Last night was one of our bad ones. In a fury I wrote a very honest and angry post and then deleted it a couple of hours later. I’m a bit annoyed I deleted it because I personally feel it would be much easier to parent if everyone were honest about the times parenting is crap. When I post these sorts of things, I invariably get lots of supportive comments and emails from people telling me I’m not alone…so why don’t I read about other parents having a tough time? Maybe we should have a tagging thing about the hard things about parenting…or would it end up being too depressing? Anyway, for anyone who didn’t read the post last night, it was about the inevitability of our children deciding that last night was the night they would stay up very late being as last night was the first night in ages that DH and I had a secret plan to stay up watching Chicago. I got very cross and angry and had to run away into the kitchen to type out my frustrations. People have said ‘lack of bedtimes and time for me to be with my partner is one of the reasons we don’t do TCS’ but TCS is firmly against anyone self-sacrificing, including parents. So…we’re not getting right. We are struggling and struggling to find a common preference…a solution that suits everyone. We let the children stay up and play and they get to a point where they want to go to bed. That’s fine - we enjoy spending time together as a family; time Dh wouldn’t get otherwise as he works relatively long hours. However, we are then too tired to stay up together any later usually as Dh has to get up very early for work and I wake several times in the night to deal with babies (and I’m suffering from insomnia anyway at the moment). Today Dh has the day off, so we thought we could be adventurous and stay up beyond 10pm last night to watch a dvd and spend some time just the two of us. Stupid plan because the children used their special telepathic powers to know we had a plan and, after starting off normally going to sleep, suddenly decided to get up. Which was when I lost my temper. In the end Dh got them to sleep by 10pm and we decided to stay up anyway, getting to bed by 12.30am - way later that usual.
Having written all that, last night I managed to get to sleep no trouble, and had no long awake periods in the night and we all woke naturally around 9am-ish so maybe staying up late the night before Dh’s days off is a solution. Ideally, I’d like to be able to watch more grown-up tv, but that’s just not going to happen at the moment and I’m quite enjoying our more leisurely evenings when we don’t have a bedtime battle. Let’s see how things go.
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11:08 am
Hi - I’ve written lots of “this didn’t go as well as I’d hoped” and “I’m so frustrated I could scream” posts over the years (not all on Homeschool Journal, but other blogs). Gosh, I really used to go off and rant! I went back and read some of my old stuff from way back and realized they were ugly posts from the mean person who used to be mom around here. But she got annoying, so I killed her.
I haven’t been writing much lately but for a while I was trying to write about the issues I was coming up against because it helped me think about solutions. There is *definitely* no perfect parents here or out there or anywhere that I know of. Most of us are trying our best, but we’re all human. I have lots of room for improvement!
We’re very relaxed unschoolers and have been slowly moving towards radical unschooling (non-coersive, consensual parenting), which sounds a lot like TCS. I still struggle with certain things, like bed times, and mostly when *I* really need or want time alone with dh or time to myself and want to retire my mothering skills for the night, so to speak. But it’s also nice, like you said, not to have the bedtime battles.
2:23 pm
sorry if my comment wasn’t particularly helpful - guess I don’t understand tcs then very well.
2:50 pm
Jax - your comment wasn’t unhelpful at all. It was nothing to do with your comment why I deleted the post so please worry about it no longer! And I’ll forgive you anything considering what you’re dealing with at the moment anyway!
Cx
4:02 pm
We un-bed too.
I have a set of rules. (heh - not for children - for me):
sleep as soon as practicable after children do
if children are up late and I want to switch off and watch a movie, do so using a different computer and a set of headphones
discuss movies with other adults on a later occasion rather than expecting to watch with them
don’t try to go to sleep when children are still running around, because having been woken from a light doze stops me getting to sleep for AGES after everyone else has dropped off.
I think those aaargh posts can be useful because they enable other parents to offer some of their own solutions or some hypothetical solutions to those problems. I wish we lived in a society where there were all sorts of creative problem solving families whose knowledge we could draw on.
But I find it almost impossible to do aaargh posts without compromising the privacy of my family beyond my comfort zone. Every single “what if?” is someone else’s “been there done that”.
Send anonymous and anonymised posts to the TCS list?
6:00 pm
It will get easier :0) When , Z,M & j were little it was hard, Z is a ‘night owl’ M gets up early and J then a baby was waking up several times a night. I did’nt do set bedtimes because they did’nt work, everyone stayed up until they were tired enought to goto sleep, O.H worked (still does) long hours so this suited us but the down side was that time for us to watch t.v did’nt happen very often. WE wuld watch films late when we did’nt have to get early the next day. Very long comment here, but they do get older and it gets easier to get some time to yourself. I’m glad that we had that time with them :0)
6:56 pm
We had bad times about sleep when the kids were little. I will come clean and confess the dark truth here… We did a modified sleep programme on L when he was about thirteen months. It wasn’t a Super Nanny screaming fest, but it was a definite pattern of behaviour with the aim of his falling asleep in his cot in a quiet room. In two nights he went from hideously interrupted sleep (we tried co-sleeping and he could never settle - constant waking, too hot, windy) to basically whole nights of sleep. It sounds like some awful baby book but it is true. He breastfed happily for another year - just not at night.
We did it because we were at the end of our tether with a super active toddler all day (who also woke at night) and a baby who was hardly sleeping at night at all. I’ve never claimed to be a TCS parent, though. I can’t claim any label - we just did what felt like it would save our sanity - and it did.
We stuck with two different bedtimes for a few years until L noticed! Then we moved to negotiated space and time agreements.
These days we have a family agreement that after ten the kids will be in their rooms. This is mainly so that we can watch stuff on tv that might scare them! It is all much, much easier now they are older.
8:48 pm
As someone who is having big sleep time and nursing problems herself right now I really do feel for you. I know I would love to have more time to spend alone with dh or even just doing something for myself.
I hesitated earlier tonight about blogging about how I feel right now. But you are right - we should be honest. It’s not all a bed of roses. Parenting can be very very challenging.
I hope things work out for all of you soon.
4:41 pm
I think we probably all have our aaaargh moments - the differences are whether you internalise or externalise your feelings maybe? Pros and cons either way, and no easy (or *right*!) answers.
To ’solve’ your issue though, personally, I’d give up, stop trying to fix it, go with the flow and see what happens because like you say, a child’s inbuilt parent plans radar never switches off. I try not to make plans - ‘try’ being the operative word! - then when I do get some me-time, it’s an unexpected surprise.
7:07 pm
thinking of the argh moments - i’m finding The Power of Now really helpful… Eckhart Tolle (in amongst some superstitious stuff which I don’t buy) suggests that when one feels anger/frustration/whatever, one should just observe it. Not judge, not squash it down.
The inner core of one is the bit doing the observing, not the bit doing the feeling. And the power of the feelings of anger or whatever is therefore beaten because it’s not ME, yk?
7:54 pm
Hi - I have 3 boys, similar ages to your girls and can totally empathise.
I think when we try and be responsive to our children rather than ruling by fear/manipulation it can be a real struggle, especially if others mock what we are doing.
I sometimes feel so torn, I know in my heart that listening to my children is right but when they all need me at the same time I feel so overwhelmed and sometimes resentful and angry as support is hard to find. (My hubby would rather be ‘victorian dad’)
Hopefully in 18years time or so we will look back and know that it was worth it.