The Battle Cry of the Parenting Warriors

Listen, friends, this one is a rough go of it. The parenting scene is no gentle ground. There are days when I feel like I might actually be able to eke by, but there are many, many other days when I find myself begging with my son, for the love of God, to just look where he’s peeing. Bonus points if he washes his hands.

There are days when it’s a victory if my daughter leaves the house with clothes on, forget that most of what she’s wearing is mixed variations of clashing cheetah prints.

Days when I shower before the bus peels up the road at the end of the day, and the fact that my armpits don’t smell as backpacks are thrown my way is a cause for significant celebration.

Days I’m super-proud that I not only got those chicken nuggets out of the freezer, but that I heated them up AND served them with ketchup. Nothing but fancy-pants in this household.

Days when I burn a seasonal fall candle…and it’s actually still fall.

You get the point. There are the times you ace the parenting gig hands down, and then there are the times you victor by nudging the white flag of surrender up from underneath the rubble and giving it your most emphatic weak wave. And what does this, this nasty persistence to press on, despite your rather halfhearted pass at success say about you? Friends it says one thing: you are one of the parenting warriors.

Welcome fellow parenting warriors.

Welcome to our refined chaotic mess of anything but perfection. Here you will find the victories we endlessly master, day in and day out, like bosses who take no prisoners.

The moments when we pour a sweet hot cup of coffee…only to forget it for hours on end as we grapple with ceaseless inane requests for “scrambled eggs on the LEFT side of the toast” and “Wipe me, Mommy!”

When we’ve only gotten halfway through an episode of our Switched at Birth private Netflix binge when our kiddos come home and we self-sacrificially surrender the television to their Skylanders.

When we take leave of our brains, vie madly for a spot as a 2nd grade field trip chaperone, only to then meander around in the rain with a bunch of whiny, cold kids and pretend to enjoy it for the sake of our kids.

When we really, really want to read a text in full, but instead drop the phone mid-emoticon and listen vigorously enraptured to the latest Minecraft discovery.

When it would rock to have a full conversation with your spouse, but the kids really, really need to talk to you about their letter to Santa–NOW.

When it would rock even more to brush your hair, but silly things like packing cheese sticks in lunches take precedence. Lunch is such a darn nuisance.

When the kids dial in a sick day, but your schedule didn’t get the memo.

When you YouTube how to school a fishtail braid…and you do.

When the kids have off for Election Day, so you take them both on the weekly grocery shopping trip. Pieces of your soul will die. You know this. You go anyway.

You go anyway. You do it anyway. You try anyway. You smile anyway. Regardless of what is thrown your way, you slam it out anyway because you are one of the parenting warriors.

And the primary truth of parenting warriors? We never back down. We take all the crazy demanding mess this whole having offspring business throws our way and we kick it back like the rockstars we are.

This parenting scene will be tough, and hard, and rather darn-right ugly at times. There will be untied shoelaces, forgotten library books, morning scrambling-for-the-bus screaming matches, and many, many days when you kick yourself for sending your kids in jackets when you should have sent them in coats and vice versa. There will be the days they sob over recesses gone wrong and many days when you sob over stories of recesses gone wrong. Parent teacher conferences? Just pass Mommy the naptime mat. She needs to hibernate for the next eighteen years.

But do you know what? You’ll do it all over again tomorrow. Of even more note? You’ll do it all over again tomorrow willingly.

Yup, friends, being one of the parenting warriors is that serious of a business. So serious that you commit to it body, mind, and sold-out-for-the-PTO-fundraisers soul.

This steadfast commitment is our brutal truth. It’s beautiful. It’s astounding. And above all else, it’s our parenting warriors’ battle cry.

Hear us roar.

First image credit: depositphotos.com, image ID:116148436, copyright:fxquadro

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Meredith

Meredith blogs at The Mom of the Year, where she dedicatedly earns her title one epic parenting fail at a time, offering quick, relatable laughs for fellow parents and all their empathizers. She has been part of several best-selling anthologies, featured on prominent sites such as Huffington Post, In the Powder Room and BlogHer, and loves her role as the Executive VP/Operations Manager of The BlogU Conference. When she's not breaking up fights over Legos and juice boxes, she remains fully committed to sharing a less serious look at the world of parenting.

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