beginning to bubble inside me. It was only 10am.
Whenever I start to sense my mood is going down a slippery slope, I make my best effort to pull myself back. Bad moments only turn into bad days if we let them take hold. But sometimes days go down the toilet, and our internal states can’t seem to get a grip no matter what. That was me today, nothing helped bring me back to even. All day I stayed dangerously close to the cusp of “mommy’s gonna f*%king lose it”, and it pains me to admit, but eventually I did just that.
I’m not going to blame my kids, my moods are not their fault, nor their responsibility. They’re 4, 3, and 1. Bat shit crazy is developmentally appropriate right now. It was just one of those days. Overstimulated, mentally overloaded, under supported, maybe a little depressed, and just really fricking tired, and it got the best of me. I felt like a dark cloud all day. The guilt for feeling that way was the worst part. The voice in the back of my head reminding me to be patient, otherwise I’d regret it, I always regret it.
A bottle of white nail polish, thrown across the room, and shattered on the tile, was what inevitably broke any resemblance of composure I was desperately trying to uphold. I snapped, I yelled, then I yelled again for everyone to sit down while I cleaned it up. In the moment pretending I was yelling to keep them “safe”, I didn’t want anyone walking on the broken glass and cutting their feet. But the truth is, the yelling wasn’t out of concern for my kids safety, it was proof that I was boiling over. I couldn’t hold in another drop if I tried. All day, I held it in, the pressure building like trying to squeeze one last breath into an already stretched to capacity balloon. And that bottle of nail polish, that stupid bottle of white nail polish, that’s now chipping off of my toes, that I KNOW should have been put away a week ago instead of taking refuge on the kitchen counter. That silly bottle of nail polish that is now cleaned up and forgotten about, cracked me open.
Now, as I lie here in bed, I can’t stop ruminating on it, on the whole day really. It always happens this way. The moment my whole house has settled, and I can hear my sweet babies sound asleep off in dream land, my heart aches for all the ways I wish I had been better, all the tiny moments I wish I had shown up a little differently for them. I feel like I’ve wasted a precious day of their fleeting childhoods being cranky, being moody, and having a short fuse.
They deserve a patient mom, a happy mom, a loving mom. And everyday I try so damn hard to be her. But I slip. I forget that the perfect mom I drew up in my head, is human, and imperfectly so. My therapist tries to remind me of my humanness, and that it’s ok to let it out, it’s in the way we repair and continue to show up that makes the biggest mark. Other moms on the internet confess they’re the same, they yell sometimes too, they act in ways they’d go back and change if they could. To some degree it helps, but I still feel like a hot pile of dog shit who doesn’t deserve her kids sometimes, despite knowing I’m not alone.
It’s funny, because I’ve been waiting for this moment for hours, for the day to be completed and behind me. But now that it is, and my kids are sleeping, I want nothing more than to spend another 5 minutes with them trying to make up for my shortcomings from the day. To snuggle them and kiss them a few more times to make sure they know how loved they are, and how precious they are to me.
The guilt, ugh the GUILT when we fall short of what we want for them, I swear somedays it could devour me whole, spit me back out, and suck me back down a second time for more.
Every mistake, any moment when I’m impatient, or short fused, gets held under a microscope and I wonder if I’ve traumatized them irreparably. Deep down I know I haven’t, I am a good mom. But I have a crippling fear that one of my not-so-fine moments will lodge itself into their long term memory and become something they think about all the time. That it’ll be a 6 second moment which becomes a topic to be dissected in their future therapy sessions.
I’m so damn scared of screwing them up, there, I said it. I think about it often. I think it’s a natural part of parenting, to obsess over and put so much weight on our not so great moments (and our full blown f%*k ups, let’s be serious). At least it’s become a natural part for me. To give myself an MMA level (mental) ass whooping over my parental mess ups. I realize it’s probably not healthy, and giving myself grace and forgiveness is at the forefront of the many personal things I’m working on. But on some level, I think the guilt and the self beatdowns just go to show how insanely BIG our love for our kids is. That we want so desperately for their worlds to be perfect and beautiful, without even a hint of anything negative.
When parents say they’d give their kids the world if they could, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration. I genuinely believe most parents would lasso the moon and put it in their kids bedroom as a nightlight if that’s what they desired to be the happiest they could possibly be.
But we’re human. We can’t give anyone the world, or the moon, or even perfect days or perfect moods. We can only give them us. Imperfect, flawed, learning from our mistakes, and trying our asses off to be better everyday, us.
Maybe my kids don’t need perfect, or the moon, maybe they just need me.
You are a far better momma than I ever was a dad my beautiful daughter