… or not having too many children. Either way, really.
I’m not in the habit of giving advice. We’ve been over this. I’m the last person to give any advice on anything. And if I did it would be wildly inconsistent. For example, if I were to give advice on “family planning” (a phrase that irritates me for a variety of reasons), I would advise against having 12 children. I would definitely advise against having twins. However, I would also strongly advise ONLY having children after having already had several other children. And I would advise having twins ONLY after already having twins at least 10 years older. You see the problem here. I can’t be trusted with advice. I’d better just stick with my own personal experiences and you can make of them what you will.
I am not a great mother. I’m really not. I had NO idea what I was doing with my first several children, which is unfortunate because I put a lot more effort into them and parenting philosophies and whatnot than I have with subsequent children. Now I actually feel like I have quite a good idea of what I’m doing, but I have so much less time and energy to do it. Which actually works out okay, honestly, most of the time. I guess I should clarify that when I’m speaking of doing well as a mother, or not doing well as a mother, I’m strictly referring to the emotional approach, discipline, conflict resolution, communication, etc. I am, in no way, shape, or form, referring to doing crafts, providing activities, being organized, being the classroom mom who is heavily involved in the school activities, or whatever else. I’m not the mom with the Band-Aids and spare snacks in her purse. I fail all day every day at those, and I don’t even feel bad about it any more. That’s not me and I’m okay with that.
So anyway, emotionally, for the most part, I’m a pretty okay mom now. Everything was so intense when I was new. And I’m a slow learner so I was “new” for a long time. And really, every single stage was new until the first batch got to adulthood… and even parenting adults is new now, but I think I’m doing okay for the most part. I mean, I have no money or property so it’s not like I can even make the mistake of enabling them to not make their own way. But back to the young ones… I was so concerned all of the time with how to teach them and discipline them into being good, decent people. I tried so many approaches and disciplinary philosophies. I had systems galore, which were useful at times to keep things running. Honestly, I’m pretty pro-system, and I think that if I were around to implement one it would be a positive for everyone because with my emotional approach now it would likely go much better. I now work full time, and my time around them is limited so we have low-level basic systems that aren’t enough to keep up on everything, but it’s not worth the trade off to use the small amount of time we have together making everyone keep up on everything the entire time.
I punished a LOT when the big ones were little. I am very ashamed of it now and I believe it harmed them. I confiscated and then threw away toys as punishments. I did standing in corners. When they relaxed too much in the corner I did standing on a stool in the middle of the room. I spanked, but when the first few got too old for that I let that one go. I was always uncertain about that one. I grounded quite a bit. I charged fines. I gave “consequences” which were usually small cleaning tasks. I kept a tally. One particular kid, at the age of 17, once accumulated more than 60 consequences. It was absurd. I am ashamed. You can judge me because I deserve it. It was never malicious. I simply had NO idea what I was doing and I believed that I had to do SOMETHING to teach them right from wrong and hold them accountable for wrongdoing.
Do you have any idea how much easier it is now that I don’t do any of that? Like, ANY of it. Not only that, my younger kids who aren’t forced to suffer through all of that bullshit are more emotionally mature and more capable of taking responsibility for mistakes than the other ones who got all the punishments were. And I don’t know that I can give a “method”. Because I don’t think it’s a “method”, necessarily. It’s an internal change in myself. If I didn’t know it and feel it and internalize what I now believe about children and humans, I wouldn’t be able to fake my way through a “method”. I pretty much NEVER try to figure out who did wrong, and certainly not what exactly they did wrong, if any wrongdoing was done at all. It’s pretty much entirely, “Why do you feel bad?” When kids act up they feel bad for some reason. Having someone care that you feel bad almost entirely neutralizes at least the immediate negative side effects. People who feel cared about, especially children, find it easier to care about others. I still have to make executive decisions. I’m not sugary sweet and nice about every single thing, and I’m okay with that. There is still plenty of, “Yeah, no. Absolutely not.”; “Knock it off!”; “You’re going to have to make that noise somewhere else because I can’t deal.”; “Of course it’s not fair, I don’t have time to make everything fair.”; “Yeah, it’s a bummer, but that’s still just how it is.”; etc., etc. I do all that, and then the rest of the time, I’m mostly just telling my kids that their feelings make sense. And asking them to care about each other’s feelings. And making executive decisions that they still may not like, but they go over a lot better knowing that I get why they feel the way they feel and that I took it into account. I couldn’t really do that before. I get irritated and I get fed up, but I’m hardly ever mad… I just don’t have the energy for it and it doesn’t help anyone anyway. I’m almost pathological about being non-reactive. It used to be that one kid would come tell me something unacceptable that another kid had done and I would be like, “They did what??” and I’d be ready to go to address the thing. I almost NEVER react like that at all anymore. It’s more like, “Wow, that sounds intense, I wonder what they were thinking when they did that? I bet there are more details that would make this make more sense. How did YOU feel when that happened? Yeah, that makes sense, I might feel that way too. I wonder how they felt when it happened?” The kid who was so gung-ho to tell me the egregious thing almost always chills immediately when I start asking these questions. Oh yeah, and NO resolution ever comes while people are escalated. And getting escalated with them just makes everything worse. So we wait for de-escalation to even get into it. It’s almost never an emergency, we can almost always get into it later when calmer.
