Parenting Difficulties

Sometimes parenting just sucks.  Especially when you realize that you have nobody to blame, but, well, yourself!  I am a recovering Marshmallow Parent who has admittedly spent some years in the role of parent trying to make up for things from my own childhood –or- following in my parent’s footsteps.  My husband came from a strict and only child home in another country.  We rarely meet on issues and have not been good at setting standards and backing one another up. (Yes, we are working on this, I’m just being honest.)

Today I am T I R E D!  Why you ask?  Well, because this is the last week of summer and my children have decided sleep is unnecessary.  They want to suck the marrow of freedom from these final days of uneducated bliss.  My daughter was practicing sign language (because we saw a show about it and now both kids want to learn) and my son was building a gun out of Lego.  OK, I’m happy that they were doing things other than watching TV and the like, but I do still have to rise early each day and not getting enough sleep for 4 days in a row is going to kill me.  I’m not as young as I used to be!

This brings up something I often find myself struggling with and leads to great frustration.  My marriage, as I have said before, needs work.  Our communication and time together is pretty embarrassing.  We have some pretty awesome parenting tools that I have been working with and using and it makes a difference.  (It’s the scaffolding around the de-mallowing of Marshmallow Mom.)  In order for this to be truly effective (in these few remaining years of actual parental influence we have left) these practices must be done together as a united front.  We just don’t do that.  It seems there is never enough time, or energy, or privacy, or motivation, or (fill in your reason or excuse here). 

I cannot be alone in this, but I sometimes feel I am.  Perhaps this is because I have several friends who seem to have this down pat.  They know the rules, the set the boundaries, they follow through consistently and the results are pretty awesome!  Perhaps it is because I compare myself to these people, or those other bloggers I follow, or people on Facebook  and I want more from my life; so I see myself as having come up short.

Where do you stand?  Are you coming up short?  I believe I will begin pondering the ways I am a good parent next.  That will be a good balance for this I believe.