It is very hard to understand the ways that your children will break your heart, until they do. Those comments spat at you, or hissed, after you've fallen out in some way that feels to them to be of epic proportions.
"I hate you"
"I want to kill you"
"I want to kill myself"
Each one cuts to the quick. In the rational part of your brain you know they don't mean it. That they are battling with emotions that are so big and intense and they just don't yet know how to deal with them. That's part of the parent's job - teaching our children healthy ways of dealing with those big emotions.
Those negative ones.
Anger. Frustration.
Especially hard when you're not that convinced of your own ability to handle those emotions in a healthy way! Good god it's so hard to keep your cool, to keep the love in your voice, to keep from over reacting - when that little person, who knows better than anyone else which button to press, looks you in the eye and deliberately pushes that button.
Hoooweee!
I've lost track of how many times I've trotted out that phrase
"I love you so much, but I do not like the way you behaved just there".
It seems so hard when they're first born and you are handed this brand new little person and sent away with no manual, no how-to. You're just expected to get on with it, and you do, more or less. It's only as they get older that you realise that those baby days were a piece of piss, a magical, golden, walk in the park. The bit where they're older and it's your job to shape them and mould them into decent, worthwhile members of society - that's the REALLY hard bit. Where they have ethics, values and morales. Where they pick up after themselves. Where they can manage and appreciate the need for personal hygiene. Where they accept responsibility for their own behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour. All of these endless little things that they need to learn.
To make sure that you love them, and tend them and build them up. But not overindulge and spoil. To give them want they need and not what they want (and ha! where do you gain the knowledge to tell you what that is!). To fight their corner like the mother tiger you are, but also to have the wisdom to know when to allow them to learn how dig themselves out the hole they put themselves in.
Hard, hard work.
But at the end of a day or week or month where it's just felt relentless and you are wondering if parenthood will ever make you feel like the warmth of the sun and the nourishment of the roots again.
That's when it happens.
Tonight, whispered against my cheek with soft lips and minty breath
"Mum, even when I say I hate you, I still love you".
