Parenting Coach Exposed as Fraud
Dear Joyful Parent,
I’ve had a seriously humbling week. My niece and nephews, 10, 12 and 14, have been visiting me this week without their parents. And what a week it has been!
There have been some marvelous highs. All three kids running in circles while “walking” the dog. My older nephew really happy in the kitchen following the recipe he had found for taco meat. My niece making and decorating a cake for her grandmother’s birthday. My other nephew methodically explaining to me about the shells and rocks he found as we walked the dog on the beach. The whole family laughing hilariously at stupid jokes being told at the dinner table.
The structure we agreed to before they came has been a definite plus. Bedtime at 10. Devices docked with me for the night. A published schedule of who was on table set up, who on clean up and who was the night’s sous chef.
But in between the wonderful moments, there has been the…. Well, I hate to say the bad and the ugly (not sure my ego will allow it!) but definitely the inept and the unfortunate. And by that I mean me. I have been inept, and things have come out of my mouth that I knew were unfortunate the moment I said them.
One of the analogies I use—especially with parents of teens—is that the teens (and tweens) are on the roller coaster ride: Your job is to stay on the platform below.
Well, it’s true confession time. There have been a few times this week when I have gotten on the roller coaster and been taken for quite the ride.
By far my biggest trigger has been any comments along the lines of “You’re not the boss of me” and “You can’t make me.” Or responses like “fine” delivered with supreme eye rolling—or even worse—laced with such hostility that it has left me feeling like I wanted to throttle them.
I think the trigger has to do with my feeling that my requests are reasonable. On the whole very little is being asked of the kids this week, and they really are in vacation mode. They get their noses out of joint because I ask them to do one little thing. They cry, Why do I have to do it? That’s not fair. I hear that and go from calm to boiling in about 10 seconds. The story I start telling in my head is Do you realize how much I am doing for you? The shopping, the cooking, the picking things up and putting them away from one end of the day to the next? I am working hard to make sure you are having fun! It is amazing how petty and petulant I then feel when they are not both cognizant of and grateful for my sacrifice!!
The other hole I dug for myself was offering to pay them for jobs. It is natural that they wanted to earn some extra spending money (having blown through their allowance the first day they spent on Monterey’s Cannery Row). And to the extent that I needed things like the car washed, I was happy to pay them. But I was not happy to have to nag them to get the job done decently well.
I also offered to pay them $2 a bag to pick up dog poop. And was then annoyed when instead of putting multiple poop piles in one bag, they used a new bag for each pile. Yes, I failed to define what a bag of poop was, so coming back and “changing the rules” would feel unfair. So I sucked it up and mentally cringed at the waste of plastic bags. (Unfortunately, it turns out, when three children are hoping to make some money, one dog does not supply enough poop to keep them earning!)
And… and this is most humbling…this is the first time this year I have gotten a taste of what it is like to parent 24/7 WHILE trying to get work done and run my business. What all you parents have been going through FOR MORE THAN A YEAR has been driving me batty for under a week.
What can I say. You are my heroes. Absolute heroes. You managed not to murder your children this year? I am in awe. Even as I write this blog (the one task I set for myself today before I go play with the kids), I have been interrupted approximately 396 times. Some of the interruptions have been requests; some have been “I can’t find my …”. Quite a few have been “She/he/they did (fill in the blank) to me. Tell her/him/them to stop.” I can’t even imagine trying to get time-critical work done.
Too often I have felt inadequate this week. Like I’m letting clients and colleagues down professionally and like I’m letting the kids down when I have not handled them with creativity and equanimity. I’ve gone to bed every night replaying the day in my head and rewriting moments that transpired. My parenting muscles are rusty. I remind myself, parenting is a skill. Well, my skills need practice! Even though I spend some part of every day—every single day—thinking about how to handle kids in a given situation, my responses were slow. This week had way too many incidents of my saying the wrong thing and not realizing the impact until the words had already done their damage.
This morning I put the kids on the plane. I came home and promptly fell asleep for a two-hour nap. Then my husband and I sat and reviewed the week. And started to plan for next summer.
We can’t wait!
Happy Parenting,
Elisabeth