To my two beautiful, awesome kids;

This post is a little different then most. This post is written directly to you in hopes that when you are older and decide to google me, you will read this. By the time you can appropriately google, which will be sooner rather than later I’m afraid, you will undoubtedly want to publicly denounce me for airing your ’embarrassing’, albeit hilarious, younger years. And while I do not apologize for sharing with the world that when you were two years old you appropriately used the word “shit” in everyday conversation OR that you ran barefoot through your sister’s floor vomit, I will apologize for something else: Me.

I apologize for me. Often times, and depending on the day, there are WAY too many things that I lack in my parenting. Somedays, my patience is too thin. Other days I might get angry with you for seemingly minuscule reasons. Sometimes I snap at you when you are throwing a fit. A lot of the time, I am too busy working to play that game that you are asking me to play (FYI I ALWAYS feel bad for that). Our house is messy most of the time. I can’t take you to the park most days. We rarely go to the mall play place and I seldom make the time to schedule play time with other kids your age. I do, however, thank God that your dad can fill most of these voids for me. Without him, I would feel little to no redemption in my parenting efforts.

But there are also a lot of things that I will not apologize for. I do not apologize for saying “no” to that toy at Target. I do not apologize for putting you in time out when you bite your sister. I do not apologize for limiting your iPad time or taking it away when you sass. I do not apologize for telling you to get up and brush it off when you fall in the grass. I do not apologize for making YOU apologize when you do something wrong, and I do not apologize for holding you accountable for your behavior. Also, and this one kills me sometimes… I do not apologize for NOT stepping in and protecting you when you get your feelings hurt.

Now, let me wipe my tears away and explain:

You both are very young still. I was not mentally prepared for the maturity of these situations to start so soon. Maybe I was in denial? Maybe 4 years is just not enough time to come to terms with the realness of parenting? Either way, the realness is here now. You have had a rough go of it lately. There have been some tears, some unsettling emotions, and a whole lot of disappointment. There have been some very adult questions coming from my very young children. And there has been a lot of you having to learn what it feels like to be hurt. There has also been a lot of me trying to remain detached and calm while your tears flow.

Now, I do not WISH for you to get your feelings hurt. No (decent) parent revels in the fact that their child is hurting. I do not WANT you to come home from school crying. I do not WANT you to not go to the park because you are scared the other kids won’t want to play with you. I do not ENJOY listening to you nonchalantly explain to me, at a random and obscure time in the day, about how a classmate told you she doesn’t care about you while you were asking her whether or not she liked going swimming. I HATE that you sometimes see a friend and get so excited but just as you start to run over to them, you  stop dead in your tracks, look at me, and ask “do you think he will want to sit by me today? He said no the last time…” I do not WANT to watch this happen and then sit around and do nothing about it. But because WANT and NEED are very different, and because I know this is an important part of your growing up, and because I love you with all of my soul, I AM going to let you feel the sting of disappointment. And just so you know, it kills me inside every. damn. time.

Sometimes, on the worst of my parenting days, I can see the other kids in the hallways pull away from you when you say “Hi” to them. I can see that sometimes an adult will roll their eyes behind your back, or ignore you completely when you try to say “hi” to them, too. Yes, adults do this. It breaks my heart, but they do. It breaks my heart even more when YOU see it happen. And when you do, I see you turn to look at me, searching my eyes and wondering whether or not you should be upset. And although I AM upset, I do not show it. I smile at you, mouth to you “It’s ok” and pretend there is nothing to be upset about. Because in the long run, there isn’t.

As an adult, it is easy for me to say that if someone doesn’t want to be around you, simply let it go and find new people. If you don’t get invited to a birthday party, it’s not the end of the world. If you ask to be someone’s friend and they say “no”, then ask someone else. It’s easy for me to say because it doesn’t bother me when it happens to ME. But what you need to know, is I learned to react this way because MY parents allowed me to get MY feelings hurt. And this is what I am doing for you.

