Battles I Will No Longer Fight
Instead of resolving to lose weight, eat healthier or whatever this year, I've resolved to stop fighting useless battles with my children. I've finally realized that life is just too short for me to stress out over things that are decidedly out of my control. I need to loosen up for the sake of my family and my sanity.
For example, my kids wake up by 6am, without fail. Regardless of when they go to bed, how tired they are, what time we went to bed, whether it is Saturday or vacation... It's annoying. We tell them to go back to bed, we try to keep them up later, nothing works. I need to embrace it and start going to bed earlier so I can drag myself out of bed before my three little alarms without snooze buttons go off. All while dreaming about when they are teenagers who want to sleep all day.
Also there's the schedule. Ugh. The schedule. Every parent probably deals with this one. It feels like our lives are revolving around ballet lessons, soccer practice, school, homework, meetings and more lessons. But what else can we do? We're going to be this busy until they all leave for college. In 17 years. Maybe we'll be able to have a life then.
And their bedrooms. Picture a toy store... exploding. We could spend all day cleaning their rooms and within minutes, its a mess again. I'm a very neat person and having messes like this in my house totally stresses me out. But I just can't do it anymore. I will no longer worry about their room and insist on picking it up everyday. I'll clean it occasionally, but that's it! Its their job now!
Finally, I give up on my girls' hair. No matter what I do, its all over the place. Any style, any product, doesn't matter. Whatever style we try, it just falls right out because their hair is so soft. I'm so jealous of those little girls who have their long hair in perfect braids or in a cute headband. That's not my kids. I'll do their hair in the morning, but then I'm not going to worry about it. If they want it hanging in their faces, they can go ahead. If they want me to fix it, I will. But I am through chasing them around with a hairbrush!
Mom has finally realized that she can't do it all without driving both herself and the family crazy. Only took me 7 years as a mom to learn that lesson!
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