Why? Oh, Why?

What I'm trying to say here is that I am a terrible mother. I am also a great mother: warm, creative, funny, doting. But today the great-mother part feels like a drop of pink dye in a cup of water, and the bad mother part is a big squirt of black, and once it's all black, the pink just seems kind of irrelevant. Every New Year's Eve, I resolve to be more patient. And then I blow it on the first day of the new year. Usually by noon. And it's so hard to describe, the effects of this impatience. It's subtle: I feel my face pull into criticism, my eyebrows sucked together into ruts of irritation; I hear my voice, the way I can speak mild words but in the harsh dialect of What's wrong with you?; I see, flitting across the children's eyes, the way I can make them feel ill at ease, here in their very own home, here in their very own skin. This is one of the worst feelings I know. ....I speak sharply to him; I speak mockingly of his "show and tell"; I speak as if he's a stranger we have caught in an act of vandalism. If you spoke to me this way, I would flee the room in tears and our friendship would never be mended. If my children spoke to each other this way, I would be outraged. If you spoke to my children this way, I would kill you.

The above is a clip from Catherine Newman's column. I had the fortune of reading this after a particularly crabby morning in which on the way to school, Maryn says to me: "Mom, are you having a good day or a bad day". I told her that as strange as it may seem, seeing as I just got out of bed that Mommy was having a grumpy morning. I asked her what she thought I should do about this. As it turns out, her remedy for the grumps is to scratch my head...one, two, three....and then all my fingers. This at least made me laugh and I apologized for my grumps just in time for Dylan to scream bloody murder about apparently nothing and then the feeling, the awful feeling I had been feeling all morning, came rushing back to me. As much as I hate these mornings, I find comfort when I hear similar experiences from other moms. It makes me a little more confident that I am not scarring my children for life.

It is especially daunting knowing that my children are entering the time in their lives where they will remember the things I say and do. If like Rex, they will remember far more than I expect. I took solace in the fact that when they were little, my harsh words or actions would be forgotten almost as quickly as it happened. Now I am waiting for the moment Maryn or Dylan says: "Mommy, remember that morning that you were oh so mean and grumpy?"

As always, I will strive to do better!