I’ve come to accept the fact that regret is an unfortunate constant in parenting. I try not to let it drag me down, but there’s usually something that I wish I had done differently during the day. Yelled a little less. Taken an extra ten minutes for more snuggles before nap time. Fixed lunch instead of letting the girls eat dry cereal, which they decided to do “like puppies!”, then had to clean up said cereal ALL AFTERNOON. Usually its little things that I can let go of with a resolution to do better tomorrow.
I shoot for a middle-of-the-road parenting philosophy. I have respect for my kids as individual little humans with their own likes, dislikes, and unreasonable little quirks. Knowing that life is hard enough with 30 years under my belt, I pick my battles and try for empathy and understanding in most situations.
However, we do expect our children to listen to adults and to obey quickly without whining. Living on a ranch, this is often a safety issue because a tantrum in the middle of a pen of horses will not have a good outcome for anybody. When we say to do something NOW our kids know that we expect them to follow through. We have clear expectations for good manners, respect for property and people, and accepting consequences for poor choices. Overall, I think our family unit functions fairly well.
One decision that I will be regretting for years to come involves my son, a summer cold, and a Lord of the Rings marathon. On the day in question, I made a choice to be unyielding and firm when I probably should have shown more of that empathy I’m so fond of encouraging. It was time for bed and my son was coughing up a lung. I was nine months pregnant, exhausted and on my last nerve. I hadn’t slept well for weeks, and by golly he was going to take some nighttime cold medicine so he could go to sleep and I could get on with my nightly routine of tossing and turning for an hour, giving up, and retreating to the living room and Middle Earth. At least when Frodo felt inner turmoil, it was not caused by a tiny human doing Cirque du Soleil.
But I digress. With the bottle of Children’s Mucinex in hand, I waddled after the hacking boy and cornered him in the kitchen. Never a fan of any medicine, his pleas fell on deaf ears as I informed him that he was going to drink this delicious cherry syrup NOW and go straight to bed. He acted as if I had force-fed him motor oil, then cough-cried all the way to bed. For the rest of the weekend, I was determined to make him choke down that medicine no matter how much of a wall-eyed fit he threw.
Fast forward four months to December 2016. I’m still not sleeping, thanks to my precious newborn, and our winter break has kicked off with all five of us sneezing, coughing, and miserable. My middle daughter also insists that the medicine is awful, but I am too busy sucking the baby’s brains out with a bulb aspirator to listen to their protests. They are to drink it right NOW.
There is not much for a nursing mother to take as far as medicine is concerned, so when I finally succumb to the crud I have very few options in our medicine cabinet.
Except the Children’s Mucinex. Surely it wasn’t that bad.
BUT. IT. WAS. It was like throwing back a shot of cherry-flavored motor oil. I could feel my eyes tearing up and my throat convulsing. The foul taste seared my soul like the fires of Mt. Doom. My life may have flashed before my eyes. And I made my kids experience this more than once!
I went and apologized to my children immediately, begging for their forgiveness.
Listen to your kids. It will save you all from pain, suffering and regret.
We all have those regrets as parents. I know every mother goes thru them. I think back when we were raising kids and how I would have changed a lot of things I did. Thankfully they turned out to be good people despite me….haha