A moment of extreme self doubt

I am tired.

Properly, properly tired.  Of almost everything.

I am a woman who clings very precariously onto the edges of her sanity at the best of times, and today I feel that things are slipping, and not in a good way.

It may be something to do with being very hormonal and this being the first day of my period, which is never fun at the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times.

It may be something to do with the fact that I am fully aware that I have taken on far too much lately, and there are times when I am floundering. Today is one of those days.

It may be due to the fact that Mercury is in retrograde (I have no idea whether this is true).

It may be a winning combination of all of those things.

Nothing really terrible is happening by the way.  I just feel terrible.  I have the first world luxury of being able to indulge my feelings rather than having to have a stiff upper lip while I go out and milk the goat in sub zero temperatures with raw and bleeding hands for the sake of the children.

Whatever.

I just know that today has been hard work and that I feel that I have failed in ways large and small, but consistently, which I suppose is something.

I keep bursting into tears this evening.  I have sat on the sofa, honking like a goose, and crying.  We watched Grand Designs in an attempt to feel more cheerful.  I usually love Kevin and his doomish little ways.  But no. Today’s episode just made me cry even more, because it was about a woman and her husband who signed up for Grand Designs just as he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  He then died, and she struggled on to build the house they had dreamed of together, alone, except for her two tiny children.  I cried so much I thought my chest would split open.

I wasn’t going to blog, I felt so miserable, but it is bed time and I am still crying, and I just want to go to sleep, but my head won’t let me.  So here I am.

This is my therapy.  Do go and stare at fish or drink gin while I deal with this.  You can come back later.

So, things with Tallulah are still rocky.  We seem to take two steps forward, one back.  Things are never entirely easy between us, but the summer holidays were pretty terrible in places.  Things improved when school started, then regressed, then improved, now they have regressed again.  Not in a huge way, but just enough for me to feel that things are futile and pointless and that I am doing everything wrong.

And today I did everything wrong.  Where I shouldn’t have explained things I explained myself and everyone else into a coma.  Where I should have walked away, I didn’t.  Where I should have remained calm I screamed and ranted and raved.  Where I should have been accepting I was accusing.  Where I should have been loving, I was mean.

I shouted yesterday too, although it was nothing compared to today.  The thing that she did today that really got me to the point of no return, was lying.  Not over big things, just over stupid things.  Stupid things that were easy for me to spot immediately.  Stupid things that she has lied about before, and which she knows are wrong, and which just made me want to lay down and give up. 

Only she is my child, and I can’t.  I can’t just give up, or turn a blind eye, or say that it’s alright.  It isn’t alright.  Lying is not good, and recently it has become quite a habit for her.  What might be forgivable in a seven year old (and not really then), is not at all forgivable in a teenager or an adult.  It has to stop.  Or, she has to get better at it.  I don’t really care which of these options she takes at this point.  I’d just like her to stop doing my head in for a bit.

We are getting help with her, by the way, before anyone very kindly suggests it.  We are not struggling on alone.  There is progress too, it’s just too slow for me on a day like today, when I have no capacity whatsoever to deal with her and all the devious ins and outs of whatever hang up she has decided to air this week.

I am ashamed that I failed to deal with it well.  I am ashamed that I find it really hard to like her at times like these, even though I love her to bits.  I am ashamed that I feel resentful that dealing with her nonsense eats into so much of my time, and time is very precious to me at the moment.  I feel ashamed that today I did not want to be kind or understanding or helpful or sympathetic.  I just wanted a laser gun, or a large piece of two by four.  Instead I used my tongue.  And that was cruel.

She is only seven.  She is doing her best.  She is working hard most of the time to change her more challenging behaviours.  She is working harder than I would have done at her age under the same circumstances. 

I feel frustrated that positive praise and rewards seem to do very little, and that when I lose my temper and lay down the law like a Victorian villain we get results, and that tonight was a night of ultimatums along the lines of ‘do this or I will tie you to the railway tracks and put the signal on green,’ because I had run out of kindness and empathy by eight o’clock this morning, about a nano second after the discovery of the first lie.

I mean to try again tomorrow with a clearer head and hopefully a kinder heart.  Whether I can keep that resolution remains to be seen.  I am aware that some of the problem is perpetuated by me, because of the way I deal with her when I am not at my sparkling best.  We fall into old, familiar, and ultimately unhelpful patterns.  Patterns which she is too young to recognise and which I am sometimes too tired and stressed to have the strength to break.  I am resolved that I will break them, even if it kills me, which it probably will.  If I change, she has to change.  It’s one of those laws of physics type things.  And change needs to happen, and it has to be my job, because I’m not seven, and I’m in charge.

Rats.

Oscar has been rather challenging all day.  This has not entirely helped matters.  He wanted to stay in all day and lie around  watching television and dashing around in just his pants.  In retrospect I realise I should have given in and let him.  But because we didn’t get out of the house yesterday, I insisted we go out and get busy.  This meant he dragged along all morning, an unwilling participant in our plans, and moaned and fretted and behaved like a frustrated three year old, which he is.  Our morning was a series of ill conceived, ill executed visits to places none of use were particularly enthusiastic about, all conducted with low level whinging, in the pouring rain.

It did nothing to improve my mood.

The pottery class was a tranquil oasis.  I had several pieces of luck there.  Firstly, my pottery dragon did not explode and Oscar was so impressed with it that he actually helped me paint it, and he also decided he wanted to make something to fire himself.  Then I hit upon the idea of making Mr. Men, who are his new, favourite thing in the world.  By the time I had executed Mr. Sneeze in the medium of clay, Tilly had been able to get on in peace and I had won more mummy kudos.

Home schooling is doing my head in a little bit folks.  I have every admiration for people who do it all the time, but it is not something I can see myself doing permanently.  There are subjects I am really struggling with, and I cannot seem to establish a successful rhythm of teaching that fits in with other stuff.  The rest of my life just doesn’t seem to fit into the neat slots that are clearly required for home schooling to be an out and out success.  I think it must help if you have all your children at home, but having some in nursery, some in school and some at home is not an easy mix, and I am forever running hither and yon.  I always feel that I am behind and that I just don’t know enough.  I am having severe home schooling doubts, despite the fact that I would rather cut my arm off than give in and send her to the schools I have worked so hard to avoid.

I am pinning hopes on our move, for which we still don’t have a firm date.  I am sort of working towards the end of October as our goal.  I now need to call County Hall and execute plan 43 and a half, which involves me visiting the two or three middle schools that may be worth sending her to, scoping out whether I can get her to one of them and Tallulah to a primary school somewhere completely different both at the same time, and reassessing the situation with the relevant information to hand.  I have already ascertained that the local nurseries are parlous, and that the primary school, which is good, does not do an intake in January, so even if I get Tilly settled in school, I will still have Oscar with me, but full time until September.  But at least I won’t have to help him work out how to do prime factors.

Mr Grumpy I can do.

It’s everything else I can’t…

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