Life as I know it to be has gotten very complicated. It's gotten a bit too much overwhelming at times and it makes me wish that I could go somewhere and bury myself in a sand on some lonely beach and hide. Hide from the complications, the decisions, the second-guessing.
Parenting has become a complication that I never thought would ever have happened to me. I have always had everything just so, not perfect, but knowing that this is A and this is B and anything that comes in between can and will be handled with the dexterity and confidence that I've always done.
When your kids are younger, you might think that's the hard part. NO it's not. Sure you have to be there for them, feed them, bathe them, change their diapers, make sure they don't bump their heads or touch something they shouldn't. Handling the terrible threes and getting them into their first Kindergarten class, all seemed to be hard at first, but that's the easy part.
The hard part comes once they reach the age of 13 and onwards. Or make that once they can do things for themselves, make decisions, the very thing you've been dying for them to be able to do on their own, it gets freaking complicated!
You as the parent have to make sure the decisions you make for them or the decisions you let them make, isn't something that will affect them for the rest of their lives. It has to be the right decision and you have to explain why you make the decision you did. You have to withhold things some of the times because you don't want them to be overwhelmed or experience things YOU feel they shouldn't, yet.
Once they have grown up and reach the age that you feel that you can stop living their lives for them (because in essence that's what you do) you have to try and keep a step ahead of them just to make sure that the decisions they make isn't one that will affect them in the wrong way for the rest of their lives.
Also, you have to allow them to live their lives. It's parental suicide if you don't! Sometimes it's hard to decide when to let them walk into something you know will not work out and they learn for themselves from experience, or let them drown! It's beyond my limits to let them drown, even though sometimes you feel like letting it happen, just because it would teach them a lesson, but I can't do that. I care too much and so life has been filled with a lot of letting go and reeling in.
I know, it all seem so overly dramatic, after all, what is my problem you might wonder? None, other than the child that you have groom for almost all of their lives, suddenly seems to be at a crossroads and you want to tell them, this is the path you take but you can't. The child who is now almost an adult, needs to make decisions on her own that will affect who she is and you want to say, no don't do this, do this. Or I do sometimes give in and give my two cents, but you still have to let her make the decision because it is her life! All that I can do is nudge and point and hint and say don't make the mistakes I did.
And when the children that you have reared seem to become influence by peers around them, that's even more complicated. You have to still be a parent, you have to still try to hold on to them in order to guide them.
When life becomes even more complicated because you feel as if you're not at that place you're supposed to be, when you feel as if things would have been so much better if only you had done this or that or not done this or that....that second-guessing is parental suicide, and a personal one too.
Thus the wanting to go off somewhere and bury myself in the sand, and try to figure out how to make things work so that life as I know it can be better than it is right now. Not perfect, (ha, who has the perfect life) but good enough to feel comfortable and in control.
So reassessing myself comes into play and telling myself to not second-guess myself or regret any decisions I have made now or in the past because that is what has made me who I am today. And trying to dig through the clutter so as to get things the way they should be is hard sometimes. Clearing out the debris of my life so that my children can see that "hey, mom has it together and I know that my life will be good because she does, and I will be better for it." Because mom has her life together, I can go off into the world with confidence. That's all I want.
But what you want is not always what you get. So I continue to work at it, digging, sorting, uncluttering, trying my hands at the bundle that remains with it's threads sticking out, unwinding this way, and that so as to get it all unwound and in order. It's not perfect, but it is life as I know it. And I have to remain true to myself and not let others influence who I am and who they thought I was or should be. Because at the end of the day, I'm a parent, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a friend, but I'm still me.
So on I go with the fearlessness I know how, a stumble here, pick myself up there, while wishing that I had the world in the palm of my hands so that I could mold it the way I want it to be, just because.