If you are like me, you feel like you are failing at mothering all the time. I always feel like I'm not doing enough, or being enough, or creating enough hand-print art for family members. I feel like I'm not teaching enough or being present enough. But the other day, I got a wonderful reminder: no matter how "not enough" I feel, my kids are getting enough of me and from me.
A few months ago, my oldest son was having a rough day. He was just being really defiant and struggling with his behavior. I was trying to be patient, but feeling like I wasn't succeeding very well. At one point he looked at me and said, "You're weird!" Now that doesn't sound like much, but from his tone and body language I knew he was trying to hurt my feelings. So I sat down him and explained to him two things. First, trying to hurt someone else's feelings when you are upset is not a good way to handle being upset. We came up with a few ways for him to tell me when he's upset or things he can do when he's upset.
The second thing I explained was that being "weird" is not a bad thing. It just means you are different, you are unique. I wanted him to know that his insult wasn't really an insult to me, partly because if anyone ever calls him weird, I want him to be OK with that. In our house, weird is an OK thing to be. But I also wanted him to know that even if someone says something to him and means it as an insult, he doesn't have to take it that way (whether it's being weird or anything else).
I didn't think of this day much until earlier this week. I picked up my son from school and he was telling me all about his day (we call it downloading because he just let's the information fly!). He noticed that one of his classmates was behind us. His classmate was walking with his older brother. The brother was saying the he was older and in a higher grade so he was better. He was basically cutting down his brother for being younger. Just brothers bickering. My son tried to introduce me to his classmate, but his classmate was too busy with his brother. As my son turned back to talk to me, his classmate pointed at me and said, "She looks weird!"
I did not think about it at all. He was a kid trying to impress his older brother, who was trying to convince everyone within earshot that he was the better brother. That's it. I wasn't mad or upset, I just ignored it because I knew he was trying to get a rise out of either me or his brother. But he did manage to get a rise out of my son. He turned to his classmate and said, very loudly, "She's NOT weird, she's just different!"
HOLY. COW. A lesson I taught him got through. And he just defended me to his peer. I was so proud of him in that moment. He then proceeded to carry on and finish telling me about his day, as if nothing big had just happened. His reaction suggested to me that what he did was just a normal thing for him. I wondered if he had done this before; he did is so easily. When his classmate tried to talk to him again, my son just ignored him as we walked back to the car.
I can only hope that this lesson will stick with him. But I felt like I had FINALLY done something right. But you know what? I've been doing things right. For him to pick up that lesson, it wasn't just the talk we had one day a few months ago. He's been picking up on these things from the beginning. And that's a pretty awesome feeling.
