tripping the balance

Some days I wonder what lessons I am really teaching M. The days where I lose my patience, am snappish instead of patient, when things I thought I'd never say slip out of my throat and off my tongue. If you don't get in your carseat right now, we won't go to the zoo. Even as I say it, I feel the ick sliding up my neck and an involuntary shiver ripples through my veins.

I am occasionally the mother I said I would never be.

I am away from M and I miss her entirely. My whole body propells the car towards home, inching over the speed limit, eyes lifted northbound. Home to M. Home.

And then I walk inside the door, and the mess and the whining and the crying and the No Ways!!! commence and I feel confused, turned around....wondering.

And some days are wilder still. The zoo looks promising, with the sun riding high in the sky and then we arrive, and it's a battle from start to finish. My quiet yet stern appeals have no influence, and I refuse, I simply refuse, both for M and for myself to turn shrewlike, haggardly, punative. I hear those things from other mother lips sometimes and I steadfastly refuse to join the choir so instead M runs roughshod, her steamrolling highness.

It's the balance, it's the intent.

But I don't always have either, and so I slip, slip from reasoning and explaining to games of take away, of counting, of time out.

I am trying, baby. I am really trying. I want to be an extraordinary mother, I want your life to feel safe and full and full of joy. I want the axis to come unhinged by your endless laughter every single day. I want mine to join yours, holding hands while discovering our new world.

I do.