children

Hard Choices and Parental Guilt

They make you second guess everything. They make you sit back and mull over all of the events leading up to the need for said choice. They make you rethink everything you have ever done when it comes to making that hard choice and they leave you wondering if the choice made was the right one once you actually make it!

My hard choice is still a hard choice. I’m over the second guessing myself, because I know in my heart that I made the right one…but it is still hard emotionally. Emotionally, I am torn. I am torn between what I know is right and what I want. But what I want is not based upon anything other than soothing my own emotional discomfort.

My hard decision was this: allowing my son to stay with my parents when my little family moved from my parents home into our own home in a different school district and county. Truth be told, it was a positive decision for him. My son is happy. He is doing well in school. He is making good choices and learning to do things that he needs to learn. Why did I allow him to stay? Well, he finally felt settled into a highschool and I didn’t want to move him. He is surrounded by friends that are good influences. He gets to be the only child that he wants to be while still maintaining a relationship with his younger siblings. But most importantly, he is happy.

I, on the otherhand, am pretty torn up. I miss my kid. I miss his goofiness. I miss his jokes and telling me all about some new game he is into or how he is trying something new with his lizards. I miss him being there in the morning and at night. Being physically seperate from him for an extended period of time like this is not okay and I feel guilt. I feel massive guilt.

Honestly, the massive guilt is probably why I feel so crappy. I really am thrilled that my son is happy and healthy and doing well. I am so fortunate to have parents who love my son so much that they would be okay with him living with them on a permanent basis. But that guilt…it’s brutal. And it eats at me at every possible moment.

I feel guilt for not being able to provide for my kid the way he needs. I feel guilt for not having the kind of relationship with my son that I had hoped we would have. I feel guilt for allowing someone other than myself to care for him. He is my first. The one who made me a mother 16 years ago. A young mother. And I think that is where it all comes to a point. I was a young mother. Not all young mothers have the same relationship with their children as I have with my son. Some grow to be inseperable. My son formed that bond with my mother rather than me, I think, because I was so young when I had him. I was barely more than a child-not even a month past my 20th birthday-when I had him. I needed her more than I knew and being a mother was something I had not planned on doing until faced with it realizing I couldn’t NOT be a mother because of what was in my own heart versus what society expected of me. And so I had him and cherished him (I still do) and I made the hard decision to allow him to live away from me.

I couldn’t ask for two better people than my parents to teach him, though. I am beyond blessed that they love him so much and are willing to look out for him and teach him and help him to become a good man. There is no lack of appreciation there, or gratitude, for their selflessness and generosity.

But this is hard. Harder than I ever imagined it would be. And even though I know this is what is best for my child, and as a parent I want to do what is best, it still hurts.

Time Marches On

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
― Dr. Seuss

Tomorrow is the last day of school for all three of my kids. When school starts again, I will have two kids in middle school and one in high school. It is really hard to believe that in just 7 short years, my youngest will be graduating high school.

7. Short. Years.

I say short years because as I get older, it seems that time passes more quickly. I used to think that my parents were messing with me about time. They would always warn me to enjoy my childhood, because once you are older, time seems to pass more quickly. I never believed them. I would roll my eyes once their backs were turned and tell myself they had no clue.  As a child, growing up seemed to take forever. My parents had no idea what they were saying… growing up was what life was all about, right?  I was sure, at age 5, that I would never make it to age 10. Once 10 was reached, 13 was the newest goal. And then 16…18…21. But once my children were born, my concept of time changed. It felt as though I would blink and they would have reached a new milestone, a new birthday, a new shoe size. I began to realize the wisdom my parents shared with me was no longer wasted wisdom. I understood.

Growing up was just a small part of my journey in this life. As an adult, though, it is easy to lose perspective on how growing up and time is viewed, depending on age. I find myself saying the same things my parents said to me to my own children…or any young person for that matter…and the look they give me is the same look, I am sure, I gave my parents. I find myself waking up and realizing the year is almost half way over. I am this close to having a 16 year old, my middle child is 6 months away from being 13, my youngest is already being mistaken for a teenager. Time is flying and I didn’t even realize I bought a ticket for this flight but here I am, strapped in and stuck and wondering how I can make it slow down.

I don’t know how to slow down time. I don’t know how to stop children from getting older so I can enjoy them a little longer. I don’t know where the pause button is so I can stop and take a breath. I do know how to hug my kids. I know how to take pictures and videos. I know how to make sure they are loved. I know how to tell them how precious they are to me. And I know how to step back and let them grow and experience and mature. Because that is what my job is now. To help them grow, to learn how to live, to experience life in all its wonder. And to be there for them when life gets hard to hold them, comfort them, and bolster them so they can get up and go back to living, experiencing, growing.

So, here I sit, watching as time marches on.  I wouldn’t miss this experience for anything.

“Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you – sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

Let’s Play a Game

 

“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” ~ Richard Bach

“Let’s play a game”

Generally in my house, that phrase holds within in a realm of possibilities. With three kids and a husband who all have a slightly vicious competitive streak, playing games can be a fun family past time or a declaration of war.

If I am playing with my husband, it is on the XBox. I will be honest-I suck at video games. I was never a true “gamer” nor did I ever attempt to be, but my husband loves his Call of Duty games and so, I will try to oblige him by playing with him. It usually ends with me almost throwing the controller while yelling “I don’t give a damn. It’s just a GAME!!!” while he fusses at me for not trying hard enough. I mean, jeez…I grew up on Nintendo and Atari. All these new fangled buttons on the XBox controller gets me flustered.

With my kids, I play on the Wii. We play MarioKart or bowling and yes, I still suck at these games, too. I will play a few rounds of MarioKart but after that, I am gamed out. My hand eye coordination is just not there. The girls aren’t so interested in playing video games, but if I ask them to play with me, they will. Or if they want to play and ask me to join, I will.

Now, board and card games are a completely different story for me. I will play some board and games and I will kick your booty. At least, I will try my damnedest. Monoploy? I will bankrupt you with hotels. Uno? I will make you lose a turn or draw cards. Checkers? King me! I love the old school games where you have to actually speak with each other to play the game. Pushing a few buttons on a controller is far less satisfying to me than knowing I will collect $2500 from you in rent because you landed on Park Place and I have hotels all over that bitch and that will bankrupt you and I will win. (Maybe that is where they get that competitive streak!)

Participation in their lives is important. Showing my husband that yes, I will at least try to play a game with him tells him I care about what he does. Showing my kids that yes, you can beat me at a game and the world will not end helps them see that playing for fun is acceptable and not everything has to be about who wins. And letting my kids in on the fun that I had growing up playing board and card games is so fulfilling. I feel as though I am teaching them secret skills that their friends might not ever learn given the current youth obsession with everything digital and/or electronic.

Quality time with family is important. Taking time out of your day or week to really spend time with your family is paramount to building and maintaining those strong bonds. A family dinner, followed by a family game. Or movie. Or outing. But doing things together…THAT is what is important. THAT is what my kids will remember.

“Family is not an important thing. It’s everything.” ~Michael J. Fox

Failure is Okay

“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” ~Mia Hamm
This is a hard topic. I know there are harder topics out there…but this is hard.

Parenting is hard. I love my kids. I would bend over backwards for them, kill for them, die for them. I love how intelligent they are. They have this way of just knowing, even if I don’t say anything, if I am having a bad day or feeling a bit down. But this current situation is hard and it hurts and I feel, as a mother, as though I have failed my son.

My son. My son is a smart, funny, compassionate, sweet, adorable, goofy, distracted, geeky, nerdy but in a cute way, suffering from ADD teenager. Honestly he is so much more than that, but I am not here to wax poetic about how amazing my kid is (which he is). My son is dealing with some school stuff that we have all been struggling with since the first day, honestly. As a parent, it is my job to push him, to challenge him, to make sure he understands how to follow through with his responsibilities. Follow through at school is such a struggle for him. With his ADD, medicine might help…or it might turn him into a zombie with no appetite again and that is the last thing we need. But he gets distracted. forgets things. Loses track of when items are due. No amount of organization attempts have really helped him. School meetings, action plans, parent/teacher conferences…nothing seems to help.

We did home based online school for a while. At his request, I re-enrolled him into public school as he missed the social aspect of it. We were confident after his semester in a home school situation, with his grades up, he would be great in public school. We were wrong. He has struggled since the beginning. And we are facing a bitter truth: this won’t be the year he passes this grade level. At least, that is what it is looking like.

Failure is a bitter pill to swallow. Thinking back over everything that could have been done as a parent, and realizing you did everything you could only to end up with the outcome you were dreading and trying to prevent is a very frustrating experience. And as defeated as I feel, I can only imagine how defeated my son must feel. This directly affects HIM. In the past, I would simply make the decision I thought best for him and be done with it. As his father and I are divorced, and as my kids live with me, I would make that ultimate decision and not accept feedback from his father or anything else. But I need support on this. I need back up. I need to know I am not the only one frustrated with this situation and I am not the only one grasping at straws trying to help my son. So I made that hard phone call to his father, who is well aware of our son’s struggles, and I am dreading his response.

I don’t do conflict well.

Failure is scary. It hurts, stings, reminds you of your fallibility and that sometimes, things don’t always work out the way we want them to. I refuse to look at this as a dead end, though, This is not the end for my son. He has many years of school, mistakes, proud moments, failures, and successes left to him. My job, as his parent, is to encourage and support him through all of these moments. His failures are not my failures and his successes are not my successes. But I can love him through all of it and that is the best, as his mom and biggest cheerleader, that I can do.

 

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” C. S. Lewis