sub-par parenting

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Grumble Grumble, Various Forms of Torture, Dinners This Week

We have reached another low point in the energy and cheer I have available to devote to meal planning. Sometimes I just viciously hate everything to do with meal planning and preparing food, and this is one of those times. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that today is YET ANOTHER day off from school. We haven’t even had any snow days, just pre-planned days off. Eight, since the beginning of January. She’s had only three weeks of school with no days off. I don’t know why this is making me so cranky today. Usually, I kind of like a day off from school. We get to sleep in a bit, Carla and I get to chill together or run errands, sometimes there’s a playdate. Today she gets to accompany me to acupuncture though, which sounds like torture for everyone involved. And then we will go to the grocery store, which is agony for Carla. (At least, until we get there. She’s very cheerful about helping and asking to buy a million things; it’s just the anticipation of grocery shopping that makes her wail as though I threatened to incinerate all her toys.) Maybe, to balance out all the suffering, we will make brownies. (Yes, I am still trying to get protein into Carla at every turn – as well as calcium, but that is not going well – and also I am still trying to like baked oatmeal. We WILL be adding chocolate chips to this recipe.)

Anyway, day off or no, meal planning grumble or no, we must eat. I think I will do the thing where I pick maybe three meals and then make black bean tacos the other days. My husband will eat a ham sandwich on black bean taco days. Carla, as you know, eats a stunning variety of foods including and pretty much limited to chicken nuggets, salmon, ground beef tacos, steak, and two very specific types of lunch meat, so she will eat one of those things while my husband and I eat whatever it is I decide on.

For lunches, I can drum up slightly more enthusiasm. I have recently rediscovered how delicious artichokes are. They are currently plentiful and also a whopping $3.99 each, but they are enormous and I find them to be such a delicious and satisfying lunch. I will see if I can buy two this week, and then maybe make a batch of Hungarian mushroom soup to eat on the other days.

Dinners for the Week of February 20-26

  • Miso Ginger Soy Salmon Rice Bowls: For awhile, I felt like I kept coming across yummy sounding meals with miso as an ingredient, so when I saw some miso paste at Trader Joe’s I snapped it up. And then of course I couldn’t find any meals that featured miso. But this recipe does feature miso and it sounds really good. 
  • Chicken and Broccoli Stir Fry: This is technically called “skinny chicken and broccoli stir fry” but that makes me think of anorexic roosters, so I deleted the “skinny.” Despite the ridiculous name, this sounds really delicious and fuels my recent obsession with broccoli slaw. I think I will also throw in a handful of water chestnuts, which I LOVE. (My husband does not love them, so his portion will be water chestnut free.)

Wow, just deciding on those three recipes felt like removing my own fingernails with pliers. Hopefully I will feel more invigorated for meal planning next week. 

Have you tried miso before? What about broccoli slaw? Does meal planning also currently feel like torture for you?

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Sub-Par Parenting Day Already

Not yet 10:00 a.m. and this is already one of those days where I am feeling like I am not a good parent and, in fact, never will be a good parent because I just don’t have What It Takes. Blah.

It was an early day today and we had a service person in our house which automatically makes things Extra Difficult. So right off the bat, we had two things working against us.

Carla’s ability to listen had completely vacated not only her body but the tri-state area and I was trying Very Hard to keep my voice upbeat and cheerful while also having to bodily remove her from the exact five inches that the service person needed to occupy. AND get her out the door to school.

So I lost my patience. Which is code for yelling at her. Which results in copious tears and the pervasive feeling that I Am Not Cut Out for This.

Listen, I fully believe that The Upper Arm Grab and The Mean Mommy Voice have their place in parenting. I mean, maybe they aren’t technically THE BEST EVER parenting, but they certainly aren’t BAD parenting. I recall my own mother using both on occasion (hmmm… perhaps I have to rethink my core belief that I’ve ALWAYS been a Rule Follower…) and I get it, that they are necessary and important tools to have in one’s parenting tool kit. Your child won’t stop kicking the back of someone’s seat in an airplane? Fine. Your child hits/spits on/kicks another person/creature/piece of non-sporting equipment? Yep. Your child wrenches away from you and starts running across a parking lot? DEFINITELY.

But this morning, I just don’t think they were the right tools for the job. Like using a hammer when what is really called for is a screwdriver. The sad fact is, I tend to reach for the hammer more often than I should. (We are all clear this is a metaphorical hammer, yes? Yes.) I don’t know if I even OWN a screwdriver. (Metaphorically.) I think I have a hammer and some needle nose pliers and okay I am abandoning this line of comparison now.

What I’m saying is, I certainly don’t enjoy using The Upper Arm Grab and The Mean Mommy Voice before eight in the morning. But, at least today, I don’t feel EQUIPPED to handle things otherwise.

I have a whole shelf of parenting books that I turn to on occasion, and some of them have legitimately good advice. But I usually end up crying my way through them, because they all seem to be saying, loudly and clearly and cheerfully, that I am doing it all wrong.

