So much for a yell-free year. I screwed that up at about 10 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Husband and I keep it no secret that we own a megaphone and use it frequently, because the noise six boys can make on a daily basis is like a thousand frightened elephants crashing through Stonehenge. The house trembles with the sound of it. And in order for our hourly instructions to be heard over all this trumpeting and stomping and crashing, we make sure our house is well stocked with Energizer D batteries and the megaphone is within reach of parent hands (definitely not kid hands. They don’t need any help in the louder department.).
So, on the rare occasion that the megaphone is nowhere to be found, or the batteries have run out and there are no more, yelling is necessary. Yelling to be heard above the voices of boys when they’re playing together. Yelling to be heard over their whispers, even, when they’re telling secrets (My kids are the loudest whisperers I’ve ever heard in my life). Yelling to get their attention, yelling to save them from dying, yelling to announce that dinner’s ready, because they surely won’t want to miss a single meal.
I’m not talking about this kind of yelling. This kind of yelling is necessary, at least in my home.
No, I’m talking about the kind of yelling that grabs the fire of anger and flings it at walls and doors and, mostly, kid-faces.
See, we’d been doing a whole lot of it in the last months of 2015. We’re not angry people, but boys, six of them, can quite often be maddening people. And, honestly, we were a little worn out. And we’d sometimes had enough of “whatever” before the kids had had enough. And there are a thousand excuses.
But when we looked around at our children during their two weeks (and an extra day!!!) off school, we realized (yet again) that yelling is not the answer. It’s true that sometimes we didn’t get enough sleep, because we had too much on our mind or the baby woke with a snot tree growing from his nose or the 9-year-old burst through our bedroom door at 3 a.m. to say his tummy hurt five seconds before yesterday’s pork chops splattered my face. It’s true that money’s tight right now and we’re building careers from the ground up and we’re balancing household responsibilities and we’re raising SIX BOYS who don’t often understand what it means to “just be quiet, please. For one second.”
I didn’t want to be that parent, though.
So we went around our table, asking boys what in the world we could possibly do besides yelling (even the necessary kind). How could we get their attention? What would make them stop and listen? How could we better express our momentary anger? What could boys do that might help parents do that might help boys do (because this parent-child relationship is a symbiotic cycle.)? We made our plan. We put it in place.
And still we failed on Day One.
We can tear ourselves up about something like this. We can believe we’re not good parents, because we slipped up that one time today, or those two times or those five thousand times. We can feel like maybe our kid is going to be forever messed up because we can’t seem to make it through a nighttime routine, with its getting out of bed a thousand times, without yelling at them to “JUST STAY PUT FOR GOD’S SAKE.” But the truth is, we’re only ever going to be good enough parents. That means we’re not ever going to be perfect. There are people who will tell us we should be perfect. They’re wrong.
It’s all well and good to make it our goal not to yell. It’s great to have a plan and put that plan in place. It’s great to take steps along the journey to where we want to be.
“We will never, ever, not even on our best days, be perfect at this parenting thing. Because we’re human. Because we’re raising humans.
So we can stop making ourselves feel so bad for being imperfect people. We can stop beating ourselves up for slipping up.
You know what we get to do when we yell in front of our kids because they’re losing their minds with the LEGOs, tossing them all up into the air like monkeys throwing poo, and we don’t really want to take down our ponytail tonight and feel the fourteen tiny little dragon-claw pieces spill out onto a floor and disappear to places where they’ll be found in the dead of night on a half-asleep trip to the bathroom? We get to show our kids what it looks like to make amends. We get to show them what it sounds like to offer an apology for a mistake we made (because yelling is a mistake in my personal parenting playbook). We get to show them that we aren’t perfect, so they don’t have to be perfect, either.
[Tweet “We’ll make plenty of mistakes in our parenting. Good thing imperfection fosters resilience.”]
I feel better already.
