Adequate

I did something different and recorded this blog and you can listen HERE. When I write I can hear myself reading it and I am not good at reading things out loud and it scares me even though I don’t even have to publish it but fuck it. Being scared and pushing on is ok sometimes. SO anyway, give it a read OR a LISTEN.

Christmas day 2015

One of the things J can’t do or won’t do, I don’t know which it is, is open gifts in front of people. He tries to remain emotionless although I know his real level of excitement any time there are gifts is like 4 year old sneaking down to the tree in the middle of the night to see if santa came and to dig about and see which gifts are for him. So when it comes to birthdays or christmas I am the one that sits next to him and encourages him and physically has to put his hands on the packages to get him to open them. Bill has a lower tolerance for this and I am caught between trying to make J’s experience happy and as stress free and normal as possible and trying to keep Bill from getting mad and frustrated because our kid just can’t rip into things the way a normal kid would. It’s a hard place to be, trying to keep things light and happy and peaceful for everyone knowing anyone could just step on a land mine at anytime burning us all to the ground. It’s exhausting.

Fast forward to later in the day when it was time to go to my parents house and I was trying to push J along to get ready. I got his new boots out for him to wear and was on the ground literally tying them up for him, which by the way he can do himself but sometimes its way easier for me to just help him do stuff like that and make jokes and try to make him feel less anxiety than it is to just yell and scream because I’m frustrated and why can’t he just be normal and do this shit by himself? So I look up and he’s just standing there letting me tie up his boots and giving me the finger at the same time. It was impossible to not get my feelings hurt and all I could say was what the fuck J? After that I just got them in the car and fought off crying the whole way.

What they never tell you in the parenting books is that most of the time you’re going to feel like no one is listening and no one gives a shit how much you give. Kids don’t have any life experience or knowledge of anything other than they were born to you and it’s your job to do the work.

It’s like when we go get in our cars, we expect that car to do it’s job and start and take us where we want to go. We don’t thank the car for starting but my god let that bitch not start and there we are, grown ass people flipping their shit like a kid who didn’t get ice cream.

So we keep going, trying to teach our kids what needs to be learned. Sometimes though, maybe even most times, do we stop and think about what they’re teaching us?

Amy Poehler says “You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.” and she’s right. We show up, day after day, and we DO. We parent and we love and we keep trying and hope that maybe, just maybe one day these rotten ass kids will have turned into a person who looks back and thinks damn, my parents were adequate.