Joyless Parenting

I will preface this post with a few statements:  I love my kids to a billion pieces.  I will forever be grateful that I am able to be a stay-at-home-mom.  I know many of the worlds' events make my problems seem nearly non-existent and that I should shut my pie hole and just be grateful for healthy kids. 

This is, however, my life and my blog.  In other words, it's my party and I can cry if I want to.

Although I have prefaced this post, I will not apologize for it.  As Oprah would say, this is my truth.

Parenting at this stage is a nearly joyless experience.  In the next 8 weeks we'll have two birthdays and at that point I'll have a 4, 6, and 8 year old.  The last 12 solid months has been awful and I've got to be honest - I am so sick and tired of people TELLING me that I will miss this stage.  I can assure you that I will not.  It is 14 hours a day of fighting.  We have brief breaks here and there but it is otherwise the only consistent thing left in this house.  It sounds easy to say that the law needs to be laid down and consequences need to be be implemented.  Well, if you know me at all or have been a reader of this blog you know that I am all about that.  ALL ABOUT IT.  This situation is different.  It may not make sense to you, the lucky one who doesn't have to live with this, but this is their way of being.  This isn't just their impulsive behavior when a sibling does something annoying.  This is their way of being.  It's just how they are with each other.  All the time.

I'm not going to go on and on.  I just want to put it out there that if you are finding it hard to find great joy in parenting, you are not alone.  If you make a point to go in at night and look at your sleeping children to remind yourself why you love them so much it hurts because during the day when they are awake you can't really remember why, you are not alone.

I know this won't last forever.  In fact, I'm hoping that this stage will end really soon.  I'm not naive.  I know they, as siblings, will fight and argue for many years to come.  I am hoping, though, that a bit of maturity will set in, they'll get tired of this dance, or they'll find a bit of something in each other to value and there will be a shift in their... way of being. 

I, in the meantime, will continue to do my best to parent them and love them to pieces and guide them to make the right choices.  Or I may just pack my bags and run away and become a gypsy.  I'm not sure which is more appealing at the moment. 

Yes.  Yes, I did. 

No.  No, it didn't work.

TRUTH.