My oldest son is now 6 and ready to start school. And boy is he ready. I expect him to get a tattoo and take up smoking any day now. He is like a really cute, little obnoxious version of myself. I see God in his eyes, like I did when he was a baby. And it is a bit confusing, seeing God in his eyes still, because now, he rolls those (huge, beautiful, blue) eyes in a way that makes you want to dig a hole and drop dead into it.
He sighs, he does the rolling-eyes-while-sighing-combo and he repeats what I say to make my skin crawl. I cringe when I hear my (bad) words coming out of his little raspberry mouth. “Oh, for fuck sake”, he sighs when the legos won’t cooperate.
It has become very real to me that I am a role model. Ehm. A bad one. The million dollar question is: How do I get him to do what I say, not what I do??…
He sees and hears everything. (Unless it is aimed at him and has content that means he has to do something. Then he’s completely deaf.)
“WHO is high strung and what does that mean??” a little voice from the back seat asks. Thus, all adult conversation in the front of the car has been suspended until further notice, at least if there are little ears in the back of the car. Or the horrific moments when we think he is engulfed in reading or drawing and we’re yipping away until he asks: “Who are you talking about? Are you talking about grandma?”
(Does anyone know where you can buy those memory-deleters from Men In Black?)
He himself is also a role model. To the 2-year old. The little parrot has learned to say “mom” in the most indignant way. With him, I didn’t even get those few years of just a normal “mom” – he started out sounding annoyed with me. Bugger!
But it’s not all bad. I see that apart from the cussing, badmouthing and yelling, we must also be affectionate, caring, and fun-loving – at least our kids are that way. Like when my 2-year old praised my dad for having caught a magnetic fish with a magnetic fishing rod with the words: “Good job!” Or when he – on the DAY he learned how to say “horse”, showed a picture of a horse to his 1-year old cousin and said: “Horse! Good job!”
And from my background in psychology, I know the importance of awareness. The first step towards change is that we are aware of ourselves and our actions, right?
So at least, when I’ve yelled – at the top of my lungs like a fire-breathing dragon from hell: “STOP YELLING!!”, I pause and reflect.
Bad mommy
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