I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "raising children is the hardest job I have ever taken on!" My current out of the house job is to train other early childhood and school age teachers and parents how to handle their children and raise them with the social, cognitive, character, and life skills they need to do well, and more days than not, my patience runs long and my spirits stay high in order to perform my job well and help the teachers, parents, and children stay on track. I encourage them in positive discipline approaches to working with children and provide understanding from both a parent and teacher perspective of the challenging of working with kids. Unfortunately, once you wrap my poor emotions into the equation and add a little stress and lack of sleep along with a strong willed child who belongs to me, my patience sometimes runs thin, and the "horns" come out as I have heard my son's dance and PE teacher describe what happens to her when they are not behaving, and she is feeling a bit frustrated with them. I raise my voice and let my emotions take over for a bit as I did today when my darling threw up in the car as soon as he climbed in the back seat, claiming it was car sickness. The car hadn't even been started yet! We struggle with this every time he gets in a car, on an airplane or boat, and I don't doubt that he gets a tummy ache on a bumpy plane ride to Roi or a long twisty car ride on a road trip, but to actually throw up from motion sickness when the only motion is his own body climbing into the back seat, c'mon.
To give you some background, I was just as "dramatic" as my son can be, and I was definitely the queen of motion sickness growing up, so I know a thing or two about it, but children never think their parents understand what they are going through when they are little anyway, right? I've entertained him countless times in the car to keep his mind off being sick, provided cool air, ginger ale or sprite and crackers, counseled him to close his eyes and not think about it, and he's always done just fine with these strategies and actually never thrown up from motion sickness in the car with me, so I felt frustrated when his irrational fear took over and caused him to gag in the car before we even got started. For him, it really can be a "mind over matter" issue, but he doesn't trust in that yet. He automatically goes to living in fear of being sick, and because I know how he feels, I want him to try and work it out, for his own sake and everyone else's who has to ride in the car with him. But that's where I need to put myself in his young mind again. I have to try and remember what it felt like when I was his age, and sometimes I forget to do this.
Of course, if this had been the first "run-in" mom and son had today, I probably wouldn't have reacted so strongly, but it was the last of my patience with him and his "drama"after very little sleep the night before because he was coughing half the night sleeping beside me in the bed, and I had no cough suppressant at my parent's house to give him in the middle of the night, and two hours earlier in the day of struggling to get him to do his school work that he has to catch up on before returning to the island, and then literally getting sick in my parent's car on our way to meet friends less than 5 minutes away before we even left the driveway, which all added up to mom's "freak-out." You'd think after 9 years of raising kids and all the education and training I've had at work in the same subject that I would have mastered how to handle my own mounting frustrations and challenges with my babies, but alas, I'm not perfect, and I frequently make mistakes. Thank goodness for a God who forgives me my faults, sons who quickly forget how I flipped out and love on me five minutes later, and a fiance who carries me through it all, reminding me that it's never worth getting that worked up over. That's what apologies are for, right? That's where forgiveness comes in. There's always something to be learned from these experiences, no matter how little or how often they happen.
What I want to learn is to remember the horrible feeling I have after a blow-up, so that I don't allow myself to get in that position again with my children and what I hope my boys can learn is that adults and parents make mistakes too, and that the best thing to do is to accept responsibility for those mistakes, to make amends, and to try and make a better choice next time. Hopefully, my imperfections will help them to feel even more comfortable coming to me as they age and have their own "growing pains" and make their own mistakes, so I can be there to remind them that I love them no matter what and that if they need help, I am always there for them. Raising children is the toughest job I've ever had, but it is also the only job I have ever become so emotionally invested in, the only job that carries such a burden of responsibility to those you are serving, such importance as you are caring for another's life and helping them to learn right from wrong, good from bad, and hopefully providing them with the tools to live up to fulfill their purpose and potential in this crazy place we call home, so no wonder if causes me to stress out sometimes, afraid I am not going to be able to do all those things right all the time, and so I don't, but that's okay. That's life. It's not perfect all the time, but I wouldn't give back my babies or the experience they have afforded me for the world, and I can only pray that by revealing to them my very flawed humanness, they will someday understand how much I loved them and only wanted to do what was best even when I didn't have the ability myself to do so and know that it's okay if they mess up too because that's just a part of life, learning, and growing.
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