My sister wrote a blog post about a parenting mistake that she had recently made with her 17-month old daughter. My sister was trying to get her to eat, and she wouldn’t. She started throwing a fit, so they put her in time-out. Turns out, my little niece was only throwing the fit because she didn’t like the tuna fish, my sister was trying to get her to eat.
My sister is a first-time mom, and of course, we all make mistakes like this. I’ll even let you in on a little secret, little sister…we keep making mistakes even with our second and subsequent children too.
My parenting mistake was on Tuesday night. I was having a hard time falling asleep, and I had to be up before dawn- like at six for work on Wednesday. The last time I looked at the clock before falling asleep, it was 2am.
I woke up at 4:30am, and heard Cole crying a bit. Sometimes he does this in his sleep, and I usually wait a minute or so, and nine times out of ten, he just goes back to sleep. Since I had only been sleeping about two and a half hours, I was sooo tired. I tuned out his cry, and figured he would be back asleep in a minute or so.
As I felt myself falling back to sleep, I could still hear him fussing around. The next time I woke up, it was a full half-an-hour later, and now Cole was crying out, “Mommy, Mommy!” He was really loud, and upset. He had not gone back to sleep, and I really resented having to get up to see what the problem was.
When I got to his room, he was standing up in his crib, just sobbing, and saying, “Mommy, Mommy,” It broke my heart. I thought he had, had a bad dream. I picked him up, and he was SOAKED. He was wet from the top of his shirt, to the bottom of his pants.
Clearly he had, had a bed wetting accident. To top that off, it was a bit cool in the room, and his blanket was wet too. I felt awful. My little boy was soaked from top to bottom in pee, and I couldn’t be bothered to get up to check on him.
I cleaned him up, changed his sheets, and he was eager to get back to sleep. Before I put him back in his bed, he put his arms around my neck, kissed me and said, “Love me Mommy.” He says ‘love me’ instead of ‘love you,’ but that just made me feel worse. He wasn’t trying to interrupt my sleep- he just wanted out of his wet pajamas.
Parenting is like driving to someplace without a map. Sometimes you nail it right on, and sometimes you hit a bump or two, or three, or more, along the way. Sometimes you just end up, flat-out lost. I think about episodes like this, and wonder if this will seem like child’s play, when my boys are teenagers, and we are dealing with very complex issues.
Eventually, even if you are lost for a while, you figure it out, and get going again- ready for the next trip down the parenting road.