After a year of doing the technical things necessary, we finally were authorized for hearing aids for Yirmi!

Yirmi is now 7. A year ago a hearing test showed he had a mild hearing loss, which I was told was significant and needed to be addressed immediately. This was the same loss he had shown when tested at age 4, but I was told at that time that there was nothing we needed to do but continue regular hearing tests.

When I realized that Yirmi should have had hearing aids from a young age and has been working hard to compensate for hearing loss all these years, I was filled with self-recrimination. So what if they told me it wasn’t a problem? Why didn’t I research it myself? How could I not have realized there was an issue? I know how important hearing is to cognition and function, I know hearing should be regularly tested. How could I have  been so oblivious and dropped the ball on this??

Did I blame the hearing test place for bad advice? Did I blame the speech therapists or ENT for not catching this? Nope. Just me.

After way too long feeling lousy about this, I finally had to tell myself: I did the best I could.

Because I really did.

(We’re still in process with this so it will probably be at least another couple of months before he is wearing them regularly.)

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Yirmi doesn’t reliably walk distances, which I’ve been attributing to me using a stroller for him for too long when he was younger. So with Rafael (now 2 3/4 yr), I’m doing things differently and encouraging a lot of walking, which is what I tell myself I should have done with Yirmi (did you catch that dangerous word, ‘should’ there?!).

And then I had two flashes of insight that helped me to forgive myself for being fallible:

1) When Yirmi was little, every time I went out I either had three little boys along with me, eagerly pulling me to our destination or I had them waiting at home with an older sibling watching them and needed to get back as quickly as possible. I didn’t have the luxury of letting a very little toddler wander here and there, I couldn’t wait him out when he sat down and wouldn’t get up. I took him out often and regularly (we went to the park just about every day), but his running around was done at the destination, not on the way there or back.

Can I accept that I was a very busy mother of 10 children who was doing all that I could, trying to meet everyone’s needs? Can it be okay that I couldn’t do everything for everyone to the maximum all the time? Can I even – gasp – be appreciative for all the things that I did do?

2) I’d been assuming the reason Yirmi doesn’t consistently walk places is because I didn’t walk with him enough at an earlier age. And then I suddenly realized, he has trouble with transitions regardless of if it involves walking or not!!! For over two years I’ve been holding myself responsible for this challenge when it’s very possible it wouldn’t be any different even if I had done lots of walking with him.

I have an awesome 7 year old who happens to have Trisomy 21 who is doing extremely well by any measure, and it’s fair to say that is in large part due to my efforts. Yet here I was feeling inadequate and self-condemnatory rather than focusing on my overall success!

Why am I sharing these two examples with you?

I’ve noticed in conversations with clients and friends that most of you are doing exactly the same thing – you ignore and overlook the many, many things you do well, and focus instead on your perceived mistakes.

Then you beat yourself up rather than crediting yourselves for all that you’ve done well!

I think we all have some reframing to do!

When you catch yourself feeling bad about some aspect of your parenting, just stop.

Remind yourself that you are doing the best that you can.

You’ve always done the best you can.

The fact that you may know better now doesn’t mean that you should have known more then.

There’s nothing more you could have done at that time or you would have done it.

This isn’t a justification to make you feel better. This is the deepest truth.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you wish you did differently! Yes, it would have been nice if you had more knowledge, more support, more resources. But you didn’t and you couldn’t have done more than you did.

There are always going to be mistakes and missteps, and that’s okay. It’s not fun and it’s not easy, but it’s a fact of life.

Oh, you wish your kids didn’t have to suffer through your mistakes? Well, we all wish that. But that’s not realistic and it’s not fair to expect of yourself. Squandering your precious life energy feeling badly about yourself is stealing some of the energy you can use to make today what you want it to be.

You are enough, as you are right now. You do enough, whatever you are doing now. 

Can you allow yourself to feel that?

Avivah