I don’t know a woman who doesn’t want to be better than her mother.
The worst insult she can get is, “You’re just like your mom,” which is sad, but often times very true.
My mom was a yeller and I hated it. When my brother or I would tell her she was yelling, she would say she just “raised her voice,” which I can laugh about now, honestly, but as a kid, I hated her yelling.
Last night I yelled at my 10-month old…
I was giving her a bath and needed to use the toilet, but it had acted weird the night before and didn’t fill the bowl back up fully, so I flushed it to see if it would work okay, and the bowl started filling up too much.
I grabbed the plunger and am going crazy, worrying it’s going to overflow and flood the bathroom (which my boyfriend explained that the tank holds enough water to just fill the bowl, but not overflow, unless it’s flushed multiple times, but I didn’t know that at the time).
Madison loves to stand up in the bathtub, and I tell her to sit down and have to pull her to sit down, but she keeps trying to stand and is super interested in the faucet. Obviously, I worry about her slipping and hurting herself, even with me right there.
So I’m plunging away and I look over and she’s standing to see what I’m doing and lost her balance and slipped a little. I could only imagine her hurting herself, so I yelled “MADISON, SIT DOWN!” and she sat down right away.
The toilet water went down and everything was fine.
She tried to stand again a few times and I would tell her to sit down and she sat down right away and gave me a look like she definitely knew what I was saying.
I yelled at her so that she wouldn’t hurt herself in this situation. But it got me to thinking…
I don’t want to be a yeller for day-to-day things I tell her to do.
I want to find ways to talk to her calmly but to where she knows I mean what I say.
I will have to actively find ways of doing this so that I don’t fall into what I know, which is yelling.
It’s so easy to perpetuate what we learned, especially things we didn’t like. Change is the hard part.
My mom always made it a point to apologize to my brothers and I if she got upset and yelled at us. Her dad didn’t agree with her doing this, but it was the thing she wished she could have gotten from her parents; acknowledgement of the wrongs they did. And that’s what she gave to us.
I think every woman can say that they want to be a better mom than their mom. Even if their mom was great, there’s usually something that they didn’t like and would want to do better.
And this isn’t to shame our moms or make them feel bad. It’s how humanity grows and evolves, by continually trying to do better.
I know that my mom did the best that she could, and she did much better than her mom, who did much better than her mom.
And there are definitely things that I would do the same, like apologize when I do wrong.
My mom was wonderful when I was sick. She took good care of us.
She could also laugh at almost anything and could take a joke at her expense. I am not always able to do that, but would like to be able to.
I want to continue the good things and try to do better than the not-so-good things.
And it’s funny, as I was writing this, I took a quick Facebook break and one of my friends shared a post about Inuit parenting and how they teach their children to control their anger.
I may try their techniques, but it’s not just tricks that they do, it’s a lifestyle.
The first thing that stuck out was that the adults controlled their anger very well…that will be challenge #1 for me.
I wasn’t taught healthy ways to manage my anger, which my parents weren’t either, or their parents, and who knows how far back it goes.
I remember being sent to my room as a little girl and being so mad for getting in trouble that I would have temper tantrums and throw things around in my room and scream and cry, and then I’d ventually calm down and be let out of my room. But nothing more came from it to help me.
And even now as an adult, I will sometimes throw things when I’m angry and have child-like temper tantrums, which is really embarrassing to admit.
Which was also talked about in the article about the Inuit, that they view adults as acting like children when they let their anger get the best of them. They would think I am a huge baby.
So, my plan to be “better” than my mother is to change how I handle anger so that I am not a yeller. And so I can teach my daughter how to handle her anger.
In what areas do you want to be different than your parents?