Ashamed and Learning

Yakee had a major meltdown last night.

And Pappie and I admittedly didn't handle him well.

I think it's a combination of his age, the holidays, the busy weekend we've had (all the excitement of being with his cousins) and exhaustion (he didn't have a proper nap and fell asleep in the car five minutes before we got home). And because we didn't handle it properly from the get go, it just escalated and escalated into a crying, kicking, screaming fit for our firstborn till 1 AM. He started around 12 midnight.

And because infants are generally empathetic, Yamee also refused to stop crying.

I also had a similar scenario with Yakee two nights before. He was upset with not being able to go with grandma that translated into all other forms of misbehavior and lack of cooperation. The dealbreaker for me was his GIGIL with Yamee on the head (which he didn't do out of anger, but was just the last straw in a series of rule breaking).

Oh, how my heart broke for being too angry... enough to push him away from Yamee and me (mainly because I felt protective of Yamee and didn't want to lose more control than I've already lost). And how our hearts broke to listen to his wailing despite our attempts to calm him down. Clearly, he was upset. More than that, he was hurt. And I can't determine how much of the hurt was our doing, and if we could ever undo it.

But I get where hubs and I were coming from. We were exhausted too. And we're officially lacking sleep for a month now. So we could be calm or not but weren't in the proper frame of mind to really understand what was up with our firstborn.

We're still learning... to find that balance, to walk this tightrope.

I just really hope to God that though there may be times when our kids will feel unloved by us, they also would nevere believe it.

For what it's worth, I really still appreciate that I'm going through these rough parenting times with hubs. We may have been failing but I know it's not for a lack of love, nor a lack of trying.