I think we have all had those days.  When the kids wear us out, the husband makes us want to kick him out, and the stress of all we have to do leaves us praying for a sister wife.

One without a uterus.

And most of us can recover.  Look at the new day as a new start, decide that creativity would flow freely if we would let it, and restores our faith in our abilities to get it done.

But what happens when those days last a few days?  Or they turn to weeks?  And before you know it you can not remember the last thing you did as a parent that was right?

How do you dig out of those holes and make yourself feel worthy of being a parent?

Lately, I have felt like I fall into that category of “Just because you CAN have kids, does not mean you SHOULD have kids!”

I am not sure what is going on here.  I don’t know if my consummate exhaustion is inhibiting my ability to know how to do this with my kids or whether my inexperience with kids is starting to show, but I am lost.   Lost in the land of non listening, angry, demanding children that seem to have hearing problems, minding problems, and respect issues.

And they are still all under 5.  I can not imaging the bad habits I will have to adopt to handle them in 10 years.  Especially if I lack the ability to deal with them now!

And have we all been there or has my bad planning and desire to have all of my children in 3 years backfired and left me too tired, too frustrated, and too uneducated in child education to do this properly?

I am not a bad mother.  They are not mistreated in any way.  If anything, I am suffering from parental spoiling syndrome and lazy parenting tactics that are coming back to bite me in the keyster.

And I am too embedded in this norm that I can not seem to shake the habits I am creating in them.  The kids that God trusted me with that I feel could be more…  well, normal.  They could go to sleep when told, eat the food I make, do the things I ask, not bite their baby sister’s cheek, show a little that they have parents, instead of proving that their parents are…  lax.

I love my job, I do.  All three of them.  And the fourth that comes home just as demanding as the little ones.  I would not have anything any other way.

But this week, I feel beat down by parenting.  A failure in the game of raising children that is set up specifically to cause massive bills to a therapist.

Maybe tomorrow things will get better.  They won’t tell me no.  They won’t trash their rooms.  They won’t bring me to tears.  Making me question every little thing I have done since the day the doctor handed them to me.

Maybe tomorrow, I will beat parenting.