Every night I hang up my decorative fall kitchen towels on the oven handle, and every morning my one-year-old rips them off and tosses them on the floor.
This habitual routine demonstrates how stubborn I am, but it also shows how tenacious I am.
I think a lot of parents possess this quality. The ability to continue to show up and be there for their family is the number one thing I admire all parents for. This constant effort we pour into parenthood every single day is no simple task. Yes, we choose to have kids and we are the ones who put ourselves in these positions, but it’s the hardest things that are always the most worthwhile.
My decorative fall kitchen towels remind me a lot of parenthood. Some days, our patience is tested so much that we struggle to be the best support system for our kids and sometimes we make mistakes. Like the towels, there are days when our kids get the best of us. We may lose our patience, raise our voices, or need to walk away to give ourselves a minute. These are the days we feel like we have been thrown on the floor and beaten down.
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I can confidently say that I know every parent has found themselves in one or more of these situations. We’ve questioned our sanity and we’ve asked ourselves whether we’re doing it right. But I also firmly believe that it’s because we care so deeply about our kids that we find ourselves in these situations.
We want our kids to be kind, resourceful, passionate, and above all, happy. It’s because we care so much about their well-being and future that we drive ourselves crazy trying to do it all. We put all our effort into every teachable moment and we embrace every feeling they sense with open arms – making sure they know we understand them, support them, and that we’re there to coach them through it.
Kids don’t always take your feelings into account, especially when they haven’t yet learned how to understand, manage, and cope with their own. We can’t expect them to understand how hurt we are when they throw their cup of milk on the freshly mopped floor. We can’t expect them to know how we feel when we see them rip the coloring pages you spent time finding and printing for them. They’re still learning about their own feelings and they’re not yet ready to understand empathy quite yet – especially if they’re in the middle of a big feeling themselves.
But, like the decorative fall kitchen towels, we pick ourselves back up again every day. No matter how carelessly we were tossed onto the floor that day, we always end up back on the oven handle because we care.
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Love is such a powerful feeling. Our kids can walk all over us one day and we get right back up the next day and offer them everything we have. This can even happen in the span of one morning or afternoon. As parents, we find ways to reset. We remind ourselves to change our perspective and empathize with our kids. No matter how old or young, they are still learning; and so are we.
If you ever feel like my pesky decorative fall kitchen towels, know you are not alone. I’ll continue to pick them up off the floor every morning, fold them, and place them on the corner of my kitchen counter because they’re always worth hanging back up. Every day is a new day and we all deserve a fresh new start. No matter how difficult the previous day was and no matter how many times you felt like you lost your patience, there’s always a reason to pick yourself back up again.
Your kids are your reason.
No matter how hard it is right now, you’ve got this.
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