The further I get into this world of kids, the more I realize how incredibly different each child is. No two kids are even close to being alike. I see it when we are around other families, and I see it in my own house. My own two children are vastly different from each other. What my son can let roll off his shoulders, my daughter will become passionately upset about (how dare Mommy leave the room?!). At one year, my daughter is already out-climbing my son and suddenly the chest of drawers in the nursery is looking scarily ladder-like. My son is goofy and giggly while my daughter sizes up each situation with consternation before doling out her smiles. (Gosh, I’m making my daughter sound positively Hitler-esque…). Anyway, you get the point–kids are different.
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| Source Thanks, Big Bird, for teaching us early on that someone has got to stand out…. |
This is cool–let each kid be an individual in their own right. In almost every parenting scenario, as long as my child isn’t the weirdest one in the group, we’re generally good to go. When the differences originate from the kids themselves, this is okay. When Mommy’s stupidity causes the the children to stand-out, it’s another story. Basically, this happens to us every day. I already pity my children as teenagers. While I don’t actively set out to destroy their social career, I seem to definitively prevent them from blending in with their cohorts…
The most recent example of this is when my truly amazing, slightly-scary-in-her-entergetic-creative-DIYer-glory, beloved friend hosted an awesome playdate for a bunch of friends. Games, events, awards…it was all astoundingly fantastic. Unfortunately, this Mom of the Year had to go and make her kids be the weird ones. We missed the memo to go with the patriotic theme and showed up in orange and pink. Ooops. Then somehow I also overlooked the note to dress your kids in swimwear, which was actually sort-of convenient b/c we are still potty-training and my son is still half-scared of the pool, but…he stuck out like a sore thumb. Whoopsie. And we were late, obviously. And lest you think that Mommy isn’t totally sucking right now, my daughter conveniently threw her bottle under a ginormous bush. While I was busy trying to dig said bottle out with my friend’s new-ish looking Swiffer and covering myself in mud, my daughter took a nasty spill on the hardwood floor. At this point, she started with the high-pitched wailing, which made me look like an even more awesome Mom. This was also obviously the point at which our exit cue had arrived.
See, this is why I am truly The Mom of the Year. I earn my title, every darn day actually. So next time “one of these things is not like the other”, don’t bother wondering–it’s my kid, and it’s my fault, trust me.
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