just shoot me

Every single parent is familiar with the feeling of being overwhelmed. It goes with the territority, you've already come to terms with it long ago, or you'd have checked out already. Most of the time you can keep it more or less at bay. You take deep breaths, you deal with everything one day at a time, you enlist all the support you can get your hands on. It may always feel like "I can't do this", but hey, the evidence is there, you're doing it, the kidlet is alive and well, you have a place to live, and food on the table, and a fair amount of fun in your lives. Then there are the times when you are sure that you just can't keep going on, that the obstacles have finally amassed in such a way that you are ready to claim defeat. Like now. At work, our department has been reduced from three to two, and the work load is increasing. I have been given all the responsibilites of my former supervisor, but none of the perks. With the kidlet starting kindergarten, there are several early school closures and inservice days and strange new routines to be learned. He will have to take a bus from kindergarten to his after school care and he's very afraid of taking the bus alone. I can handle just about everything except when he starts crying to me about being afraid. Then I just lose it. Oh, and he informed me yesterday that he doesn't like the shape of my bottom. Great. Despite all my efforts, I'm somehow living with a male who doesn't dig my butt. Don't even get me started on the utter despair I felt that it seems he's already integrated into his psyche the culture's tendency to judge women's bodies as all wrong. Sorry for the extended whine, folks, but a girl can only do, and take, so much.

Comments

[Karen]

Tea and sympathy comin' atcha....

[lisa]

wow! that is so much like me and my son... he is 7, starting grade 2 in a new school cause we moved in november, and now he has to take the bus, and he's terrified... (we used to live 3 blocks from his old school)...so I am going to follow his school bus on the first day and meet him at the school! (the teacher thinks I am an overprotective mom...but it was the only way he would agree to get on the bus without me) he has also started to criticize me, accusing me today of purposely burning his mini-pizzas... bad mom!

[Ronni]

What is wrong with the American workplace that accomodation cannot be made to shepherding young children one or two afternoons a week? Certainly other arrangements could be made for making up the time.

As to kidlet's assessment of your butt, I am at a total loss for words. Where does one so young get such stuff.

[nina]

I am lucky in that my boss and most of my colleagues have been there/done that with the school and parenting issues. It's much better than it might be in a less female dominated industry or an earlier era.

As for the kidlet's comment--I blame, in addition to the culture at large, his daddy, and the crappy TV that his daddy lets him watch. It turns out that just the day before, he'd been watching some sort of infomercial (or perhaps just a commercial) on TV at his dad's house. This commercial was for some exercise product as far as I could gather. Interestingly, he's made comments about my big butt before (yes folks, nina's got back), but never quite as straightforward as this one.