Struggling...

It's hard to feel that parenting is a good enough purpose when I feel like such a failure at it. I'm not the "fun" parent. I'm definitely not the "calm" parent. To be honest, that I survived my childhood is nothing short of a miracle. A therapist who had worked with my mom and dad for over a decade even asked me how I got through it all. I lived in a very dysfunctional household where I was, at best, merely emotionally neglected and at worse, verbally and physically abused. I did not even feel safe enough to go to my own mother if I had been hurt and would try to hide even when I had gotten BURNED. So how can I even begin to teach my children anything about love and treating others with kindness when I wasn't raised that way myself?

Since my husband has his idea as to how our children should be parented, I feel like there is little I can even do. I'm out of touch with my five year old, having been away from her as long as I was and I'm still trying to figure this new baby out, a baby that until very recently, had colic and, since that ended, has struggled to keep weight on and gain weight.

So actually, to be honest, right now, parenting seems to only point out to me my many failures. And so, more and more, I seek to find SOMETHING I'm good at again. It's not so much I'm looking for a career or anything that would take me away from them but something I can accomplish and succeed at. I'm 30 years old and I can't even DRIVE! So there's this feeling not so much that I'm missing out on life but that something is missing in my life. And maybe the solution is nothing more than to seek out a new craft or find a church. I don't know but I have to find SOMETHING because this can't be it. I don't know very many mothers who do ONLY the parenting thing. There is SOMETHING else they are doing whether they are involved with their church or have a hobby or sell something online or write articles, SOMETHING. They are not just mothers.