But you are just a kid. You do not know yet what this world will bring you. You do not know that this world is chock full of disappointment and you do not yet have the tools to deal with it. You just see the right now. All you see right now is that no one wants to play with you during recess. All you see right now is that one day someone is your friend and the next day they avoid you like the plague. All you see right now is that you don’t get asked to go the park like the other kids do. All you see right now is that someone called you “annoying”. And all you see right now is that your mom didn’t step in and intervene.

You are probably mad at me for that. But this is why I am writing today, because what you don’t know is WHY I am not intervening when these things happen. Point blank, at face value: kids can be mean. Do I think kids CAN BE mean? Absolutely. Do I think most kids truly ARE mean? Absolutely NOT. Most kids are good, kind, and just have moments of unintentional meanness. But the hard truth of the matter is, I am sure YOU can be mean, too. The sidewalks go both ways. Kids are, for the most part, open books. That is a quality that I love MOST about kids. They say it how it is, whether it is nice or not. As adults, we (mostly) learn to control when and how to say things so as not to hurt another’s feelings unintentionally. As for the adults who I have witnessed be rude to you as a very young child? Shame on them, they should know better.  And they obviously need to work on their own kindness and patience as well. But kids DEFINITELY haven’t quite mastered this yet, including you. So while I am LITERALLY aching for you when something happens and those crocodile tears start to well, I know that this is something that you NEED to feel. Chances are, you have accidentally made someone else feel this way as well. Would it be much easier on BOTH of our hearts if I jumped in and intervened? SURE. Is that the right thing to do? NO. So I won’t do it unless I need to. Just like the other parent’s probably have kept quiet about you as well.

Another hard truth of the situation is that there is probably a reason that this is happening. Nothing is ever 100% one sided. Now, you KNOW that I love you both with every muscle in my body, every hair on my head, but you both have areas of improvement as well. While I LOVE that you are so outgoing, you can sometimes be too loud for the other kids. And while I LOVE that you get very excited about things, that sometimes can be too much energy for others. I also know that, while I LOVE your snuggles and lack of personal space with ME, your friends might not want the same. “Hands to ourselves” is a frequent comment in our house. And while I wouldn’t change your personalities or YOU for ANYTHING, some personalities just don’t fit well with others. And that’s OK, those aren’t your people. But trust me, YOU WILL FIND YOUR PEOPLE. Maybe not now, maybe not until you get a little older, but you will. There are people out there that will LOVE those traits of yours, and those will be your people. Yes, we will keep working to improve our own flaws, but we also shouldn’t have to completely change who we are to fit in. And since I know all of this for your future, I will not protect you in this present.

BUT LET ME VERY CLEAR: I WILL protect you if and when I REALLY need to. I can only pray that this has yet to happen by the time you read this. If you are getting physically or mentally beaten down by a TRUE bully, you bet your little butt I will take the appropriate measures to make it stop. If you get pushed off a slide and break your arm? Momma to the rescue. If you get slammed in to the locker bank and called a nasty name, I am there.  If you ever get assaulted or find yourself in a dangerous situation, you can trust in me. But let’s be honest….are you being bullied right now at this moment? No. You are not. You are very young, and these situations are to be expected.  So I will allow you to work through these feelings.

However, I will not leave you high and dry to sort these feelings by yourself. We will talk about these situations. I will help to guide you in respect to WHY your feelings may have gotten hurt, HOW the situation makes you feel, and how to HANDLE the successive feelings after the event. I will make sure that you feel supported but also knowledgeable about how to react. I will make sure we identify how the other person may have been feeling and take ownership in our own faults of the situation. But I will also make sure you know that everyone goes through these feelings at some point, and you are not alone.

Lastly, though, I want to write about what it feels like as the parent to have to do this. How you don’t know that keeping quiet and letting you fight your own battles is so, so hard. That seeing you start to tear up as you tell me about how your teachers had to assign you to a table because no one wanted to choose to sit by you is, hands down, the absolute HARDEST thing I have EVER had to do. And what you don’t know about is the pure heartbreak and mixed emotions that happen when a parent has to do this. Do you remember that time you accidentally caught me hiding in the bathroom, with tears streaming down my face? You stopped and stared at me, not sure what to say. And when you finally spoke, you were so upset:

“Mom, what’s that black on your face? Why are your cheeks wet?” 

