"You're ruining my life! You're ruining everything!" wailed my daughter. What a lovely end to the week. I believe my crime was not doing a homework assignment for her. Ahh, such felonies we should all know from...
Seriously though, let's talk about the darker side of parenting. I was thinking, just a few minutes ago, that it's really bad to beat a child, and it's not really so great to hit a child. But where does thinking about beating a child fit in the pantheon of parental crimes and misdemeanors? Perhaps you're horrified that I'd even bring this up. Well, there's the reality of parenting, colliding with all those polished images of control and reason.
I'm not sure I can even relate to a parent who's never thought of strangling her child, even just once. It just doesn't seem normal to me that you can, in the course of raising a child, never reach a point of anger and frustration that would lead you down that dark mental path. The trick of course is not to cross over to the dark side, to restrain yourself, even though with every fiber of your being, you feel a monster rising up inside you.
Is it okay to admit sometimes that the child in front of you is a being you want to strangle, that running away from home should perhaps be the purview of parents, rather than children? This is not one of those times when I want a self-help guru to tell me to get a grip; this is one of those times when I wish the walls of my house weren't made of plaster, 'cause then I'd have a shot at being able to put my fist through one of them. No luck, so the balled-up-fist-brain that's me at the moment will have to settle for writing, for keeping my communications with my child taut, brief, and as emotionless as possible. And then of course there's alcohol...
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