Accepting Your Shortcomings as a Parent

Accepting Your Shortcomings as a Parent
Accepting Your Shortcomings as a Parent

As I am writing this, I am not entirely sure what I am writing about… I mean I know I have something on my heart that I want to share but I am not exactly sure how I want to phrase this.

To be honest, I feel like running away right now.

Young woman with backpack taking photo of a great landscape

Photo credit:

If I were to run away today I would sell what I had and buy myself a ticket to the farthest Island I can find and stay there as long as my money would take me. If I ran out I would work and travel and write and sing and run and do whatever I want to do for as long as I want to.

What I didn’t realise before, is that its OK to feel this way and that it’s normal for Parents to feel this way sometimes. Scary much?

But the thing is that as much as I want to run away right now, like many moms have felt before, I would never go through with it. Actually I won’t think about it longer than a split second because I have three main reasons for staying… my twins and my husband.

Funny how the very things that makes me want to run away, are the same things that makes me want to stay. Well enough about staying or going, let’s get to the point of this whole topic.

What I portray as a blogger may be quite different from what you see when you see me in everyday life. I think it’s the same with many other bloggers, we write about our struggles and fears and doing so helps us overcome the very things that scare us so much. When we learn something new we are eager to write about it and sometimes we forget to explain exactly how much we are learning from the experience, and that it’s also something quite new for us. The fact is that we are all Mothers in the making daily and we never arrive. Each day brings it’s own battle…


Photo credit: Unknkown

Sometimes though, we loose the battle. Daily. For a long, long time.

I thought for a long time that my lack of being able to focus on more than one thing at a time due to ADHD was to blame for my constant struggle with patience with my kids but the more I talked with different moms the more I realise that it’s something every mom struggle with at some stage. After three years of raising my twins I would have thought that I would be better at this… that it would come more naturally. But it doesn’t.

It’s simply not something you just do… parenting takes a lot of practice and hard work. I’ve come to realise that the more you accept your shortcomings and give yourself slack for not being perfect, the more relaxed and therefore the more effective you become as a parent.

I am a perfectionist in some areas of my life so I can be reaaaally hard on myself sometimes. When I see an area I lack in, I constantly focus on my failures and try to fix myself, making the problem even worse. In fact, 80% of the times I see something in myself that needs fixing, there wasn’t even anything that needed fixing in the first place. Sometimes it’s just really normal to feel the way you feel but you just want to fix yourself to a point where you can’t even remember what you wanted to fix in the first place.

Keep calm perfectionist

Dear Parent… PLEASE give yourself some slack! Sure we can never stop learning from our mistakes and sure we can’t just mess up and shrug it off but as parents we are more often than not on the other end of the scope. A friend made the light bulb go on in my head when she said that she had to work things out as she went with her kids and that they actually taught her what to do.

YES you are going to make mistakes. YES you are going to feel like a failure sometimes but the more you stress about it the worse it gets, so accept your shortcomings and please just relax.

You will be fine. Your kids will be fine.

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