The Moment I Knew My Parenting Had To Change

"It's not your job!" I said for what felt like the tenth time that day.

"But it feels like it is!" he said with the threat of tears in his already lowering 12 year old voice. 

We had been arguing more and more about when it was his job to tell his siblings what to do and when he took it too far.  In that moment, my breath left me and I knew what he meant.  I had lived with that feeling my whole life.  So many times it felt like it must be my job to instruct, correct, guide, lead, and ultimately take responsibility for everyone else.  Not necessarily because I wanted the job, but because it felt like it was my job - it felt like no one else would.  Or sometimes it felt like I was expected to because I was able to.  Whatever the reason, I never got the message that much of what other people did was not my responsibility and often none of my business.  I never should have carried the weight of the world, especially not for that long.  As I heard my son sum up my whole life with that one reactive response, I knew there were some things that had to change in my parenting.

All my life I picked up all the rocks that others were dropping in an attempt to help.  It seemed like the right thing to do.  Those rocks were left in my path and I kept tripping over them anyway.  What I didn't realize was how much responsibility I was taking away from the people who dropped the rocks.  As I was developing, it never occurred to me that I was teaching the world to give me their rocks and silently hoping they would come back for them, but unaware I could put them down.  Fast forward to parenthood and I had instinctively begun to teach my son that picking up other people’s rocks - like his siblings or his parents - was his job too. That’s a lesson I never would have given him intentionally, but so much of life is lived out absent of true understanding. Since that day, we’ve been slowly walking back from blame, responsibility and assumptions that weren’t said but heavily communicated by my own emotional turmoil and habits.

This year has been a long lesson in regulating my own emotions instead of expecting the world around me to do it for me. My body has been screaming at me for a while that the continual stress I experienced was not good for me. I could change my circumstances, but the turmoil I felt inside didn’t seem to change that much. The problem wasn’t the stress, it was me. Seeing the immense (and unfair) pressure I was unknowingly putting on my son to pick up the slack when I couldn’t cope like an adult convicted me all the more.

So, I’ve been spending more time reassuring my kids when my emotion is and, more importantly, is not about them or their responsibility to fix. I hate that it has taken me so long to realize what was happening. We talk about individual roles and responsibilities in ways I’m still wrapping my head around. It feels embarrassing to be struggling with something I’m trying to model for my teenager. And yet, that seems to be what parenthood is like a lot. Ready or not, here we go kind of days.