Vision Versus Reality: I’m Not the Parent I Wanted to Be
By: Lisa Olsen
Tags: Self, Parenthood, Imperfection, Life Lessons, Parenting

I thought we were ready for kids in 2009, but we became parents in 2013. During those four long years of waiting, wondering, wishing, and paperwork to process our adoption, I had a lot of time to think about what kind of parent I was going to be.

I read countless parenting books, adoption books, and blogs, to prepare me for the countless joys of being a parent.

Every idle moment was spent thinking about what life would be like with my kids. I had a vision of myself as a perfect mom, who never yelled, never bribed her kids, and made dinners everyone loved, from scratch, among other things.

The reality is far from my vision.

My dad never yelled. He had the perfect composure, no matter how mad my brother and I made him, but his words of disappointment could cut you to the core. To make my dad disappointed was far worse than making him mad.

My mom got mad, and we had our fair share of yelling arguments, especially when I was an teen (though we have a great relationship now), and I had ideals to be more like my dad than my mom.

Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle.

There are times I can maintain my cool and calm composure… and other times I don’t.

I find myself yelling at my kids, with levels of anger that I can’t hide, as they decide to disobey, for what feels like the millionth time for that day, and oh yes, they are still running and laughing, and definitely still not listening.

So, I yell, and I threaten and I punish, and eventually they do what they are supposed to do.

We get them tucked in their beds… and then the mom guilt sets in.

Somehow, once they are sleeping, I’m no longer angry at them, but disappointed in myself for the day.

We do family questions at dinner, and one night the question was about regrets, and what you would go back and change if you could, and I was honest with them.

“I would redo every time I yell,” I confessed to my kids at the dinner table.

I don’t like the angry mom I become.

I waited so long for these little lives, and I know there are many others still waiting for their turn, and I want so badly to be the perfect mom, but this dang human side of me keeps coming out.

I would love to be like the parents on sitcoms.

They seem to always have a calm, loving response and consequence for whatever mischief their kids got into in that half an hour. They wrap up with a heart-to-heart talk and a hug, and they never seem to get to that angry, “I am so frustrated with you” place.

That was my plan, that was my vision, and shoot, that continues to be my intention every single morning, at least until they get up.

Getting two kids up and through the morning routine is no joke. The calm morning quickly escalates into a “GET YOUR SHOES ON!” kind of day more mornings than not.

But the nice thing is that once we have successfully wrangled these two kids through clothes, breakfasts, getting lunches prepped and ready to go… we can return to the sweet family time again, giving hugs and kisses as we get them out the door.

They know they are loved, and they know they get consequences if they disobey. I wish those consequences could always be given with an angelic demeanor, but in all honesty, they usually aren’t.

I also was never going to bribe my kids to do anything.

I read so many things about how to motivate, encourage and praise kids, and I truly never thought I would go to bribes to get them to do anything.

Not me.

That was for those other moms. (I might have judged them too, this aspiring mom to be who had read all the books. They don’t know how to do it right, I will, I thought smugly to myself.)

Ha!

Here is my message to any non-parents reading this- you don’t know until you’ve been there.

If you are a parent who has found a way to get your kids to comply every time without bribery, you are awesome, and by the way, leave me a response letting me know just how you do that, because I never figured it out.

It’s not my first move, I try encouragement first, or intrinsic motivation, where hopefully they will do it because they want to… but that doesn’t always work.

Sometimes, I just need them to obey, and fast, because there is something that needs to happen, and it needs to happen on a schedule. I don’t have time to hope that they magically start listening in the next two minutes, so I sweeten the deal.

I’m not proud of it.

But it has happened, more times than I can count.

Including yesterday.

My son is the cautious, scared, not willing to jump into things he doesn’t feel comfortable with kind of kid. And he had said he wanted to play soccer.

I bought all the things. I signed up and paid for the season, bought the uniform, bought the cleats, bought the shin guards, etc. We got to the first practice… and he ran off the field.

Literally.

I had to chase him down, and he started screaming he didn’t want to do soccer, I was making him do soccer. Sigh.

What would a TV parent do?

I’m not sure.

But I am pretty confident that it wouldn’t include a frustrated, angry voice trying out several punishments and bribes to convince him to get back to the field. I don’t think I would like to see that parent on TV- but that is who I was yesterday.

This is what the reality of parenting is sometimes.

A combination of a threat of grounding him from screen time and a Lego bribe got him to finally agree to try it (about halfway through practice, but hey, it was a win).

Why did I go through all that?

Because I was fairly certain that he would have fun if I could just get him past his fear.

Sure enough, watching him with the other boys, laughing and joking, going after the ball, and getting a few good goals in throughout practice, I knew that I wasn’t quite as bad of a parent as I feared I was earlier that night.

After practice he reported he had fun, and wouldn’t need so much convincing next time.

The fact is that parenting can’t be taught just from a book.

Just as no two snowflakes are exactly the same, no two kids are the same, and there is no guarantee that they will respond the “right way” even if we do all the “right things.”

The beauty of humanity is that we are all, adults and kids alike, independent thinkers and trying to figure out our place in the world.

Parents are trying to raise kids that will be great adults — but also trying to simply survive the day’s challenges.

Sometimes that means we have the perfect beautiful, made-for-TV moments, like tonight, when my family played a game of Christmas charades together.

Sometimes that means we bribe or allow candy before dinner or decide they can wear rain boots every day because we are so tired of fighting battles over everything, it is just easier to get a freaking win sometimes.

Sometimes we yell, because it seems that the “kind mom voice” has no more effect on their ears than the adults in Charlie Brown movies, and yelling sometimes catches their attention just a bit more.

I don’t think any of it makes me or you a bad parent.

Living the day to day reality of parenting is so much harder than the vision of parenting I had before having kids in my own home, and this is spoken as someone who had six years of teaching under my belt at the time.

It’s important to try our best not to judge the parent we see struggling with a kid, and we see maybe offering a bribe or a screen to a grouchy kid. We don’t know the day they are having, or how many battles they have already fought to that point.

The musical Dear Even Hansen has a song sung by two different moms struggling to figure out the best way to reach their kids, and I think it sums up my experience with parenting nicely.

Does anybody have a map?

Happen to know how the hell to do this?

I don’t know if you can tell

But this is me just pretending to know

So where’s the map?

I need a clue

’Cause the scary truth is

I’m flying blind

…

And I’m making this up as I go

At the end of the day, if our motives are out of love, and trying to care for them, and we make sure that we aren’t crossing a line into hurting them emotionally or physically, I think a little yelling and bribery can be offset by hugs and bedtime stories, family games, and happy memories together.

At least I hope so, cause I’m still making this up as I go.