It's not always wine and roses

I know I tend to blog the happier moments of parenting because to me they're the bits worth recording. The stand out moments. But there's crap times too. Frustration is an ever present part of being a parent. Frustration at not being listened to or being actively ignored. Frustration at being asked to do things you really don't want to do. Frustration with their rejecting something they normally love. Frustration, yes, frustration with incompetence ... forgetting your child is a child and sometimes they might not be able to do something they'd apparently already mastered.

We were out at Bunnings. As you know Bunnings as an almost ever-present barbecue going. It's almost like an eternal flame of cooking meat tubes. When theBoy goes to Bunnings he inevitably gets a sausage on a piece of bread with sauce, or even two of them. And he loves sauce. He will have it with anything and everything. More often than not he will go through two small dishes of sauce with an evening meal (1).

I was planning on sitting in the cafe while theBoy and theWife went cruising along the aisles, he eating his two sausage sandwiches with her. But he rejected that idea and sat with me instead. 

It was then he decided he didn't want sauce. 

So he balanced two of the sausages on one piece of bread and then ripped the sauce-free bits away from the now sans sausage piece of bread, smearing tomato sauce across the tabletop, his fingers, his shirt and his face. Then he wanted a sausage ... but no sauce. Both sausages were covered in sauce. The only solution was for me to lick the sauce off. Wrinkling my nose I did so, the taste somewhat unpleasant, then gave him his now sauce free sausage.

He dropped it about two seconds later, the sausage rolling across the floor and under a planter box. I had to painfully bend to grab it and put it with the now sauce sodden pile of napkins. 

I couldn't help being annoyed. 'Fucking hell, theBoy!' I said with angry weariness. 'You make it so hard for me sometimes.'

As is the way with such public utterances there were a couple of middle-aged ladies in earshot having a coffee (2). I'm pretty sure they shot me a 'tut, tut' look. Which is fair enough. I dislike it when parents rag on their kids in public, too. I didn't yell or carry on but I was pissed off. Especially at having to lick clean the second sausage. However, lessons learned and all, and given the first sausage was clearly unwieldy to hold I snapped the secondary back up sausage in half first which was a lot easier for him to handle. 

The anger went away quickly and by the time he was done I was pretty contrite. Instead of going to the playground he decided to push his toddler trolley along, it now actually small for his size, and go on a crazy adventure amongst the towering warren of shelves that fills the vast space. And I embraced it all, following him, giggling as he banged into things and people (I apologised on his behalf as he careened off) and even suggested places to go like the 1:1 scale model kitchen or the weird alcoves under the shelves that have hanging hooks festooned with various things. By the time theWife had stacked the goods in the car all was good, save of course for his not wanting to hold my hand in the car park as we returned to the car. 

It is hard sometimes. And I am easily annoyed because I feel like crap a lot of the time, though I am better at swallowing annoyances now than I used to be. 

Anyway I told him I was sorry a couple more times later that day but I still felt bad. I hate yelling at him. I hated being yelled at as a kid and I hate yelling now. I hate people yelling at me or yelling near me. But even while I didn't yell what I said I still said it from a place of severe annoyance and I felt bad for it.

As ever I will stride to have the anger die with me.

(1) We should cut out losses and simply give it to him on a bigger dish.
(2) It's a week later. Occasionally I re-read my posts. Call it a time machine since this is in effect what this is. Anyway I re-read it and saw the ladies were 'having a coffee in earshot'. In retrospect that was confusing. It implied there were two Grandpa-in-my-pocket-sized mid-age'sters indulging in shots of expression whilst just outside the fleshy part of my outer ear. So I have nipped in to tweak it. Hello now me! Hi. How was the cycle just then? Good, actually. I did my six kilometres and it didn't hurt too much.I watched The Colbert Report which was tremendously awesome, as ever. The guest on talked about how the war on drugs is effectively discriminating against African Americans with a far higher incarceration rate that for whites with drug useage roughly proportional across all ethnic groups. If laws returned to the level they were before Reagan's massively moronic "War on Drugs" then the prison population would be one fifth the size. God bless America.