This morning he got up, all nice and friendly, and then proceeded to go into our ensuite bathroom and throw my book into the toilet. Which had recently been used.
The book is in the garbage.
I can't work out if this is better or worse than my watch in the toilet, which was at least salvagable but only after The Man bravely reached into the toilet for it.
I don't think I'm a crap mom, but I am feeling impatient right now. The Man's work is really really stressful, which means he's stressed and he doesn't have as much energy for home. That means I have to put in more energy, and then I don't have as much for The Boy -- or I do, but the kitchen is a mess.
I don't know why I beat myself up over this; I compare myself to my mother, but she didn't work when I was this age, and she frankly has never worked as much in her post-child working life as I do now. AND her house is almost always in chaos, although her kitchen is always clean. My sister doesn't work as much as I do, and has a nanny. Her place is always immaculate, but she has help and a husband who's a neat freak. This is my life, and this is how things are .... they aren't always clean and I'm not always patient. And I think that I need to just accept that and concentrate on the good things. Realize that the kitchen sucks, but I need to parent my child and take some time for me, and let the rest go until I do have more energy. This is why we employ a cleaner.
One rather amusing thing from last night is that at one point The Boy took my keys, and sat down at the dining room table. He had a red item with him, the ball from his hockey set, and said "look mommy, I'm cutting the tomato with your keys!" And man, he was QUIET and NOT A PAIN for a few moments, so I let him go ahead. And then got up this morning and thought -- what the hell happened to my table cloth???!
Mothers, please remember: don't ASSUME it's the ball from the hockey set. It might just be a REAL TOMATO.
1 comment:
OMG, I remember that stage. I remember a week when DH was working until ten or eleven every night, and SP (who was maybe six months younger than The Boy is now) was a miserable little so-and-so every single evening, freaking out about the tiniest things (OMG I WANT YOGURT!!!! OMG NO I DON'T!!!!!) and behaving in inexplicably awful ways, and my patience wore very thin indeed and I felt like the worst mother ever.
And eventually I figured out (I can be v. slow) that the child had not seen her father for almost a week, and there had been no explanation of this fact that made any sense to her (because she was, like, two and a half), and how was she supposed to cope with that? I mean, yes, we all slept together, and they talked on the phone for a minute or two every night, but ... just not the same.
Not that that made it any easier to deal with, but at least I kind of felt like there was an end in sight, you know?
You know what I think the deep, dark secret of parenting is? Everyone is the world's worst mommy (or daddy) sometimes. None of us can do it all. And if you could peek into the private lives of mothers who appear to be doing everything right, you'd find flaws, all right. Maybe even big, scary ones.
Comparing ourselves with our mothers is especially pernicious, I feel, not only because (obviously) we aren't are mothers but also because expectations were so different then. It starts with the fact that most mums of our childhood didn't WOH full-time, or at all, but there's so much more to it: the freedom to roam and self-amuse that we had but our kids don't; the presence or absence of informal social support in the form of other stay-at-home mums and neighbours one actually knew; the dramatically lower levels of social paranoia in our childhood; the higher expectations (academic, etc.) society has for our children than it had for us; the insanely large number of other things we are supposed to be able to do in addition to being perfect mums to our children ... And, of course, kids and parents experience the same things differently. I remember convivial evenings of familial cooking in my teen years; my mother remembers desperately drafting my brother and me into dinner prep because otherwise, given the hours she was working, we would hardly see each other.
This is looking like a whole 'nother blog post...
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