This morning, my older son slept through his alarm, well on his way to be late for his 9 am class. It would have been so easy to lay into him about responsibility and better planning, or use guilt as its usual weapon, or snarky humor in an attempt to mask annoyance for wit. Instead, I offered to drive him.
Last week, my younger son forget to check the family calendar before buying the entry ticket for the PSAT at the high school. When he did look at the test date, he realized he had a commitment that he couldn’t change and would not be able to take the PSAT. Nor could he get the ticket refunded. My initial internal response was to launch into a lecture designed simply to make me right and him wrong.
All of those choices might have felt good, in an emotionally cathartic sense, at least for the moment. They might even have felt like some kind of victory. As if every moment of every day is a battle in a larger war. (Continue reading on Black Ink, White Paper)
This is the opening of a blogpost I wrote for Black Ink, White Paper, a group blog of lovely writers I am lucky to be part of. Head on over. Some wonderfully, talented folks on that blog.
Such a sense of...relief (I think is the word to describe the feeling) from this post. It took a long time to change my communication from "AAAARGH" to "How are you going to take responsibility for that?" The effect on my kids was, amazingly, maturity. The drawback of this method: Angry parents view you as neglectful. I can live with that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the supportive comment, Sue. I remember, when my boys were little, having different strangers berate me; one for being too lenient with my sons, the other for being too strict.
DeleteThat's when I realized that I needed to listen to my own self and my own heart.
I'll be zipping over to your other site to finish this. Before I do, I'd like to publicly say that you are as thoughtful a mom as you are a writer and friend. And by thoughtful, I take that beyond it's obvious meaning to say that you are careful about your actions and words. It's one of the things I most admire about you.
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