Why can’t you be more like your brother? I heard the words come out of my mouth, and I couldn’t believe I had said them. From the look on my son’s face, he couldn’t believe it, either.
little boy being punnished isolated in white
I didn’t just say them either. I screamed them. Through tears. It was a full on moment of weakness. And I hated myself for it.
He’d just brought home yet another failing grade. This from a kid that can easily get straight A’s. Why was he failing? Because he wouldn’t do the work…
And why wouldn’t he do the work? Because he didn’t want to. There was no excuse. He just didn’t feel like trying.
You see this is a thing that teenagers do. They just decide sometimes that they don’t want to apply themselves and then we as parents have to walk them through it. A lot of times we are so busy parenting them on the big IMPORTANT things like sex and drugs that we forget they need parenting on the small things, like trying their best and not being lazy.
But that was no excuse. It still wasn’t fair for me to yell at my kid like that, and it definitely wasn’t fair for me to compare him to his brother. I knew that as soon as I’d said it. I am the mom. It was my job to keep my cool.
It had been happening more and more, and I didn’t know how to control it. I didn’t know how to control myself, or to keep myself from losing my cool. This was my every day now. Sometimes life hands you a big pile of lemons and they turn you into a sourpuss, and sometimes you grow the lemons yourself.
I was pretty sure I was growing the lemons. My son was doing perfectly normal teenager boy things, and I was the one doing all the freaking out. This was on me. I needed to find a way to be a happier mom.
I had to do something to make me MYSELF again. Because this screaming yelling mom was NOT me. She was not the person I wanted to be, and she certainly wasn’t the person I used to be.
So, my best friend introduced me to happy coffee, and I know this sounds too good to be true, but it changed me. It changed who I was. It kept me from yelling.
In fact, it kept me from even wanting to yell. Suddenly I could take a beat. Suddenly I could breathe and say to myself, “Okay, yeah he screwed up, but we can fix this.”
And now I can fix the problems. I don’t yell at my kids anymore. I don’t yell at anyone anymore.
Most of the time, I smile. And it’s all thanks to happy coffee. It’s got magic in it. I promise.
If you want to know more, join my friends Holly and Jamie here. They’re the miracle workers that introduced me to this stuff. I owe them everything.
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