Liam (aged 6) has been driving Chris and I insane lately. Back chat, rudeness, cheekiness, shouting, name calling, and the list goes on. It's not that we don't do stuff with him, he gets plenty of love and attention, but he seems to be going through a trying time. I think he needs more sleep but it's hard getting him to sleep when his big brother stays awake reading in the bed below him.Yesterday I discovered a blog called Be A Fun Mum. I found it via another blog that I have been reading which extols the joys of homemaking and planning fantastic play activities each day to do with toddlers and preschoolers (the woman who writes it manages all this with a newborn, by the way). These blogs come complete with photos of happy looking kids playing with playdough, paper clips or whatever is the craft of the week. Photos of children's bedrooms with craft activities hung up on the walls and no mess anywhere. Our boys' room is lucky to stay tidy for five minutes after we've cleaned it out.
I'm sure these ladies are lovely people but just once I would like to hear that they have been called "rubbish-head" or "fatty" (the current names of choice, I suppose I should be grateful they're not swear words) by an ungrateful child. I don't feel much like being a fun mum when he's behaving like that.
Still, I suppose that's not the point of their blogs. And I don't want to turn mine into a whingeing blog. This is just what our life looks like right now. I know it will pass, but for now it's not much fun.
3 comments:
Hi Karen,
I can relate to you here. From my observation those kinds of blogs while perhaps attempting to be encouraging can be just the opposite. When parenting is hard, it's painful to read posts about how fantasticly smooth someone elses' parenting is going, how many crafts and activities they fit in, how the newborn has been sleeping through the night since the day they came home from hospital.It's also hard to not read it as just boasting.
I guess it's just important to guard my own heart on this. I can never really know someone elses' motivations for writing a blog or a post, and I can't judge them. If I am tempted to be jelous or bitter, I should just not look at those blogs and work on my own issues.
It's hard though.
Thanks for the comment Ben. After reading the posts on openness and authenticity on Simone and Wendy's blogs, I realised there is a fine line between being honest about what life is like, and falling over the edge into oversharing the sinful stuff that's inside me.
That said, though, I don't want to pretend the hard stuff doesn't happen (that is, after all, partly why my blog is called Life Actually!). I'm sure it must be hard at Fun Mum's place too some days. I did print off her monthly calendar of fun moments to have each day with your child/ren and put it on my fridge....then I thought, I don't know if scheduling fun works for me, but it is good to have a few ideas of what to try if everything is falling apart (as it has been doing all too often lately...) and I need to remember why I do really love these little people I have been blessed with.
But you know this is the kind of thing I'm writing against - not you, but these people who portray a beautiful, perfect life. It IS discouraging, not encouraging at all. I feel far more encouraged to read of your struggles (not that I'm encouraging you to turn to whinging) - but not just that you struggle, as you succeed in coming through those hardships. Because, the reality of life is that it is hard, that kids aren't perfect and neither are we. For sure someone who looks perfect is struggling somewhere with something - that is the truth, the Bible's truth.
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