Clean Car Days

You know what I am doing?

Cleaning my van. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?

It's not.

We spent forever cleaning
this room before breakfast.

It is the "Anger Management Strategy of the Day" aka, the thing that I am doing to avoid totally losing every shred of my cool with my middle child. She is what is commonly referred to as a threenager. And by the end of this day she will have spent more time in her room than out of it, culminating in a 5:00 pm bedtime. Primarily the purpose of the room time out is so that I can put some distance between her and I. Every time that I have had to put this child in the car today it has been a wrestling match, and the two hours of "nap time" resulted in every thing, toys, clothes, books, everything, being thrown about in her room. It makes my stomach clench to think of it,...

...That is why we are now pulling all the seats out of the van so what we can be sure that we get every iota of dirt, and orange peels, and church worksheets, and tater tots, and who knows what else, out from under them.

 I think her sweet compliant nature up until the beginning of this year meant that the defiance that suddenly started around that time felt like a real slap in the face, a punch in the gut, a spit in the proverbial eye, and it makes me want to scream and cry and rant, all at the same time, a lot...

...So I am out here furiously scrubbing the windows on my vehicle, which are covered in stickers, saliva, chocolate and other unrecognizable things, so that I won't hear her kicking the door and barge in like the maternal maniac I feel like.

 I'm running out of strategies and if I am completely honest there are days when I don't even employ them. I just go from 0 to rage in 3 seconds flat blowing right through the tiny voice in the back of my head that is telling me that I am going to regret this....

So there it is. This is why I am shaking out the dead flowers, rocks, granola bars, and playground sand from my floor mats.

Dinner before a 5 pm bedtime
is sparse at best.

Every time I lose my cool it just feeds that monster in the darkest parts of thoughts that continually whispers that I'm a bad mom. That I don't know what I'm doing. That is messing it all up. And there are many days that I can't find much fodder to argue with him. When I yell, and huff and puff and threaten, I regret it instantly. I want to be a calm collected person, dolling out consequences with a side note of love and affection and not this red faced troll bellowing at every misstep.

So I take deep breaths, I try to think through the consequences I am going to give and how reasonable they are, I text my friend phrases like "Ahhhh!", and when all else fails...

... I spend some time shaking all the cheerios, animal crackers and chicken nuggets out of the car seats.

These are the good days. When I find something to help me make it through the day. The days where I remember that there are better days ahead and behind.

 The days that I write about, that I post pictures of on Facebook, those are the best days. I put them there to remind myself that sometimes the best of me wins and my child finds reason to smile at me. So don't judge me because my Facebook makes my life look all hunky dory with sunshine and poppies. Its not that I am trying to project a false image, pretend that my life is perfect, or show off in anyway. I'm just trying to hold on to the things that are worth remembering. Just like my now pristine car sometimes the result belies the cause. Perhaps next time you see overly happy pictures or a perfect family on some sort of social media you can just smile with them.
Or next time you see a woman with a spotless minivan, you can give her a hug and tell her she is a good mom because we all need to hear that more.