Eagle 17, Attitude Adjustment, 6×9″ pastel on sanded paper by Marie Marfia.
Eagle 17, Attitude Adjustment
When we lived in Ludington and Steve was working long hours, I was faced with making dinner every night after work. I was so depleted at the end of the day that coming up with a meal was just too much on top of everything else. So I enlisted the kids to take a day a week and decide what to make for dinner, then I’d help them put it together. That plan was in place for probably three weeks, which in the overall scheme of things, isn’t very long, but it helped. I got a break, they felt like they were contributing, so it was good.
Parenting for me so far has been a series of short experiments. I’ll try this new approach to discipline that I just read about on the internet, and next week it’ll be a how to talk to your teenager book I found at the library. The week after it’ll be something my girlfriend told me about that worked for getting her kid to clean up his room. I am always trying to improve my parenting self.
One of the first things I remember figuring out was how not to be funny at my children’s expense. You know how it is when you’re telling a parenting story and it starts to sound like complaining but it’s funny and you can’t stop. Pretty soon people think your kids are awful, when actually, they’re just being kids.
I decided one day to just tell people, if they asked, that my kids were perfect. Because they were. They were perfect examples of children. At least, that’s how I thought of it.
Instead of actively taking notes about how hard it was being a mom, I started memorizing all the good stuff. Instead of telling the story about Alice walking on her baby brother when I wasn’t looking, I told the story about how she cuddled him in her arms. Instead of whining about how Sam kept me up all night, I talked about how much he loved to be held. Instead of talking about Nick sneaking into the health department building after hours with his friends, I bragged about how he had built-in GPS and always knew where he was.
My friends started telling me they wished I’d been their mother. And this always stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t think of myself as a good mom. I just practiced thinking of my kids as good kids.
Maybe I can take that early lesson about my attitude toward my children and apply it to myself. Rather than make a daily catalog of my failures, what would happen if I made a list of my successes instead? If I started toting up all the examples of what makes me a perfect example of myself, it would maybe change how I feel about me. It’s worth a try.
