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I Love You, but I Choose Me
On Parenting and Prioritizing Yourself
The glitter reflected the light like a setting sun shining through a thousand icicles. Rising over the letters beautifully scripted with school glue, the different colors bled together and formed the most magnificent piece of art, right on my kitchen counter. It was stunning, truly. It was also lunchtime. I was hungry, I was tired, and the four-year-old at my elbow had just knocked over a second jar of glitter. There was glitter on the counter, glitter on her hands, glitter on the floor, on my pants, even a dusting on the wall.
My husband and one-year-old son were at the dinner table behind us, enjoying their lunch while my daughter’s plate went cold next to them. I don’t know what lapse in communication led my daughter and me to be crafting when we should have been lunching but it’s where we were, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. Every little thing my daughter was doing added to my discontent. The mess, the questions, the cold pasta on the table.
I began to feel irritable and knew that just one more spilled jar of glitter would toss me over the edge. So I did something that has taken me four years of parenting to begin to do: I expressed the mounting frustration I felt bubbling up inside. I told my family I might need to remove myself from the situation before I said or did…