I struggle so much with how to get my particular wonderful child to acquiesce to my own needs. How to get her to listen and follow directions and get out the door on time and stop bothering the service people and get dressed when I ask you the first time and just eat your dinner already… without squelching all of the things that make her her – the independent spirit, the creativity, the effervescent joy, the desire to help, the capability to notice and take delight in everything from a line of ants in a crack on the sidewalk to the enormous tractor trailer on the road to the sliver of moon sailing along with us on our bike ride down the street.

And while I think I need to be less rigid about my needs, I also worry about the needs of others: her teachers, her classmates, her future employers, society at large. For her to be effective and un-intrusive and, let’s face it, safe in the world today and for her whole life, she has to learn how and when to suppress that urge to Do It Her Way. That’s part of my job – a big, huge, important part: teaching her how to be a constructive, productive, functioning member of society.

It just doesn’t feel like I’m doing any of it well.

 

 

One of the books I’ve found most useful is called Positive Parenting. It’s got some specific techniques and suggestions. And when I model those techniques, I see a real difference. But it is SO HARD. Being upbeat and using positive language and redirecting and offering choices – it’s exhausting. Sometimes I just need to get out the freaking door.

Of course, I recognize that this is MY failing. We don’t actually have a hard and fast time we need to be at school. She goes to preschool for Pete’s sake; if she’s 10 minutes late, no big. If I start writing 15 minutes later than I wanted to, the world won’t end. If Carla doesn’t put her own clothes on and I have to do it for her, the stars won’t drop out of the sky. If she wants to pick up 35 worms on the way into school and move them into the grass and then choose one special worm to use as a visual aid during the worm-saving lecture she issues to every single person who passes us, Earth won’t be sucked into a black hole and destroy us all.

It’s my stubbornness, my desire to be done with it already, my inner impatience to keep moving smoothly from one task to another that builds up inside me like a clogged pipe until Carla’s perfectly reasonable and even admirable insistence on buttoning her own coat somehow bursts the entire pipe and there’s filthy water everywhere.

And then tears.

 

 

 

I hope this doesn’t come across like I think poorly of Carla. I don’t. I am sure every mom thinks this, but my child is wonderful. She is a joy and a delight and I feel grateful every day that she’s here, that she’s my daughter, that I have the privilege of knowing her and snuggling her and watching her learn and grow. She is loving and bright and fun and energetic and inquisitive and all sorts of wonderful things.

She’s also three and a half, behaving as a three-and-a-half-year-old does. I mean, I am all for having high expectations of your child, but sometimes I wonder if the problem is that I expect too much.

 

 

 

What I am going to say next, well. Let me start by saying that I get it. Yelling happens. If you told me that you yell at your kid/s on occasion, I would hug you and buy you some coffee so we could discuss just what led to the yelling and how deeply I empathize it.

But I HATE yelling. Hate it. It makes me feel out of control and mean and unsuited for being in charge of a small human.

It’s one of those paradoxes, I guess, wherein I would never think those things of YOU, if you yelled at your child occasionally. But I know how angry I feel, when I get to that point of yelling. And it scares me. And it… makes me feel out of control and mean and unsuited for being in charge of a small human.

When I do actually yell – which, as I noted, I hate hate hate, but which I nonetheless do, much more frequently than I want to – I apologize. I let her know yelling isn’t okay. That it’s something I have to work on – that I am working on it. That even though she isn’t behaving in a way that she should, she doesn’t deserve to be yelled at. She and I talk through things I could have done differently, to express my feelings in a more productive way.

I hope this sort of conversational break-down of the yelling helps. Helps her deal with the shock of being yelled at. Helps her learn how to prevent her own outbursts.

But I also know that my actions are way more important than my words.

Today, after the tears had dried, I told her I was sorry. I told her I lost my temper. It wasn’t okay. I told her I was frustrated, because I like to be on time. I told her that it was okay to be frustrated, but that yelling about it wasn’t.

Then – and probably this isn’t the right way to handle things, but I did it – I told her that even though she is a big girl and wants to be able to make her own choices and do things her way, she still has to listen. She still has to follow directions. When mommy and daddy and her teachers need her to do something, she has to do it. She is only three and a half, and that’s just part of being three and a half. And, in fact, she will have to listen to mommy and daddy and her teachers for a long time. Probably until she is eighteen.

Carla has no concept of what that means – being eighteen.

But oh Internet. More than fourteen more years of this? Will I ever get the hang of it? Am I just temperamentally unsuited to being a parent? How oh how can I work around my personality flaws so that I don’t scar Carla for life? Or, worse, so that I don’t turn her into me?

 

 

I don’t know if I can handle any more parenting book recommendations, although I suppose I should do MORE reading of parenting books rather than avoiding them. But if you have any techniques or ideas or… anything. Well, I would welcome it all.