aaaaakkkk. From the moment I opened my eyes, everything was just slightly off today. Literally, because first of all, I overslept. However, my husband and kids were all up, so things weren't so bad. I arrived downstairs as my husband was finishing helping one of our 7 year olds Emily by tying a bow on the back of her shirt for her. They were all eating, check. I got lunches out of the fridge and loaded up the backpacks. Then I decided to offer Emily some orange juice - she never seems to drink enough, and you have to remind her. Told her I wanted to see that cup empty when she left the table. As I am carrying her juice to her, something went wrong, and I bumped into something, or jigged when I should have jogged, and threw the orange juice all over my daughter. This might sound bad, but thank god it was Emily! Because she just laughed and said "well, I guess the cup's empty at least Mom". As I strip off her shirt and send her to change, her sister Kate (who is also 7 years old, fraternal twins) yells from behind me "Stop it, it's NOT FUNNY, Mom!" and when I attempt to mildly say that it kind of is, she gets even madder and screams "STOP IT! IT'S NOT!" and makes like she is going to hit me. I grab her arm mid swing and look her in the eye and tell her that's enough. She collapses to the floor and wails for a few minutes while I mop up the remnants of the OJ.
How did this happen? I swung from laughing one moment to barely containing my temper the next. The child at the receiving end of the juice made a joke about it, while the other child turned the situation into something dark and frustrating after all. Is it just about a desire for drama, or that my attention was fully focused elsewhere that caused Kate to give in to her inner thundercloud?
Anyway, I walked away from it, ignore ignore ignore, and went outside to clean mud off rain boots and soccer shoes. The hose nozzle wasn't on straight or something, so a nasty side spray of water was shooting out from it no matter how I tried to adjust it, so by the time I was done with all the shoes, my pants were completely soaked. I ran in and changed, calling the girls to get their boots and jackets on. My oldest daughter Elizabeth (8 years old) appeared in a dirty shirt and a sweater that I know came out of the hamper because I had put it there myself the day before. When I pointed out this out to her, she rolled her eyes and wailed at me, and honest to God, I just said fine, whatever, just put them in the hamper tonight please!! and walked away.
I have to ask myself, is this normal? Do all mom's go through this on a regular basis, and if so, do they handle it any better or worse than I did today? Is is wrong that my motivation for not losing my cool on my kids is not so I don't traumatize them for life, but is in actual fact because I don't want my husband to say that I must be getting my period soon, that's why I'm being such a bitch? I really hate having my desire to express myself in a contradictory way interpreted as just being on the rag. Because honestly, I don't know if that's actually true or not. But it doesn't appeal to me to teach my girls to go through life blaming their acts of assertiveness on their hormone levels. They are certainly not menstruating now, so what's responsible for their moods, and how they act on them? Perhaps that's the goal of this blog: to find a way to teach my daughters how to manage their emotions so that they are able to express them in a constructive way, so that when puberty hits they are able to cope effectively with the raging hormones and all the rest of it.
I wish. I think that three teenage girls and a menopausal mother trapped under the same roof sounds like an episode of Fear Factor. I'm going for a coffee. :)
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