Fellow Oakland parent here! I wish my daughter would eat the school lunches!! But as a kindergartener, she still seems to be not eating much lunch at all - I think lunch in particular is a big transition from the hand-holding she got in preschool. It's all so quick (15-20 min) and they're super short-staffed so there aren't enough adults to help the littles.
This paragraph is everything for me right now. Thank you.
Applying creativity or compassion to your parenting life is not an isolated event. Even if things go well for a time, you will need more of it at some point, when new systems lose their charm, old habits return, or outside factors impede. I constantly go in and out of cycles of some aspect of parenting being great, then bearable, then insufferable, then OK again. Sometimes it’s bad, but you don’t do anything about it until you have some extra time, or you go on new meds and feel a burst of energy, or it gets so bad that you have no other choice. And then, after a while, you have to run through the cycle all over again.
That’s OK. That’s how it works. You can always reinvent. You can always give yourself a little more room, or just say, “You know what, I’m gonna let this suck until I have the bandwidth to unsuck it.”
“I don’t do s*** like cry at drop offs!” Just laughing, laughing, laughing out loud. Great writing, Sarah! @Sarah Wheeler
Fellow Oakland parent here! I wish my daughter would eat the school lunches!! But as a kindergartener, she still seems to be not eating much lunch at all - I think lunch in particular is a big transition from the hand-holding she got in preschool. It's all so quick (15-20 min) and they're super short-staffed so there aren't enough adults to help the littles.
This paragraph is everything for me right now. Thank you.
Applying creativity or compassion to your parenting life is not an isolated event. Even if things go well for a time, you will need more of it at some point, when new systems lose their charm, old habits return, or outside factors impede. I constantly go in and out of cycles of some aspect of parenting being great, then bearable, then insufferable, then OK again. Sometimes it’s bad, but you don’t do anything about it until you have some extra time, or you go on new meds and feel a burst of energy, or it gets so bad that you have no other choice. And then, after a while, you have to run through the cycle all over again.
That’s OK. That’s how it works. You can always reinvent. You can always give yourself a little more room, or just say, “You know what, I’m gonna let this suck until I have the bandwidth to unsuck it.”