Not thankful for much today except this.

Yea it's too early to be abandoning the Thankful For... series. But I'm not thankful for much at the moment. I am so stressed out from discipline. Adam is not even 6 years old yet, and already I have to arrange him not so gently against the wall of his room and remind him with my voice raised and my arms on his shoulders that HE WILL LISTEN TO ME. And he suffers when he doesn't. He suffers from an exasperated mother who loses it quickly. He suffers from no stories at night, our daily and treasured ritual. He suffers from perfunctory showers. There is no win in this picture for either of us. No end in sight either, I feel. Today is only Monday. We've been going about this discipline hell hole since Thursday of last week, through the weekend, til today.

Inside, I'm glad that his father is taking him for a bit. Part of me feels like I've let a bit of the aggravation out on him because of this very fact. I'm not proud of this--nary an accomplishment can be prefaced by "I took it out on a child half my size." How will this play out in three months, two years, a decade? Will I be grey, aged twenty years, stressed to the point of breaking, unable to deduce a logical disciplinary scenario because I've used them ALL? Will my son hate me ? Will I feel the same reciprocally??

I'm not physically suffering from an ailment. But I may be suffering from something inside. I feel at an end of my patience constantly this week. I have not had one peaceful night with Adam. Perhaps it is of my own doing. I like to run constantly doing things in an efficient manner and trying to get double the things done in half the time. That's my personality, and perhaps it may come off as ADD, but I'm quite organized when I've got many tasks to overcome. Perhaps this logical deduction of time management is lost on a boy who's so little. What he does see is a mom rushing around, moving from place to place flitting as if there is a fire under her ass following her.  I may ignore his requests at times when we're out, because I've got to get this thing completed so we can move on to the next thing I gotta do. Perhaps this is the source of his adamant whining when he wants something, he has learned that he has to nag me until I snap out of my space and listen.

So I may have learned something just from deducing this on (virtual) paper. The lesson learned is I need to bring my perspective down to his size. I need to constantly be vigilant about how he sees my actions, what he will take away from it, how it can be calculated with his limited brain power at the moment. He knows only so much right now, and he will try to make sense of it all with the logic that a five year old has. Not mommy logic. Kiddeh logic.