Being a mother is hard. This , to my fellow mother friends, is a very obvious statement. I always expected as the years passed , and kids graduated from diapers to pull-ups to needing privacy in the bathroom, things would get less hard. It hasn't . It is a different kind of hard, though. It is no longer the physically exhausting, manual labor (dragging 3 kids and a stroller through the grocry store )kind of hard. It is the mentally draining, when do i interfere , when do I let them fail , and how do i allow all that to occur kind of hard. Believe it or not, there are days I miss the Pull -Ups.
I love all my children , but they all require very different things from me as a mother. And usually , they are all requiring it at the same time. I feel there are days I am doing a shitty job, sometimes these days string together and begin to turn into weeks... My oldest is a great person, but requires a lot of pushing and motivating from me in the school department of his life. So I push. Then I see the look of strain on his face and i stop . Then he fails a test. See, shitty job. But , he is 15 years old , and can take the reins himself now , and the question of how hard to push comes into play. See, I told you Pull -Ups are easier to deal with:)
My daughter is a bright , outspoken, extremely funny girl. She wants to experience everything , and she also wants to buy everything . I have to say no to her...a lot. Due to her outspokeness, she lets me know that these are the days I do a shitty job, because no is a word she doesn't digest very easily. It was way easier to say no to the 4 year old Sophie who would ask for 3 Peppermint pattys before dinner, put up with 5 minutes of screaming and move on to the next thing. But saying no to the 12 year old Sophie who wants to go to the mall or Busch Gardens with her friends proves more painful..for the both of us. Yet, I am the mother and though it is hard and I am probably a model for a voodoo doll in her room, I must say no.
The child I question myself the most about , however, is my sweetest ,most easy going one...Mikey. he is his father in a 9 year old form. I love his father, but I didn't have to raise him (well, not REALLY). Mikey is complacent at best, when it comes to school and will do the minimum required of him. He gets no A's on a report card , just B's and C's. There have been emails and conferences and questions to all the educational professionals at his school , because face it I'm type A when it comes to education. They all say "he's fine" , "he'll do just fine". I, however , think his attitude was created by me. Did i spend so much time helping the two older ones with their stuff , that he fell to the back burner? Was I just too tired at night to monitor how much and if he was reading? So, now we have implemented some rules , here is where the hard being a mother thing comes in. I took away Xbox during the week, so he must only read and interact with his family at night. Crazy, huh? You would think I put him in a Russian prison by the way he reacted, and I heard him say , under his breath "shitty job" . Well, maybe i imagined that but I could read it in his big blue eyes.
So I guess what they view as a "shitty job" and what I view as a "shitty job" are different, but the feeling is the same :Never good enough, and never quite sure what the right decision is. But i am their mother and I will continue to be here everyday to help them (or hinder, depends who you ask) and I am sure this job will remain hard until the day I die.
