Blowing It As a Mother

by Stephanie Romero | More from this Blogger

02 Mar 2011 09:12 AM

I sit here with a pit in my stomach. I will probably spend the rest of the day beating myself up over the less than stellar moments I had this morning as a mother. There is just nothing worse than sending your child off to school on a bad note.

Even worse...to send your child off to school with them in tears-I don't think my last minute attempts at an apology really resonated in his heart.

It has been a bad couple of weeks, just a lot of stressful things happening. It's been everything from medical bills, to school situations, to someone hitting my van and leaving pieces of it in the street...not bothering to stop and leave a note.

I think all of the stress has just been building and building and all it took was one wrong move for it to finally blow...and yes, that is what I did...I blew.

Today is the deadline for my oldest son to choose his classes for 12th grade. As is typical, he waited until last minute so Monday night he was attempting to choose them online but one class was giving him a problem and he couldn't complete the form.

Then he woke up sick Tuesday and was unable to go to school. So I put a call into his guidance counselor who explained what the problem was and that only he could fix it. But he would need my son to come into school early Wednesday morning so they could take care of his classes before school began.

I gave the warning the night before to my children, "We will need to wake up earlier and get out the door earlier." I went to sleep dreading the prospect of attempting to get them up and moving earlier than normal, as this is usually a struggle with at least one child everyday.

As I knew would happen, the youngest was struggling to get out of bed this morning. After 15 minutes of getting after him (yes, the blood pressure was starting to rise) he finally got up. We were then about 15 minutes away from leaving when he announced that he had no pants to wear.

He had decided to finally clean his room last night but took ALL of his clothes, even those that were clean (because of course they weren't on hangars or in drawers) and he had thrown them into the laundry basket.

When I got up this morning I wondered why I suddenly had this barrage of laundry to do and since there was so much, I decided to throw it in. Well that meant all of his jeans were being washed and they were soaking wet when he informed me just 15 minutes before leaving that he had no pants to wear.

If I had taken the time to breathe deeply and investigate, I would have found an old pair of jeans in the back of his closet but instead...well, I blew. After I blew is when I found the jeans but I was still justifying my behavior by telling...okay, more like yelling...how he needs to use commonsense and blah, blah, blah. I'm quite sure that is all he really heard was, "Blah, blah, blah."

So needless to say it was not a good morning and I am left to feel guilty all day. But I suppose that's okay. I blew it in the moment and as a mother. Perhaps next time I will take a step back, evaluate the situation and respond rather than react.

What do you do when you have blown it?

Related Articles:

There She Blows!

Learning from Our "Ouch" Moments

Talking to Your Tween

Learn more about Stephanie Romero

Stephanie Romero is a wife and mom to three children ages 13, 14 and 18 years old. She writes web content for We Do Web Content and of course, blogs for Families.

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