One Bad Moment Does Not Make You a Horrible Parent
But we still fixate on it and forget the good.
My daughter and I got into an argument on Tuesday. Nope. Forget that. I’ll be totally honest. It was a knockdown, drag-out fight. There was yelling. There was cursing. There were tears. It was no one’s finest moment.
I am not infallible. She may have lit the fire but I grabbed the gasoline, dumped it on there, and then did a dance around the whole mess.
Tuesday was a crap day. I had too much to do before heading out on vacation the next day. The election had my anxiety through the roof. I had leftover sadness from the anniversary of a friend’s death. Of course, a high level of hormones draped over this mess like a wet blanket.
On a good day, I would have let the mildly annoying thing my daughter did slide. We could have had a calm conversation about it later in the evening over pizza. Instead, we had it out while trapped in a car together on a short ride home from her practice. An 8-minute car ride of doom and despair.
I’ve said it before. My kid can be savage. She knows all of my buttons. She can take responsibility for her actions and then turn around and make it my fault anyway like you’ve never seen. She’s a clever brute.
