If you are friends with me on Facebook, you may have already seen the
link to the blog that I posted this evening (click the colored part to read it). It's a nicely written blog entry about the trials of day to day parenting, and the guilt we carry with us, especially when someone tells us to enjoy every moment of our quickly growing little buggers. If you haven't already read it, it's worth a minute of your time. I imagine it will strike a chord with most parents.
I am a person who is hyper aware of my own flaws, especially when it comes to my parenting skills. If you asked me to list my strengths as a mother, I could name a few, but they'd be pretty generic. If you asked me to list my shortcomings, I could go on for days. It's not the little deficits that bother me. It's not the unhealthy snacks they sometimes eat (OK,
OK, they eat unhealthy snacks every day. Quit judging me), or the times I let them pee in the parking lot at Giant Eagle (don't tell anyone about that. I'm pretty sure I could be fined for it). It's the bigger things that get me - the times when I have completely lost my temper and yelled at them until I was hoarse. It's when I've lost patience with unnecessary drama and ignored their cries, ignored them when they possibly needed comforting, because I was just too tapped to be nurturing. Those are the things that keep me up at night. They keep me up, because I know in my heart that even if my children forget
most of the nasty moments, they won't forget them all. And I won't forget
any of them.
I will vividly remember how short-tempered I am. I will remember the times when I turned a cold shoulder, when I lost patience, said unkind things, set a poor example. These are the times that haunt me now, and will undoubtedly haunt me for the rest of my life. Motherhood, to me, feels like a sequence of contradictions. Even though I yearn for a break, when I am away from them, I miss them terribly. They drive me up a wall during the day, but when I walk into their rooms at night and look at their sweet sleeping faces, the knowledge that their little hands won't fit inside of mine much longer grips my heartstrings and pulls -
hard. I get it. It won't be like this for long. The fighting won't last forever. The neediness won't last forever. The mess and disorder won't last forever. They will be grown with children of their own before I know it. I will miss these days. I know I will. But even with that knowledge, the cold hard truth is that sometimes, I just can't help it. Sometimes, I hate these days.
I have friends and family who have lost children, who have children with very special needs, who have gone to great lengths to have babies, or who can't have children at all. I am very conscious that there are others who would give anything to be bombarded with my day to day motherhood annoyances. You would think that knowing those things would give me a better perspective, but most of the time, it doesn't. Most of the time, that knowledge doesn't make me any more patient with my own children. It just makes me feel worse about myself. It makes me feel like I am not just complaining about my own petty trials, I'm also being insensitive to someone else's loss or hardship. Pardon my French, but it's a double-asshole whammy. It's much like when I was growing up and I didn't finish all the spinach on my plate. My grandmother would inevitably say, "There are children starving in Africa..." Even as a small child, words like that had the ability to strike incredible guilt in my tiny gut. I remember staring at my plate thinking, "I know there are children starving in Africa, but I still hate spinach and if I have to eat it, I think I might vomit. I'm a terrible person! If they were here, I'd gladly give them my spinach!" Instead of acting as an incentive to help me appreciate my blessings (and quit wasting food), it ended up making me feel worse. I felt like a bad person for not liking the healthy food, and somehow my simple distaste of spinach had also turned into a means of failing some very hungry kids in Africa, who I had never even met. Bad, Koelle. Guilty (yet still spinach-free), Koelle. Lose-lose. Little did I know that this mundane dinnertime scenario would be a practical mirror image of my present day parenting conundrum.
I told someone the other day that there is not a person in my life who I have not let down in some form or another. Don't bother countering that statement with oodles of positive reinforcement. I'm not writing to elicit sympathy. It's true. Sometimes, I just really suck. It has certainly happened with my parents. It's true for my friends, the rest of my family, my husband, and most of all for my children. There are no two people I love more than my children, no two people who depend more on me than my children, no one who has more to lose when I make mistakes than my children. Motherhood is a hell of a lot of pressure. Honestly, if I had to do it all over, I don't know that I would chose to have children. Don't jump on me for that statement. I am not in any way saying that I regret having my children or that I don't want them. I love them, and I need them in my life. They bring me more joy and reward than anything else I have ever encountered. What I mean is that I didn't realize just how hard it was to raise people.
People, not pets, not plants, but
people. There isn't a day that goes by without me realizing that I am failing as a mother in some way or another. I look at their tiny faces, their innocent eyes, and know that I can never do it all right. There's no way on God's green Earth that I will give them all they need. There's no way I will be the world's best mother. No way. That's hard for me to swallow. It eats at me every single day. Knowing that I am wasting time by not appreciating every single moment of their fleeting childhood just adds to the guilt I feel for being human, because that's what it boils down to - being human. I may feel like a failure, but really, I'm no worse than any other parent. I'm trying the best I can. I'm giving the most I can. I'm putting one foot in front of the other, and sometimes, I'm faltering along the way.
Up until I read this blog, I felt somewhat isolated in my opinion of motherhood. Sure, people say that they feel frustration, but when I have said truly frank things about my opinion of child rearing, I have gotten some really rotten and/or shocked expressions in return. I go back and forth between thinking that people are just too ashamed to admit that they also hate parts of parenting, to thinking that I am truly a jerk and this is just another notch on my parenting failure belt. Aside from my sister, there is really no one to whom I can say, "I hate babies" without feeling at least a little bit like an asshole. Who on Earth hates babies? I do. Sorry. I can't help it. They're cute from afar. I like it when they smile. They make me laugh from time to time (especially if they are dressed in goofy outfits), but beyond that, nah. No thanks. As Andrew used to say, "I can't want it." Babies are germ factories. They're messy. They break things and wreak havoc on my organization. They're time consuming and exhausting. When I see someone with a baby, I don't ever gush, "Oh! Let me hold her!" Never. Instead, I always, without fail, think, "Man. Sucks to be you!" (Now, if I see a kitten, I get
way gushy inside, squeal and act like a ninny until I can pick it up. Priorities, people. Infants - no. Felines - yes!) I have spent years talking to other parents and feeling like I missed the boat somewhere. I missed the "even in the midst of screaming, filthy, chaos, I still love this ride" boat. I must have hopped on the economy ferry instead. You know, the one for people on a strict budget. I'm not saying I want to get off the ship. I'm just saying that sometimes I feel a little seasick. It's so nice to know that someone else hates these days sometimes too - that I'm not the only one who sometimes wishes away the exhaustion, the frustration, the neediness of parenthood.
I now eat spinach willingly and joyfully, not only because I appreciate the blessing of having the food on my plate, but also because I genuinely enjoy spinach. I imagine that, much like my taste for spinach, I will in turn grow to appreciate small children (no, not the taste of them - I'm not quite as bad as the witch in Hansel and Gretel...yet). I know I will someday look at the bewildered parent of a small child and say, with genuine nostalgia, "Time goes so fast! Appreciate them while they're young!" I believe that time is commonly called grand-parenthood. It'll be here soon enough. In the meantime, please pass me the Dramamine.
