If you are reading this and expecting to get some rose colored view of parenting, please go elsewhere. If you expect me to only say how my life has been enhanced and enriched by parenting, delete your bookmark and clear your history. You will be disappointed. You might get pissed off. Let me give you a few reasons why.
1. For all intensive purposes, I'm parenting on my own. Now, let's make this very clear. This is not a dog at my husband. It is not his fault that he is gone. But the fact is, he is gone and he is gone quite often. Even when he is not gone, he is working around the clock. That's what happens when you lead a group of guys whose main purpose is to disarm bombs. When he is not at work, he is often at home making training aids because they do not give him time at work in order to train his men properly (which as you could imagine would result in death if they were in a real life situation disarming REAL bombs....so not training them is pretty much out of the question). More often then not, he is off on training missions or even doing VIP bomb sweeps somewhere. He can be gone for a week. He has been gone for a year. There is ALWAYS talk of him going somewhere.
With that being said, I feel like a single parent with a sugar daddy. I don't get a lot of breaks. Which means my "batteries," if you will, are bordering on empty almost all the time. One of the ways, I deal with this is I vent. I vent using my Facebook statuses. Usually this warrants a bunch of advice on how I could be "fixing" the situation. This is all fine and good and sometimes I do get things that help. Most of the time, I think "Wow, yeah I could do that if I wasn't exhausted beyond belief and at the end of my proverbial rope." When I'm not getting advice, I get the "Oh enjoy these moments" comments that are anything but helpful. I already feel like a shitty parent because I want a break from my kid but now I'm supposed to cherish these moments and do it with a smile. Pardon my rudeness, but those people can take a trip on the "go fuck yourself" train. People like this (rose colored glasses people) are the reason mothers like me (very tired, just need to vent mothers) drown their children in the bathtub. :P
I find myself jealous of working mothers. Not that I really want to have a job, but they get a break from their children. I don't. I'm with my children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some times I don't even get a break from my children at night because my daughter likes to sneak in our room at night and sleep in our bed. Yes, I realize that is what parenting is. However, I don't have to enjoy it all the time. Imagine being handcuffed to someone. You have to sleep with this person, eat with this person, shower with this person....hell take a shit with this person. Even the most patient, out-going person would flip out after a few days and scream "Just leave me alone. I need 5 minutes just to breathe by myself." Well this is my life. Only shrink the person and add a lot more whining. If you are a normal person, then you can understand that sometimes I vent on Facebook in order to not lose it completely. If you can't.....you belong on that train I mentioned earlier.
2. This one is linked closely with number one. Not only is my husband not around, but we also live about 2000 miles from family and friends we grew up with. If I'm stressed out, I can't just call my mom and have her take the kids for a weekend. My mom would be there to give me a break in a heartbeat, but she can't....thus I deal. Also, it's not like we live in a place where we know everyone. Every time we move some where, it is a scramble to find someone to hang out with. It's like one of those 20 dates in a hour situation. You hang out with a bunch of people, trying to quickly find someone that you are a good fit with and hope to God that you don't find out later that they think that watching their children getting a contact high is funny or something equally as horrendous. I thank my lucky stars every day that so far my judge of character has been amazing and I haven't been burned yet and even if I do....well we will probably move in 2 years so I really won't have to deal with it for long. Even then, I don't really ask these people to watch my kids so I can "have a break." It's not that I don't trust my friends. It's that most of them are in the same situation I'm in. They are all just as stressed out and tired as I am. I can't fathom making someone more stressed out so I can just sit in my house in my underwear and enjoy silence for 2-4 hours. So I do what adults are forced to do......suck it up and deal.
3. I blame no one but myself for this. God help me, I have a VERY STRONG WILLED little girl. Every day, I fight about 3 million battles (This is part of the reason I'm so tired. It's more a mental exhaustion then a physical one). I fight to get her to eat. I fight to get her to nap (without tears). I fight to get her to pick up her toys. I fight to get her to play things with me. I fight to get her to wear clothes. I fight her to get her to take a bath. I fight her to get her OUT of the bath. I would say about 75% of these battles, I lose. So as most parents before me, I pick ones that are the most important. The rest I try to humorously share on Facebook. I would say about 60% of people understand that I'm joking. The other 40%, well you can join the rose colored glasses people on that train ride I mentioned earlier. :)
So...........are there days when I just throw crayons and play-doh at my daughter and hope to God we can make it through the day without maiming each other? You better believe it. Are there days when I just throw poptarts (because that is the only thing she will eat lately) at my daughter and keep a constant stream of cartoons on the tv so I can just sit and veg on the computer? There sure are! Am I going to feel bad about it? Hell no. I need those days for my sanity. My children are clothed (well my daughter doesn't count as she is training to be a stripper it seems) and fed (for the most part...my son still enjoys eating, but he's only 3ish months old) and are usually happy (at least in the moments when my daughter is not on the floor having a tantrum that closely resembles an epileptic fit). I accept the fact that my parenting is far from perfect, but I refuse to take hell because I admit this. I refuse to lie and say that parenting is this magical, wonderful journey that I enjoy every single moment of. I don't. When I'm up to my elbows in play-doh and shit, I'm not thinking "Wow, I really need to cherish this because some day my kids will be grown up and then I'll be sad and alone." I'm thinking, "Dear God please help me to not put my children in a basket and set them on a random doorstep." This is reality folks and I'm a realist. So don't try to make me feel bad about myself because you are living in parenting denial.
If I can still make jokes about a shitty situation, then I consider myself winning. Honestly, if I stop making wise ass remarks on Facebook....well that's when you should start worrying that my children have been gagged and tied up in the closet :P :)
Reminds me of an article another mom wrote where she said all those people who say they loved every minute of being a parent REALLY mean that they love the fact that they parented children, but they have total amnesia about what that was like :)
ReplyDeleteDo you mean this one?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/glennon-melton/dont-carpe-diem_b_1206346.html
And yes! I read this and loved it.
Honestly I wrote this post because I've been having some FB issues when I vent about my kids..well daughter. My 3 month old is still being sweet...it's only a matter of time though :)
I've been told "If I have time to complain about my daughter then I have time to spend with her." And just recently a comment was made that "if I didn't want kids there are plenty of other children who can't have them would take her off my hands."
I made this post as fair warning I would not tolerate these kinds of comments :P :)
I think people really do get amnesia about how horrible child bearing/rearing can be. I and my colleagues decided at lunch the other day that you have to have amnesia in order to want to continue to do this to yourself and continue the species. If everyone remembered or realized how horrific this whole process can be we would all become extinct or eat our young :) Maybe that's what happened to the dinosaurs? I am very pro-venting because I don't want to hear that you spontaneously combusted one day. I also think it's a good reality check for the rest of the world.
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