Dear Son or Daughter, You're Going to Need Therapy

Yesterday I was talking with a friend in the studio parking lot. For an hour we stood there chatting about restaurants, husbands, kids, working outside the home etc. Somehow the conversation turned to all the ways we feel we’ve failed our children by not being perfect parents. Now, we both recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect parent, but when you want the best for your children, you become very in tune to the ways in which you fall short. I cracked up when she told me that she regularly tells her teenaged girls, “I know I’m screwing this up. You’re definitely going to need therapy, so start making a list.” I cracked up because I may not have said those exact words to my own children, but I have felt them. Haven’t you?

I have five children, ranging in age from 11 yrs. old to 19 yrs. old. I’ve been parenting for almost twenty years, and I can honestly say that I don’t think a single day has gone by where I haven’t felt like I could have done better. I’ve had days when I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely seen or spoken to my children. I’ve had days when I’ve been so stressed out that I’ve lost my shit over the fact that there was a spoon in the sink when it was quite obvious that the dishwasher hadn’t been run yet. It was not one of my finer moments. I’m pretty sure f-bombs were thrown about as I angrily grabbed the offending spoon and placed it in the dishwasher. It’s so easy to recall those moments when I’ve succumbed to stress or frustration or anger. It’s easy to recall those moments because they leave scars on my heart. They cause me to feel guilt, disappointment, and a general sense of failure.

Those less-than-stellar-parenting moments happen to everyone. I mean EVERYONE. Never in the history of the world has there been a parent who has done this parenting thing without incident. Me, for example…I taught my two-year-old son how to swear, which was no simple task since he only spoke a few words by the time he was two. Of the 5-10 words he could say, “damn it” was his favorite. In my defense, at the time I had a four year old, a two year old, and a 6 month old baby and my husband worked from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. six days a week, which left me alone with three young children all day long. Oh, and we lived in a new town where we had no family and had only met a few people since he was busy working and I was busy surviving.

My two-year-old son was mobile and extremely curious. If I took my eyes off of him for even a second, he would be into something, scaling something, taking something apart. It was non-stop. One day he scaled up the pantry closet by wedging himself against the door jam and the shelving. He grabbed a box of cereal and dumped it everywhere. Meanwhile, I was up to my elbows in poo — the kind of poo that scoffs at the boundaries set by diapers and chooses, instead, to travel up your child’s back and down her legs. By the time I reached the kitchen, my son was on his way down from the upper pantry shelf and the dog was loving his Lucky Charms. I’m sure I yelled something, but then, gathering my wits, I began to clean up the mess. Not one to waste a teaching moment, I grabbed my son a plastic container and insisted that he help clean up the mess he had made. As he was picking up the cereal and eating the marshmallows (because, let’s be real, they only want the marshmallows), he dropped his container, dumping the few pieces he had managed to pick up back onto the floor. My sweet little, cherub-like boy then yelled, “Dom e.” I was so confused. I looked at him and asked what he had said. He looked up at me and repeated, “Dom e. Dom e, Evan.” Oh, shit. In that moment, it dawned on me that all those times he had spilled something, taken the remote control apart, or written on the wall with my lipstick, I had responded with a big, fat DAMN IT. I was absolutely mortified and completely appalled by my lack of parenting prowess.

My two-year-old son is now seventeen, a senior in high school getting ready to start his final high school football season. He’s such a cool kid. Sometimes I look at him and wonder how he turned out so incredible. He’s smart, well-liked by his peers and adults, and he has this confidence that I often envy. He still says “damn it” now and again, but he also says “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” when speaking to adults. He gives his sister and her friends rides to the fast food joint and plays with his eleven-year-old brothers. He also never hangs up the phone or goes to bed without telling each of us that he loves us. The point is that our parenting fails are only a small part of the equation.

As parents, we will fail. We will lose our tempers. We will embarrass the shit out of our kids. We will disappoint them, and there will most certainly be moments when our children will hate us. If, however, we do our best to love them in spite of our stress, if we do everything we can to make them feel safe, and if we let them know that they matter, they are going to be just fine.

We have to stop expecting perfection and then beating ourselves up when we fall short. What does that say to our children? What are we setting them up for? I, for one, want my kids to see me fail. I want them to understand that I am going to screw up and that’s alright, but just as assuredly as I will fail, I will try again. I’ll apologize for forgetting to pick up my daughter at practice, forcing her coach to stay twenty minutes late while I race across town to get her. And the next time, I’ll arrive early. I’ll treat everyone to ice cream on the way home from my son’s basketball game in an attempt to make up for the fact that I missed the entire first half and was so busy talking once I did get there that I missed my son’s three pointer. And the next week, I’ll record the game, because in all reality, I’ll miss the next shot too because I like to talk. I will screw this up . . . repeatedly because I’m human, and I struggle just like everyone else. I say damn it and shit when I probably shouldn’t. I never volunteer at school, and I rely on other parents to keep me informed because I’m terrible about reading my email. I will, however, always try my best, and I will tell my children every day that I love them, even when they don’t want to hear it. I will hug my children every day because there’s nothing better. And at dinner I will relive precious memories from when they were younger, and they will roll their eyes at me, and they will feel loved in spite of everything else.