5,4,3,2,1...Lost it!

Dear Reader,

Today I lost it. The kid just pushed me too far...or is it that I am so tired? I think it is the later and Dominic chose a bad day to traipse around the block without permission. Do you ever question your perspective? Well, I have to or else I can get so singularly focused on something that I forget to consider other variables. This week was one of those examples. Recently I began homeschooling my son. I love it! But when I started this adventure I didn't have a clue how it would turn out and how I would accomplish all that was set before me...Meyers and Briggs would say characteristics true of an idealist. Go ahead and laugh at my naivety. We had prepared a part time schedule for Dom with public school and homeschool. He is to go to his elementary school each day from 8-10:30am. There he will get a reading group, specials, which are music or PE, and science. I was totally stoked about his schedule and very willingly agreed to make this work. Well, then the week came for us to start and I realized, what was I thinking? I didn't have anyone to pick Dom up from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays while I was in my class. So after trying to find a solution to this problem for a couple of weeks, I decided that Dom would accompany me to college on those days and that would have to do, because I am a single mom who in this particular instance, was out of options. So he has been keeping this schedule for the past two weeks.

Saturday morning came and I was determined to sleep in. Friday night I took my Tylenol PM to try to elongate a few extra hours of self induced slumber and drifted off. Well, sleep in I did, until Dominic, the dog and the cat all made their way into my room around 10:30 chanting, "Give me food! Give me food!" Or was that my dream? I don't know. It was a little foggy. Dom crawled into bed and sweetly asked if we were going to be able to go somewhere or do something. I had been waiting all week for Saturday, the day that I did not have to do anything and he wanted to go somewhere! Was he nuts! I grunted a response which must have been satisfactory since he slipped out of the covers to go in search of cereal. As I lay there in bed deciding whether or not I was going to join his cereal efforts or stay right where I was as long as I could, it suddenly dawned on me. My son, apart from two dinner invitations we had accepted, had not been out of the house very much over the last week. Although I had been going from class to class, Dom had not been outside to play or had much contact with kidos his own age this week. I had been so focused on surviving the week that I had made my child into a hermit!

I promptly got out of bed and enthusiastically told him to get dressed because we were going to the skate park...all was well, but I had a pent up pressure inside. It was the pressure a parent gets when they have not had adequate sleep and then goes full steam through the day and night just to get up from the few hours of snooze that they did get to do it all over again. It really can make a person nuts! Well I made it through Saturday with no major crazy moments, but Sunday I could feel it coming. We got up in the morning with plenty of time to get ready for church and were actually on time which is often times not the case. We had a fairly positive morning, went out to lunch with a dear friend of mine and then came home. Dom decided he wanted to play outside and I called the dog out for a brushing...then suddenly no child in sight. I started calling his name only to get silence in return. I looked and looked, but could not see him. After about 10 minutes of me checking around the corner and back upstairs and then around the other corner I see him across the street and down a block at the neighbors house. I suddenly envisioned my hand jetting from my arm and grabbing him by the scruff only to bring him back to me in mid air. I was ready to kill him!

Went and got him and told him to go to his room so we could talk. I thoroughly and calmly, or not so calmly, told him of the dire safety issues surrounding his disobedience and that he was to ask me before he just takes off somewhere...okay, pause...we have all been there with trying to explain an abstract concept to a child who draws Superman when asked to do a self portrait. He cannot even fathom in his mind how a bad guy could get past his wicked Judo skills and have time to swipe him into a car when he would easily throw the bad guy to the ground and punch him in the nuts until he died. Do you see what I am working with here! Anyway, I made parental mistake 500,421...I gave him another chance. But this time he blew it way bigger.

I allowed him to go back down the street under my supervision and visit with his friend that was moving away...I am not a monster. I have a heart. I am a mom. I gave him 20 minutes to visit. Then I promptly went home and called my friends and told them they needed to pick up my child and feed him for me because I was on the verge of losing it and just could not take it anymore! My friend and her husband offered immediately to take him for the evening and I breathed a sigh of relief. They must have been able to hear the seriousness in my voice, or maybe they heard nothing but the tearful sobs and, "Come get Dominic" and they deduced the urgency of my situation hahahaha...nonetheless Randy came to pick him up and when I went to find him down the street I was told that he had gone with his friend to the 7/11 around the corner. He had told the adult that it was fine with me...well when a 10 year old boy tells you something like that you are definitely suppose to believe him!!!! NOT!!!!!! Oh now I was torked. I marched my little butt down the street to the 7/11, but they were not there. I missed them. I walked my butt back and by this time was completely red with a swollen head and steam rolling out of my ears...his life was over...I found him, much to his unpleasantry, and told him in a "mama ain't playing" tone of voice to get his little butt home because he was in trouble.

Well we dealt with the consequences of the disobedience and Randy took him to give me a break. When I closed the door, I just burst into tears. I was so tired in that moment. I truly had nothing left, but tears. Before I became a mom and people thought I had just concocted a cockamamie idea to adopt people had told me how hard it was to be a mom. Now I understand that being a mom is complicated. You love them so much, yet they drive you so nuts. You sacrifice so much just to give them a leg up now and then. You take all the dirty looks in the world for the different decisions that are made in their best interest and all the while it is somehow satisfying and fulfilling to be watching a little person develope into a bigger person. Motherhood is a mental disorder and without it our species would have died out a long time ago. It really is not easy to be this mentally dysfunctional, but the season is short and the fruit will be plentiful...if I can just keep from throwing him out the window :)

Thank God for friends who see the signs of serious breakdown and thank God for a son who enjoys his breaks from his mother :). I guess we will see what tomorrow brings, huh?

Laura Araujo