Nearly every day, I count my lucky stars my daughters are past the baby and toddler years.
It’s not that I don’t like kids that age, it’s just they require so much work and attention. Now I see my hard work paid off, but at the time it felt like a never-ending effort to care for them, teach them, discipline them, feed them, clean them, tidy up their toys, scrape dried applesauce off the floor and pack bags and bags of supplies just to go grocery shopping. It was exhausting.
On top of the day-to-day stuff were the hair-pulling times. It was these times when people, well-intentioned of course, would offer all kinds of crappy advice.
For example, one suggestion to curb bad behaviour was to flick my girls’ forehead with my thumb and middle finger. I tried this out one night after listening to my daughter scream steady for four hours (this was a nightly occurrence for about a year, no joke). I flicked her very hard and immediately regretted it. She held her little hand to her head and looked at me through tears of disbelief. She cried and cried and so did I. I would never do that again.
Another example came from a man I really respected. His theory was you had to really scare kids if you wanted them to stop doing something. On Valentine’s Day when my daughter was two, I gave this gem a try. She kept climbing into our German Shepherd’s kennel while the dog was in there. Since this was our dog’s space, we needed our daughter to stay out. So that day, I stood in the hallway and shouted until my daughter burst into tears. Real nice Valentine’s. She may have forgotten but I won’t.
I’ll tell you, when I signed up to have kids, I had no idea it would be so hard. Sure I was an Auntie for a long time, but it’s not the same when you’re responsible for them 24/7.
I recently shared some embarrassing parenting blunders with some good friends who are new parents, and I could see relief on their faces. They, like me, worry about what other people think of them as parents. They’re afraid to talk about the hard times because they think they’re the only ones going through them. That’s exactly how I felt. I felt isolated and alone and worst of all, like a terrible mom.
But I’m lucky because I have a friend who provides a free parenting program. One of the most valuable insights I gained from it was all parents make mistakes and face all kinds of challenges. I take every opportunity I can to share my bad-parent stories because I remember what it was like to feel like I was failing.
The mistakes I made didn’t make me a rotten parent. For all the mistakes I did make, the successes far outnumber them. And things get easier. As my girls transition into “tweenhood,” I guess I can look forward to a whole ‘nother can of experiences.