You stared at me with this sad, puzzled look. Like you were staring at a complete stranger and you didn’t know how to help. You were so kind in that moment. I felt so many different emotions at this point. I felt sad that you have been sad. I felt heartbroken that I knew I couldn’t, more aptly SHOULDN’T, do anything to intervene. I felt nervous that I was already reacting so emotionally and you both are young, it is only going to get worse as you get older. But mostly I felt mad at myself for letting you see me in this moment of weakness. At that moment, you didn’t see me as the strong, positive mom who was saying, “It’s ok, don’t worry about it. Nothing to be sad about. Brush your shoulders off, buttercup”. I was so MAD at myself for reacting this way. How am I supposed to teach you to be strong, independent, and courageous if I, myself, was crying about it? So I lied to you. The first of many white lies, I bet…

I lied and told you that I “accidentally stubbed my toe on the door and it hurt, that’s all”. Then I used my shirt sleeve to wipe those mascara-stained tears away as fast as I could, put on a smile, and excitedly said “I’m ok now, let’s go!” You both started to smile again and skipped out of the bathroom like nothing ever happened.

Yea… now you know that that breakdown of mine was not due to my stubbed toe, but rather the repercussion of a mom having to see her child struggle and know that she must sit idly by, behind the scenes. Intervening might be what you would want at the time, and it SURELY would be easier in the PRESENT moment, but that is a TOTAL disservice to you as a person. You need to learn about disappointment. You need to know what it feels like to get your feelings hurt and how to recover from those feelings. You need to be forced to dissect these events and use them as ways to improve YOU. And you need to learn that sometimes your behavior directly impacts your outcome.

What would happen if I always protected you from these hurt feelings while you were young? You would NEVER learn how to deal with them when they finally DID creep in. And they WILL creep in at some point. It is vastly important that you start to work through these feelings at a young age, even if you don’t know that yet.

What would happen if I always intervened and accused someone of hurting you? It would teach you to blame other people. You would never take ownership in your own behaviors and would never learn to improve on your own flaws. Did someone not want to sit by you today? I am sorry that you got your feelings hurt, but let’s talk about it. Were you nice to them before hand? Did you pull their arm on the playground? Did you take a toy from their hand while they were playing with it? Maybe you didn’t, but what if you did? Would it be their fault still? These situations show cause and effect and can harbor great growth in you. I would be stealing that from you if I handled the situation instead of you. You would spend your lifetime always blaming others, and that is very scary.

What would happen if every single time you got your feelings hurt, mommy came running to the rescue? Well, you would never learn to fight your own battles. And after I am gone, what then? Who will protect you then?  I will help you, guide you, give you advice, and watch out for you. I will provide you with the tools necessary to be a good, kind, functional human. But at some point, you need to execute that on your own. The time is now, child. And if you make poor choices and don’t execute kind behavior and you do something super asshole-y to someone? Well, I’ll kick your ass, that’s what.

What you need to know, what I pray you know now, is these events are just another fabric thread in the blanket of your life.  You might feel left out, sad, and unsure of how to fix it, but you will find your place. You are currently learning, growing, and making mistakes right along with the rest of us. You might have realized by now that some of these feelings are stemming from your own behavior, and some of them are simply because kids, as a whole, are still learning how to behave. We can all grow and evolve together. And please know that this too shall pass, my dear babies. This too shall pass.

So again, I apologize. I apologize for telling the interwebs what your own personal words for “penis” are. I apologize for sometimes being short with you and not demonstrating the patience that I wish I could. I apologize for ME. But I do not apologize for standing aside and letting you live your own experiences.

This is how I will NOT protect you.

Love you true,

Mom