Ugh…school is starting!
That’s how I felt… and I felt it all over…like in my throat and all the
way deep in my stomach. I know in a few
years I’ll be saying, “when do the kids go back to school?” But this was our first year of for real
school…where I wasn’t in control of our oldest child for most of the day. Anyone else feeling this way or just
me???? I felt like why should my child’s
teacher get him for 7+ hours. I carried
him for 9 months and 1 week, gave labor to him, and have been with him it feels
like non-stop for 5 years. Yes, I was
sad, maybe even a little depressed about it…at first.
Then after a few days alone with my other 2
children…something else was happening.
Something I didn’t expect or even imagine. Throughout the summer, my 3 year old daughter
had been driving me and everyone else in the house nutso. I swear she managed to whine through just
about every dinner driving me and my husband to the mantra, “Eat or else go to
your room” every night. We had agreed
that it was the girl in her because our oldest would eat whatever we put in
front of him and was the most laid back kid on the planet.
But finally with our oldest in school most of the day, we
got our sweet daughter back. Was it that
we were back to a routine? Or was it the
fact that I had a little more time to spend with my daughter now that I was
down to 2 children? Or was it our
littlest, almost one year, was growing up and also needing slightly less of my
attention? Or was it one of those short
phases that kids go through stretching their muscles? Probably a mix of all those to be honest…of
course, then I immediately turned on the mom guilt that I hadn’t paid enough
attention to her. It took only a little
bit of logic to realize that she hadn’t been scarred from life. No matter the reason, I loved this new
version of my daughter. Now of course,
she still has her moments and tantrums, but we can quickly move through those
with a little discipline and go on with our day-reading library books and
playing pretend.
So the moral of the story for me as a mother that day was to
step back from the busyness of life and take a look at why your child might be
having an issue. As a parent, we are
always busy trying to deal with the behavior and by the time the situation is
dealt with you just want to move on to the other tasks at hand, i.e., laundry,
baths, work, cleaning up dinner in my case.
You don’t have time to step back and think okay what’s really going on
with my child and why is he behaving the way he is. It was just a little nudge for me to wake up
and live my life with my child not my to-do list.
p.s. the oldest that I worried about is fine, too...actually thriving...why do we worry? change is good...most of the time!
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