OOoooOOOoooh the steroids I take for my back make it super duper hard to sleep.
But on the upside my poison ivy doesn't itch anymore :)
Do you want to know why it is so easy to be a great parent? Cause I know the complete and simple truth. With your child you know that their heart is pure. Their motivations may be dangerous, ill-conceived or self-centered...but never injurious and never malicious. So when our little angels step outside the boundaries of how you wish they would behave, you can still see that they meant no harm.
I remember early one Sunday morning when my little man was only about 2 and a half years old. I awakened at around 7 AM to a silent house. If you are a mom, and the sun is up, and your kid is ABSOLUTELY quiet....you know something is wrong. I jumped out of bed, ready to find my son stolen, or dismembered, or maybe having moved to Reno to run a brothel and found his bed EMPTY. I flew to the kitchen and there he sat. On the floor. Immersed in his own world. A few weeks prior I had purchased a wonderful (yet over riced) jute rug, which was now covered by a giant mixture of flour, rice milk and butter. And elbow deep in that mixture was my boy...smiling like a mad scientist.
Of course my first reaction was relief that he was alive, but 0.002 milliseconds later came the abject horror of the mess. Flour and butter were EVERYWHERE! The rug, the tiles, the refrigerator, even the WALLS....The anger started rolling through me as I approached him...but my footsteps broke his concentration...and when he saw me his face erupted in a giant grin and he shouted "MOMMA!!!!!!!BISCUITS!!!!!!"
And just like that monster mom had vanished...I was immediately filled with the same excitement he offered me that morning.
He and I had made biscuits together countless times....and he wanted to surprise me that morning and make his mommy a damn good breakfast. So I grabbed the over sized cutting board, joined him on that now ruined $300 rug, and we made biscuits together. Don't get me wrong, the clean up was miserable...but the breakfast was perfect :)
If you take that story, and replace my 2 year old son, with, say, a 30 year old house guest visiting from out-of-town....well...the ending would have been much different. Most likely I would have had them put in psyche ward at best...sprinkled in with gunfire and prison time. Maybe not prison time though, since clearly it would have been understandable.
My son couldn't have known how to bake on his own at that age, and he sure as hell didn't care about the value of the kitchen rug. His intention was to make his mom breakfast.
As a grown up dealing with other grown ups...it is trickier to trust the motivations and intentions behind the actions of others. I guess that is just another way of saying "unconditional love" - why is it so hard to love other adults unconditionally? Why can't we see the intentions and motivations behind their actions more clearly than the messes and mistakes? It would be so amazing if our friends and loved ones would see that we are only trying to make them biscuits...
Because some nights, it feels like all they see is the ruined kitchen rug.
