Today was Abby's second day of Preschool. She loves it. It exhausts her. And I had a plan.
It was a bad plan.
See we are out of food, and my kids are surviving on chocolate chips they are picking out of trailmix of questionable freshness. I decided that it was time to do a Costco run, and the only chunk of time big enough to pull this off was directly after preschool. But we only had an hour and a half.
My ill conceived plan was to take four hungry children to Costco, grab lunch and get home within a this 1.5 hour chunk of time. Even as we were heading in to Costco from the parking, I KNEW to the very core of my being that this was a bad call. Yet, we walked in the door.
The disregulation of a certain 5 year old was epic and palpable. She was wonky, and it was evident. But still I persisted. As I purchased four $1.50 cardiac arrest wrapped in tin foil and a ridiculously large piece of cholesterol laden pizza the situation deteriorated.
So we slammed down our junk food, and left san groceries.
This is important because, not 2 years ago, I would have persisted. Abby, my other children, patrons of San Leandro Costco, and I would have suffered the consequences of my poor judgement and insistence on persisting with a bad plan.
12 years into this motherhood journey I know better than to take hungry and tired children into a grocery warehouses. Heck, I knew that year one. But sometimes "knowing better" isn't quite enough to "do better" -at least not all of the time.
Here's what I know now:
A) Just because I start down a path doesn't mean I must persist. It is not some act of valor to stick with stupid to its long and ugly demise.
B ) (And this one is big) It is unfair and unkind to punish my children for my bad/poor planning. If I have set them up to fail then, lo and behold, they fail I should not be surprised. And I dare not punish.
I can abort mission. And that is the wisdom gained from more than a decade of motherhood.
Sometimes its best to push control, alt., delete on your day, and eat a half a box of Cheerios and wilty lettuce for dinner. Sometimes, that is success.
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