Family Under Construction
I think it was the broken dishwasher that threw the morning out of kilter right from the start. I discovered the dysfunction when I went to unload clean dishes and discovered that they were not in fact clean. This meant that I not only had breakfast dishes to hand wash, but also the dishes from last nights company-for-dinner event as well. That piled on top of all the other looming tasks of the day made me want to sit down and cry. And then the kids were not cooperative about getting ready for school.
It wasn’t a good start for the day. Things got much better when Howard sent me out of the kitchen because he had figured out a dish system that worked best if no one else was in his way. They improved further when my kids were glad to see me after school despite the fact that I’d not been nice in the morning. Gleek and I had another quiet snuggle time where I read her a story and then she read one to me. I had a nice long talk with my backyard neighbor in which we conspired to help both our kids. It is so nice to have a friend who knows my kids well enough that she sees everything I see, but she sees it all from a slightly different perspective. She had some excellent ideas for new approaches to some of the interpersonal problems I’ve been wrestling with.
Our family has a good strong foundation. We all love and depend on each other, but all of us have been distracted lately and it is time to do some maintenance work. It is time for me to pay attention to my interactions with the kids. I need to see the unintended lessons I’ve been teaching in my hurry to get things done. I need to change my behaviors and attitudes to make sure that I am building up my kids rather than undermining them. I never meant to hurt them, but after enough times being told “Not now, I’m working” they decide that they aren’t as important as work. I need to fix that since the point of working so hard is to maintain the family and the life we’ve created together.