My husband planned a work trip the week before winter break. While I understood the purpose of the trip, the second he told me about it, I felt like he was taking some weight off of his shoulders and not-so-gently placing it on mine. The last week of school before winter break means prepping for spirit days, packaging well-deserved teacher gifts, wrapping all of the presents before the kids are home to see them, volunteering for school events, etc., etc., etc. I am usually the one who takes on all of these things, but when you add in solo parenting, yucky weather, and kids who are whining and fighting, it all starts to feel like too much. At one point in the midst of the chaos, I said out loud to my kids and to no one at all, “I feel like a punching bag.”
As the mostly stay-at-home parent in my household, I’m used to my kids running to me with their problems. Paper cut? Me. Tiring day at school? Me. Needing a cup of water? Running right past their dad towards me. Don’t get me wrong, I love feeling needed. But as my kids get older and have bigger problems, I am only as happy as my least happy child, and when you have three kids, well, someone is usually unhappy about something.
During my husband’s trip, dance class night was the stressor in our household. We have a short window to get to dance between the bus drop-off and class start, and it’s always a mad dash to grab snacks, change, and get in the car. On that day, everyone was crying about something—someone was hungry, someone needed help buckling in, and someone was worried we’d be late.
By the time I got my kids into the minivan and turned it on to warm it up a little, one of them was still crying about something. The kind of tired, whiny, bigger kid cry that makes your skin crawl — also the kind that you know no words will make better, and the kind that needs to run its course when it’s coming from a child far too old for a pacifier. So that kid cried, and I slowly, absentmindedly began to back out of the garage — ears ringing, head spinning, and I guess, not looking in my backup camera. *Crash.* I heard it, and the kids felt it. I backed right into my husband’s car, forgetting that it’d been parked there all along because he did not drive himself to the airport.
Somehow through all of the commotion, my kids were STILL whining and fighting (and completely unharmed, thank goodness), and this punching bag decided she had absorbed enough impact for the day. Now, quite literally.
In hindsight, we probably should’ve just skipped the classes. In no particular order, I yelled at my kids to stop whining, jumped out the car, assessed the damages, texted my husband and my parents, cried, regretted my decision to leave the house, and made the split decision to get right back in the van and drive to dance class before it was too late, because we already paid for the month, darn it.
This is what we do as moms. For better or for worse, we absorb the impact of our kids’ emotions like punching bags. We love them so much that we risk the consequences, knowing we’ll carry on with our days with little imprints of our kids’ big feelings.
Hopefully, your impact won’t be quite so literal as mine during the week that I solo parented before winter break.
