Scaling the Great Wall of Parenting
Here we are, with the first week of school completed, and I’m a hot mess! I thought it was bad enough getting up early, getting kids who suddenly either don’t want to or can’t sleep down and then up again the morning, and the mad dash to make everything in time. I thought it would be tough after spending the weekend before school unintentionally NOT re-acclimating to early risings and consistent schedules but rather at pools and ball games. I thought it was going to be a bit of a bear since we arrived at the final and most challenging round of detox during the first week of school.
And finally, remembering the start of the last two years for Zoe’s introduction into elementary school, her change in staffing, and seeing how Amelia is actually going on her 7th year of attending as school, I thought Zoe would be the one to stop me up and send me crying in the shower, feeling like a failure.
For some reason, Amelia has been struggling. I’m flailing and hyperventilating and full of despair, because I don’t know how to handle the intersection of disruptive behaviors vs. what I believe are things she absolutely cannot help – dumped on by multiple stressors (puberty, new staff, transition back to school work, detox). I’m beating myself up because I feel like all other parents have this figured. I mean, Amelia’s 10, right? So discipline should be under control and organized by now, right? If it was an issue in the past, why didn’t I take steps to fix it?
But I did. Time and again. I’d gather advice, buy the books, make a plan, figure out my steps.. well, no I wouldn’t get that far, actually. Not for this, not for the diets, not for potty training. Why? Because of The Great Wall of Parenting.
It’s actually not just a parenting wall, it’s there in lots of parts of my life. I pick up a book, say “Steps to Independence”, which lays things out about getting your child to achieve stuff – I mean, it literally has charts you can fill in to follow your progress – and then you do them. But somewhere between the planning and the doing I look up and all I see is this:
It’s just massive defeat before I even start. It’s a miracle we’re even doing homeopathy, which seems to me the least painful and difficult recovery route, and yet the ground we’ve gained in 6 months has been miniscule.
Maybe I’m relying on myself too much to handle it all. Maybe the behaviors and the potty issues and all that is less a failing of my parenting skills, and just errors and problems in my kids’ bodies that I haven’t yet solved. But when I try to find a new course of action, all I see is that mountain again.
This is why I keep plugging away at what I think is most important: faith. If my kids have that, if I’m trusting God, maybe this mountain will go away, or maybe we’ll all have the structure we need to climb that mountain.