I am the semi-neurotic mother of three kids, ages 18, 8 and 5. My oldest is off to college and my youngest just started school. I’ve been the single mom, divorced mom, married mom, young mom, old mom, career mom, and attends school-at-night mom. I’ve worked in the IT world for almost two decades, but still shy from programming cell phones. I have no free time, but when I do…I write or read or plan our next vacation or holler at whomever to give me some PEACE AND QUIET.
The Last Thread of Patience
Eva, my youngest, has been unusually irritating, exasperating, rude and just plain tiring lately. I think it started around Thanksgiving, so I blame the holidays. However, it’s now the middle of January and that excuse is wearing thin.
This morning she screamed at me because I took the lid off of her yogurt and I hadn’t asked her permission. She makes these high-pitched squeals that annoy dogs within a square-mile radius, and when I ask her to stop, she has to do it AT LEAST two more times. She fights with her sister, constantly. (“NOOOOO ANN-KA!!!” is her favorite sentence). When I threaten her with time-outs or no privileges, she laughs about it. She has taken to hitting people when she doesn’t get her way. I have to constantly apologize to our part-time nanny about her behavior and have started a calendar of ‘good days’ towards books as a reward. So far, she’s had 2 good days out of 5. Those aren’t very good odds.
I’ve started to threaten to send her to boarding school and NOT visit (if only I could afford boarding school).
Then, occasionally, she can’t be without me. She’ll smother me with kisses and hugs, write letters (sounding out the words so well that I think that her older sister wrote it!), or draw pictures of us standing in a sunlit field of daisies, just smiling our brains out. She’ll ask me silly questions like ‘why do frogs have such long tongues?’ She’ll impersonate a foreigner with a lisp and do a strange uber-russian dance, making us all laugh. I have a protective heart over her, as she’s my youngest and most sensitive, so that whenever anyone corrects her or complains about her actions (quite often) I’m the first to rush to her defense.
I just can’t figure out how to be a good mother to her. There are a lot worse mothers out there, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel better. Some days I actually can count to 100 before losing my cool. Then there are those days where I find myself in a fetal position, sobbing, and sorely wishing this misery to end (graduation date: 2022!). Thankfully her father took her to work with him today, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Then I feel guilty for feeling this way.
There’s no fun twist to this blog. Perhaps there will be a happy ending in the years ahead, but right now it’s hard to see the sunlight through the clouds.
