A request for the stupid YouTube video of people opening surprise eggs can send me through the roof. A request for the sugary fruit snacks I never should have let her have in the first place can chill me to the bone. Her complete lack of interest in potty training, even after we picked out special stickers and made Frozen potty charts fuels all of my feelings of inadequacy. The meeting with her teacher in which we learn my strong-willed little girl is so impulsive and difficult that she may not be welcomed back, sits in the pit of my stomach like a giant rock. The afternoon tantrums that ensue whether I try to get her to nap or not, leave me feeling like I can never actually win, and I have probably already messed up everything.
There are probably a few people ready to pull out the "I told you it wasn't easy" card. Here's the thing--I knew it wasn't going to be easy. I just didn't know which things would be so hard. I thought the "big stuff" would be the hardest. What's even crazier is that I am having to learn a whole new way of defining what the "big things" actually are.
Who knew you could get up first thing in the morning, and offer to take your kid to a playground, and they would immediately melt down because today they want to stay inside and watch the television you never should have allowed in the first place? Who would have thought that one day she would climb the stairs to the big slide, nearly giving you a heart attack as you watched in quiet awe, and on another day she would refuse to climb even to the medium slide while playing with her precocious best friend? How can it be that you pick up your child at school and she tells you how great it is and how much she loves it, and hours later you learn she struck one of her teachers?
There are days when nothing make sense, and very little seems to go right. I can't keep her from climbing and jumping all over the furniture, and she refuses to keep her clothes on. She gets angry about something she wants to do, and laughs while she kicks and hits at me.
There are days I wonder if I am the only one fighting not to lose my shit. And there are days when I sit alone in the universe and ask myself if the expectations I have are really even mine, or the expectations that other people have. Should a three-year-old be cooperative and pliable? Or should she challenge me at every single turn? Would I be as upset with her if I wasn't worried she is "failing" in someone else's eyes?
I don't know the answers. And even if I did, it would not necessarily make the job or my days easier. I say this, because I know that sometimes, even when you do know things, life isn't any easier.
Am I a bad mom, with a bad kid? Or am I just a mom who's going through a rough patch--again? Sometimes, I imagine that everyone is a bad mom, with a bad kid, going through a rough patch from time to time. And it doesn't matter how many people tell you they know you're doing the best you can, and that your kid is actually pretty normal.
In the quicksand of getting through, you tend to look at everything through a set of muddied lenses. You let all of the judgment, evaluation, and guidance feed your own feelings of doubt, uncertainty, and inadequacy. You try to control the uncontrollable, and you forget who you are, who you want to be, and who you want your child to be--which is quite simply, herself.
Am I trying to control and fix things that are okay? Is all of this analysis just making everything harder for everyone?
I don't know. Today, I don't know anything. And tomorrow? That's a hundred steps too far to even guess.
