Today I went to see the local daycare center for children under the age of three with developmental delays. This is something that is repeatedly being strongly suggested to me for Yirmiyahu, so I decided to visit and see for myself what it was like.
In short – it was very nice. Nonetheless, Yirmiyahu will continue staying home with me.
After my visit, I had a lot of thoughts running through my head. I was trying to analyze what would be better for Yirmiyahu about being home, and as I mentally checked off the reasons I began feeling a lot of insecurity about my ability to give him what he needs. My mind starting running the tape of, ‘I’m so busy, I have so many people depending on me and there’s so much more I want to do for him than what I do. Maybe he’d be better off there.’
I have lots of reasons he wouldn’t be better off there – not just because he’s a very young baby who needs to be with his mother, but because I really do think he’ll get more at home with me, but this post isn’t about that. I don’t want to write about what the daycare doesn’t have or compare and contrast. What I want to share about is how extremely tired I felt when I got home from the daycare center.
At first I didn’t think much of this tiredness, but it was really overwhelming – I felt like I could hardly move. I kept wondering why I was so tired – it’s true I only got five hours of sleep last night, but that’s not so unusual. This tiredness was overwhelming and taking a step felt like lifting up a leg that was glued to the ground. After about an hour I realized – it was my thoughts about my visit to the daycare center and all the feelings of not being enough that were exhausting me.
This made me think of a couple of recent emails from readers with questions that were seemingly quite different, but the underlying sentiment was the same, that of feeling inadequate about some aspect of child raising. I may seem like I have all the answers from my platform on your computer screen, but I have these same doubts and fears sometimes. A child psychologist told me that guilt is a feeling that is universal to parents, so that means we’re all in good company when we get into self-doubt.
So what can we do about it? I was able to shift out of this within a couple of hours, once I took the first step. For me, the first step is recognizing my thoughts for what they are. Those thoughts are usually coming from a place of making unrealistic demands of myself, while simultaneously not validating what I do. It’s so easy to slip from a healthy desire to be the best person you can be, to being a perfectionist who can’t see her accomplishments and nothing less than 100% is worth anything. Not a good place to be.
Sure, there’s always more that I could do. I could do things to be a better mother, wife, self. I could be more disciplined, be more emotionally present, be more physically present, yadda yadda yadda. But right now I’m doing the best I can with what I have. Feeling guilty that I’m not more than I am isn’t going to make me a better person. Actually, it does the opposite – these kind of thoughts drag you down and suck all your positive energy right out of you. Today I had to consciously remind myself of what I do for Yirmiyahu, and to value it as being enough. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the heavy feeling of tiredness shifted once I started thinking differently.
Parents, look at all the good things you do in the course of a week for your child. Okay, sometimes you drop the ball, you yell or are impatient. You’re exhausted and spent and you feel like you’re failing your child. No, you’re not. You’ve just lost sight of who you are and what you do, you’ve let the true beautiful you become obscured by stinking thinking! We all do this. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to not do everything right all the time – in short, it’s okay to be human.
Avivah
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