Parents

Our journaling prompt for this week is "what comes to mind when you hear the word parent?" Well first thing that comes to my mind is HARD.  Anyone who says that parenting isn't hard is either not a parent or is really not doing it right.  I am not saying hard as in all children are horrible and you spend your day pulling your hair out (although that is part of it some days) I mean hard in the sense that there are decisions to make that you don't know which road to take.  Once you have made the decision you sit and wonder if you have done the right thing.  Then there is discipline, what is the right way to discipline your child and will it help or make things worse.  I believe it is Dr. Phil who said we are not raising children we are raising adults and this is so true but doesn't make it any easier because as a parent you wonder with everything that you do if your child will grow up to be a good adult.

I did not start out with the best of parenting skills.  My parents were one of those couples who "stayed together for the kids", they fought constantly, seemed to have nothing in common and spent as little time together as possible.  Until I was 12 my mother was my only parent as my father was never around.  At 12 he quit drinking and started staying home and decided he should now start to parent me and my two little brothers.  All three of us pretty much had the same opinion you weren't there before so don't bother now.  Every rule he tried to make we resented him for it, and did our best to break it.  Me personally only broke the rules that I knew wouldn't hurt my mother as I knew she was doing the best she could.  My mother had a very short fuse and would yell and throw things so you did your best not to make her angry.  Anyway my mother left me to care for myself most of the time as she felt I was responsible enough to take do so and my brothers needed her more than I did.  My youngest brother had been sick since birth so she was always taking care of him and the older one was always in trouble with my dad so she was always protecting him.  At the time I did not realize this was what was going on I just felt that I wasn't loved as much as the boys...I was in my 30s when my mother told me that she "never worried about me because she knew I could take care of myself."  And now that we are all grown up with kids of our own my mother still tends to take care of the boys and leave me to fend for myself.

I had my first child at 20 and was very ill prepared.  My husband came from a very different family his parents divorced when he was about 6 and his mother raised him and his little brother alone for most of their lives.  So we had very different ideas on how things were supposed to be done.  We lived 3500 miles from our parents and were flying solo on the parenting thing.  We did the best we could teaching our children and making sure they knew they were loved.  Then we divorced.  Not going into all the details my husband kept the children while I moved back with my parents...the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.  My children were my world and I thought at 26 that I was doing what was best for them and that was all that mattered to me...my misery was not important their well being was all that mattered.  Hindsight being 20/20 as they say I would have never left my children if I had to do it over again, but that is another story.  So for the next 8 1/2 years I parented my children on weekends, holidays and a month of the summer when they came to visit.  It was not the same, I still had rules and expected them to behave and have manners etc, but I didn't deal with the everyday stuff of homework and chores etc.  Then at the age of 34 I had a baby (the father split before he was born) and now I had a whole new world to deal with...single parenting.

Up to this point I knew parenting was hard, every decision you make reflects on your children.  Every thing you say they hear and compute in their little minds, as well as the things you don't say and you are teaching them about life every minute of the day...and some days they are learning lessons you don't want them to learn.  My children had learnt a lot of lessons I wish they hadn't had to learn, things like divorce, spouse battering, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and mental breakdowns just to name a few.  But they had and there was no way to take any of it back...but now it was time to do the parenting thing alone.  No one to ask for advice, no one to give you their opinion, no one to say that they think this is the better way to do things.  Everything is your choice right from the name you give them to the time you put them to bed, if you are going to breast or bottle feed, if they get a passifier or if you are going to let them suck their thumb.  It isn't a team effort anymore...when something goes wrong you can't say "well you shouldn't have let him stay out in the snow without a coat," now it is all your fault.  No one to blame but you.  This is a huge burden on anyone but for me it was major...  My older two children were now 10 and 14 and I had felt that I had damaged them majorly with the things I had exposed them to over their short lives and now I was going to be totally responsible for this little life....I was scared to death.

For 10 months I did the best I could to be a good mother to my child and I am sure that watching reruns of CSI at 3 in the morning was not the best for a 6 month old baby but we were together and he knew I loved him and I thought was what was important.  I breast feed him, I read him stories all the time, we hung out...the only thing he didn't have was a male role model in his life as his father had split, my father had just past away and my male friends weren't interested in hanging out with babies, and my brothers were too busy to drop by.  I thought I did pretty good with me (in my biased opinion anyway :)

Then I reconnected with my first husband and we started a new stage of parenting...the totally blended family.  We had our children now 11 and 15, we had his daughter who was 6 and my baby who was just under a year.  We thought parenting was tough before...we had just hit the jackpot of difficult.  Every day is a struggle...you have decisions constantly on how to parent your children, how do you make sure they do their homework and attend classes...or even have a goal for their lives?  How do you make sure that the friends they choice are friends that will keep them on the right path and not encourage them to do "bad" things?  How do teach your children manners and respect when they have different rules at their other parents?  Every day you ask yourself am I doing the right thing, is my child going to grow up "right" are they going to be happy adults with prosperous lives or am I teaching them all the wrong things.  Right now I have an 18 year old repeating his grade 12 because homework is not his thing...very smart boy if he would just stop being so lazy.  A 14 year old who only cares about her friends and of course boys.  A 10 year old who spends everyday figuring out a way to get to live with her mother.  And a 4 year old who thinks everything he sees is his and he should be allowed to do whatever he wants....what kind of adults are these kids going to make?  Am I going to one day be proud of the job I did as a parent or will I spend my old age wishing for a do over...I guess time will tell.

So I guess the bottom line is that don't let anyone tell you any different parenting is hard, and it doesn't matter how old your kids are or how old they are it doesn't get any easier.   You worry about them from the minute you find out you are pregnant until the day you die (or God forbid they die before you) and they think you are a crazy obsessive person but it is what mother's do.  If you aren't a parent you may have a hard time understanding why your parents did the things they did, but as a parent some things make a lot more sense.  Not all things though as everyone does things for their own reasons but you can see why they would do what they did a little clearer.  One of the sayings in Al-Anon is "take what you need and leave the rest behind" and I think this is a good motto for parenting as well...take the good things your parents taught you and leave the rest behind.