Mama's Thoughts

It's so hard being a parent sometimes. As prepared as I believed myself to be for motherhood,the harsh truth is that I didn't know crap. The older I get, the older my girls get, the more I'm able to see that.

The most difficult part of parenting, for me, is the emotional stuff. Teaching my girls how to be emotionally responsible, healthy people. It's sad to say, but when it comes to this kind of thing, I'm feeling around blindly in the dark - because it's not something that was ever taught to me. I have to make this stuff up as I go along. Thanks again, mom.

I think I'd feel a lot better about the process if I felt, even a little bit, like I had my own crap together. Maybe if I were a little wiser, a little more emotionally stable, this might come to me a lot easier, I don't know. It's hard to teach my girls good boundaries when that's something I still struggle with myself. It's had to teach my girls healthy coping mechanisms when I spent the majority of my life either binging or starving or overexercising my emotions away. Sometimes I feel like I'm learning this stuff right along with them.

I guess the one thing that I can teach my girls is that mistakes happen. Mistakes happen to us all, and we have the power to choose to learn from those mistakes, or use them as just another excuse to wallow in misery. 'Cuz that's pretty much all I know from personal experience right now. Hopefully, I'll know more in years to come.

Sometimes I look at those wonderful little girls of mine and I feel almost overwhelmed by fear. Already I'm afraid of the first time their hearts get broken. Of all the suffering that they will inevitably be met with in their lives. The fear is so gripping that I just want to grab them up and hug them close and never let them go.

Another hard part of being a mom is accepting that you can't protect those wonderful little creatures forever. Some day, sooner than I'd like to think about, they will be turned out into the world and left to fend for themselves. My success (or failure) as a mother will determine how well they are able to handle themselves in this scary world.

I worry that I'm failing them, not doing a good enough job.

The worst part is that I won't know until it's too late.