Ugly Days Redux

Hi! Since this week is insanely busy with multiple deadlines looming over my head, I am taking the week off from writing here. But since next week will mark ONE YEAR since I started this little old blog, I will take this busy week as an excuse to repost a couple of posts from that first month when like, my mom and my friend Jodi were reading my blog. (hi mom! hi jodi! I'm glad you're still here!)

This post is actually much older than a year. I wrote it when my oldest was just turning 4 and my middle kid was about a year old. I wasn't blogging then, and I was on a hiatus from journaling. So what I'm posting below was a brain-heart dump that I poured out into a Word document on a really tough afternoon during naptime. I filed it away, just having needed to release some thoughts and emotions, and when I started blogging I dug it out and threw it up to share. I know I'm not the only one who has been there.

Anyway, I'll have another oldie but goodie up later this week. And hey -- thanks for reading.

September 3, 2007

I want to be a good mom. I think I am a good mom. But some days I lose it. Today was one of those days. I hate it when I feel like this. I hate it when I talk so meanly to my kids. I hate feeling like I don’t want to hold my baby or when I feel like hurting my 4 year old’s feelings on purpose. That’s not the kind of mom I want to be. That’s not the kind of person I want to be.

I’m embarrassed because I’m sure my neighbors can hear me when I yell at the kids. But they don’t hear me when I’m being a good mom. I feel like I need to knock on their doors and explain myself. Tell them that if they had kids, they’d understand. But they don’t, and they won’t. Or maybe they would, but it doesn’t matter.

When I’m in my moments of rage, when I’ve lost complete control of my temper, I can feel the good part of me trying to surface, trying to speak words of reason to the out-of-control woman who has lost her cool. But I push her back down where I can’t hear her. I don’t even let her message be articulated. I know she’s right. I know that I need to roll with it. That it’s no big deal if the baby doesn’t get his nap. That it’s too much to expect a 4 year old to leave me alone while I’m in the room with the door closed trying to get the baby to sleep. That I don’t need to heap shame upon a child because I gave up on the baby’s nap.

But I was disappointed. I wanted to have one-on-one time with my son while my other son slept. I wanted to bake his birthday cake. The one I couldn’t bake yesterday, on his actual birthday, because the baby was sick. Couldn’t he see this time was supposed to be for him? That he had to leave me alone so I could spend time with him later?

I feel deflated. I feel like a failure. I know there are times like this, and that even good moms yell at their kids sometimes. But I thought I was bigger than this. I thought I had become a patient, flexible, empathetic person. Its times like these I feel like the person I used to be.

Not that I was a bad person before, but I definitely feel that I have become a better person since having children. And those traits I was so happy to outgrow reared their ugly heads today. I guess I need to recognize that they’re always there, lurking, waiting for a chance to surface. My impatience, my temper, my illogical demand for control of the uncontrollable will always be challenges I struggle with.

But I guess for now I work from where I’m at. As my 4 year old said to me so matter-of-factly this morning as I sulked in the rocking chair, “Don’t you wish you could start over? Everybody does sometimes. But we can’t.”

So I will take a deep breath. Let the morning roll off my back like water. And I’ll move on from here. When the boys wake up I’m going to give them big hugs and apologize for being so crabby and mean. Even good mamas have ugly days.