I didn’t even mean to get into all that. Sigh. I’m just saying it’s so much easier to love my kids the way that they deserve to be loved having already experimented and failed at other approaches. Sucks right? Super unfair to the first ones. They do seem to forgive me and love me quite a bit despite my appalling mistakes, which is a relief, because it doesn’t always go that way.
What DID I mean to write about? Hell if I know. Let’s see, pros and cons of having too many children. So pros would be: after life has completely broken you down and you’ve made a ton of mistakes and failed and traumatized your children horribly… you start to get better at it and the later kids get an emotionally positive and validating upbringing that not everyone gets to have.
Other pros: Growing up with a lot of older siblings who are involved kind of kicks ass. There are cons to that too. But I think overall my kids find it to be pretty awesome. Some of the older siblings randomly do crazy fun activities that mom would probably never think of or is too tired for. Older siblings give a lot of feedback to younger siblings about problems and social things they are going through. Older siblings provide protection to younger siblings from peers. I am noticing that a lot of these benefits seem to be more for the younger kids than the older kids. All of them really. They get better parenting AND a bunch of cool older siblings to help them out. But for some reason, even though the older ones had it a lot rougher, and had to grow up a lot faster, and definitely had too many responsibilities… they all seem to think it’s pretty cool to have such a big family. They seem pretty proud of it. Sometimes the big ones have terrible fights and conflicts, but they seem to all genuinely care about each other. Everyone is always up in everyone else’s business. It’s hard to keep any secrets because it’s kind of like each kid has at least one sibling who they don’t keep any secrets from so it’s usually going to get all the way around. Heck, I know more than I want to know sometimes too because they all tell me just about everything anyway - you know, because I’m pretty non-reactive. All I’m going to do is ask everyone how they feel about everything and remind them to keep in mind how other people feel as well.
Dude, I could have saved so much typing if I just said that in the first place. Good parenting/human-ing: Ask how people feel, care how they feel, encourage caring about how others feel too. The end. You can do it for pretty much anything. Oh, and ask if they would change anything the next time.
Kid: Mom, I burned down the school today.
Me: Wow, that’s intense, what led up to that?
Kid: *Whatever answer.*
Me: How did that make you feel to do that? Do you regret it or do you feel like you would do it again in the same scenario?
Kid: *Whatever answer.*
Me: Was anyone hurt? How do you think the other people involved felt? I bet they were (fill in the blanks… scared, shocked, in excruciating pain, etc.).
Kid: *Whatever answer.*
Me: Well, honestly I find this a bit concerning, for a number of reasons. I’m sorry you were in a situation where you felt like this was your best option. But yeah, I’ll definitely visit you in jail. Yeah, I mean, I love you no matter what, but I think you might want to give some thought as to whether this approach ended up being the most effective for you or if there is a better way to go in the future, and also definitely take some time to give some thought to how it affected other people/community, etc., and what they are going through - probably some reparations are due there in some form.
I mean… I intentionally gave an extreme and hyperbolic example, but I honestly don’t see how losing my shit would improve the outcome for anyone or teach a lesson. If they’ve gone so far as arson, something entirely different than that communication pattern went wrong a long long time ago… like maybe having their toys thrown away or being dealt 67 consequences for talking back or something.
Anyway, it makes them all think I’m really awesome too. They think I’m like, the BEST mom. They tell all their friends that I’m the best mom. When their friends meet me, they agree that I’m like, the BEST mom. It feels a little underhanded like I cheated the system or something. I don’t even bake.
So, cons of having too many children: My body is fairly well destroyed. I literally was not capable of meeting all of my responsibilities to my children and I’m still not. I couldn’t even when I was a stay at home mom. I definitely can’t now that I work full time. Extracurriculars are nearly impossible unless you manage to get everyone into the same extracurricular at the same time. There are probably better mom’s than me (actually there are definitely better moms than me) who can do it well with the same amount of kids, but I honestly don’t know how they can or do, especially when you don’t have additional drivers yet. The exhaustion of pregnancy and newborns with several other children made it very very hard to meet their needs, physical OR emotional, while I did that over, and over, and over.
And, realistically, I ended up with a failed marriage, so there’s a pretty good clue I shouldn’t have had so very many kids in a marriage that was failing from the start. And that’s a thing you’re not supposed to say, right? I’m supposed to say that I regret nothing because no matter what I want each and every one of these exact children that I have. But you know what? I do want each and every one of these exact children that I have, AND I definitely shouldn’t have done it. Weird, right? I shouldn’t have. I had too many children. I’m grateful for them all. But it was a terrible idea. Poor execution too. I’m going to allow myself to say it. However, being in the scenario I am now, with the failed marriage and all, thank God I have all these big kids who inexplicably love the hell out of me and support me and make it possible for me to work and manage all these little kids and fill in so many gaps. It’s like a problem with its own solution, that wouldn’t need the solution if I hadn’t made the problem in the first place, but I did, and there it is.
What was my point again? I think it’s something like… you probably shouldn’t have too many children, but if you do, be sure to have WAY too many and it might work itself out.
Also, there is literally nothing to do at work today. Like nothing at all. I did all of my tasks. I did all of my backup tasks. I did some tasks for some other people. I made up some imaginary tasks and did those. My boss doesn’t even have any ideas for me. So I’m bored. I have no idea if some corporate person somewhere is monitoring my computer usage. And if they are, I hope they think of some tasks for me, because THIS is how I’m using my time now. SMH.
No comments:
Post a Comment