Admittedly, it’s been a difficult month and on occasion I failed to provide my daughter with the attention she desired and deserved. Losing her Mimi may have had a larger impact on her that I originally thought, or maybe in my stressed out and grieving haze, I didn’t notice her unhappiness. In any event, today, she said those magic three little words that start wars and manage to cause the jaws of many a parent to clench… I HATE YOU!
Yep. There it is. She hates me…and she’s 4. My heart seized and my brain convulsed inside my skull, thinking, “Did she just say what I THINK she said?” I managed to make it into my teens before I ever slung that one on my mom! Hearing those words truly horrified me. But I took a breath and said, “That’s okay, you have a right to feel that way, but I love you no matter what.” Yeah, I’ve read a few books, watched some Oprah and scanned a couple of articles in parenting magazines. Yippee for me.
Truth? That little girl hurt my feelings. No one wants to hear that someone hates him or her – not even if you hate him or her right back! (Yikes, second grade, anyone? And by the way, I cannot bring myself to cause grammatical dissonance by using “no one” and “them.”) Especially if you surrendered your body, for 9 months (10 months really, but who’s counting?), labored for 22 hours and underwent major surgery to give life to that person!! This is the thanks I get? I know that lately my heart has been firmly encamped upon my sleeve and feelings run rampant with little or no notice, but should I have to put up with this? How can I allow this little person who can’t spell more than her own name and still wears training pants to bed to damage me so?
After calming down and drowning my sorrows in a 12-ounce can of Diet Dr. Pepper, I realized that it is BECAUSE I surrendered my body to her, at which time I gave over my life – heart and soul – to her, that she can hurt me with her words. Logically, I know the she does indeed NOT hate me, but that she is frustrated by me at times and that’s the only way she can tell me. There are times I wish I never encouraged her to speak, but she needs her little voice to tell me, in her own inimitable way, how she feels. I would rather hear her tell me she hates me than wind up explaining to the media in 10 years that she was a quiet kid and I had no idea she planned to open fire on her school.
This way, we can deal with what she feels when she feels it and I can get on to doing whatever I was doing before my life fell apart.
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