Daughter

My daughter......that is my struggle of my day today, maybe my week.

I love my daughter more than anything in the world, I would do absolutely anything for her....but she makes me want to pull every stand of curly hair out of my head!!!

She is at the wonderful age of 'tween' right now. She thinks she knows all, wants to argue with me about everything and anything, is a hormonal wreck and is even at the point that she is starting to fry the nerves of my 7 year old son.

A month or so ago, my daughter is on her emotional roller coaster...crying and carrying on about everything. (I truly think that on this day she would have argued that the sky was blue.) I am at the point that I have to ignore her because I am at my breaking point. I go into the living room, turn on the TV to help drown out some of her tantrum that is going on.... My son sits down next to me on the couch and says "Mom, you know that someday she will move out and when she does, it will just be you and me and we can do anything we want to." May god bless that little boy!! It is so like him to make me laugh when I need to the most.

I wonder everyday how my mom raised three daughters. It is no wonder that she had grey hair. Seriously, I was in no way shape or form a 'good kid' when I was growing up, I was quite the rebel child, a free spirit.  Sometimes, when my daughter is making me crazy, I think back to all the stupid shit I did as a kid, look up to the heavens and tell my mom I am sorry! How in the hell did she raise three daughters? I sometimes wonder if my one will make it to adulthood.

I tell myself everyday that I am doing my best, that I love her and only want the best for her. I am her parent, not her friend. I know she is going through a very difficult time right now with the divorce and having to move. But I have six more years of this at least! How am I going to last and stand my ground when she is on a relentless quest to wear me down...I really have no idea how I am going to make it.

It has to be so hard on the kids in this time that we are living in and the pressure that we as a society put on them. I believe that it is very different on them than it was when I was growing up. They have cell phones, e-mail, facebook, ipads...we could go on and on. Everyone is constantly after the bigger and better items as well as who has more of them. The advertising is even worse than when I was a kid, everything is sexed up more than it was 20 years ago. The pressure to grow up that is put on these kids is really amazing when you stop and think about it. If only they could see that there is no hurry to grow up....once you do grow up you stop and wonder why you ever thought it was a good idea, you really don't know how lucky you had it.

Then there is those parents out there that give there children anything they ask for. I often want to ask them if they understand that all they are doing to their kids is hurting them. There is no way that these kids can maintain that level of a lifestyle when they grow up and move out on their own someday, they are setting them up for failure. There are kids my daughters age (6th grade) that have fancy cell phones with internet, get their hair colored, have fake fingernails, wear makeup, date, have their own computers in their rooms, laptops, designer jeans that cost more than any pair of Levi's that I own, have tennis shoes that cost more than my  electric bill...and on and on and on. Now if you can afford these things than good for you. The average working single parent however, cannot. I try to tell my kids that they have nothing in the world to be ashamed of, they have clean clothes that fit, a roof over their head and food to eat...most importantly, they are loved.

My grandpa always used to tell me to never judge a person by the clothes that they are wearing, that as long as they are clean they are doing the best with what they have. (That still holds true today.)

So in the end all I can do is stand my ground and teach my children the values that are important to me. It would be so much easier to just give in sometimes but I know that is really doing more damage than good.

I don't get the luxury of being the cool, fun parent right now...I get to be the one and only real parent that they have. Hopefully when they are parents one day they will look back at the job I did raising them and come to the conclusion that I did my best, loved them, supported them and that as far as childhoods go, it really wasn't all that bad...