It's a new beginning - you thought you lost, but honey you won

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Just a little happy, along the way.

Sometimes the shit life gives us ends up improving the hell out of our gardens. Don't ever forget that :)

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Happy New Year

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This should be a more cheerful post.

It's the new year, new beginning, fresh start, tabula rasa ... all that stuff. It should be an optimistic, hopeful time.

Unless you begin your year with my kids, that is.

I so badly want to be a great mom. I want to be calm, compassionate. I want to be able to love and accept these kids at face value, not holler, not threaten. I truly do see being a mom as my most important job. I want my kids to see me with trust, love and that idealistic sparkly-eyed wonder that children see their fictional parents with. Fictional, because I just know that truly, every parent ends up being "real" and not "fantasy" after awhile.

But every single day, those aspirations are dashed before the sun even rises. Bean badgers her little sister nonstop. She has to one-up or correct her on everything, she has to dominate play, she has to speak in an ugly, aggressive way and just destroy any semblance of peace. Miss O is now just a hyper-reactive kid, so any injustice from Bean means she'll start her whining and crying and then it's like talking a jumper off the ledge. Unless your words are chosen perfectly (and this varies every. single. time.) you make a volatile situation worse.

Then there's the absolute inability to do what they're told, when they're told. It can't ever be a "please put that back" // "okay" exchange. It's always drama, negotiation and freak outs. I pick my battles, but even with a somewhat laissez-faire approach to my expectations, everything's a battle. Everything. There is not a single exchange with my kids that isn't a battle.

I don't know how I'm supposed to be a good mom in the face of all this. There are small lulls, where they can play nicely together for 10-15 minutes. And I can usually get some peace if I park them in front of the TV, but the majority of each day is just hard. Really, really hard. And it breaks my heart not to enjoy my time with them more than I do.
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