Mommies Behaving Badly

“You don’t have to yell at me,” she whimpered. “When you yell it hurts my feelings.”

“Obviously, I do have to YELL since when I told you to stop five times NICELY you ignored me. So now I’m MAD and now I’m YELLING!”

When I finished taking a bow for this “mommie dearest” caliber moment, my daughter melted down in tears, while I stood there fuming, embarrassed yet defiant in the face of the sideways glances we were drawing from other obviously happier families nearby.

My husband put his hand gently on my shoulder in the manner of someone coaxing a suicidal jumper off the side of a bridge. Tentatively, (lest he risk being yelled at himself) my husband suggested that perhaps I was overreacting. Maybe, I was being a little hard on our daughter, who is, after all, only seven. He of course was right. In an instant I saw this small person who adores me every day of her life cowering in the face of my irrational rage and felt the shame rise up and choke the anger right out of me.

What she did and why I was yelling was beside the point. The fact that I had lost all manner of self control was a bigger and more pressing concern. After feeling like a jerk for several minutes I kneeled down in front of my daughter and hugged her to my chest. “I’m so sorry sweetheart,” I said. “Please forgive me. Mommy was angry but I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I was wrong.”

My daughter, still wounded, wouldn’t look me in the eye or hug me back just yet. Instead, she said something so deeply convicting I physically stepped back as if slapped. “You always say that mommie,” she whispered. “But then you do it again.”

Before I go on, let me set the context here. It was a sparkling day in San Diego, Labor Day Weekend, the last summer hurrah before the back-to-school rush. We had just finished an amazing lunch at a bay-side café and were getting into a boat my husband rented for us. Life was good, right? It was one of those days that you plan out in your head before they happen, visualizing your perfect, happy family making perfect happy memories together that your children will one day recount as they describe how fortunate they were to have parents like you. Unfortunately, images like this are always quickly annihilated by the reality of my family dynamic. Which, to be brutally honest, is characterized by the fact that being on vacation with my kids for any extended period of time often irritates the hell out of me.

There are certain moms whom I imagine love spending down time with their kids, splashing in the hotel pool, renting jalopy-sized bicycle contraptions, laughing at endless knock knock jokes and teasing away bad moods with a tickle. Perhaps they were born with more patience. Surely they are younger and less hormonal than me. Possibly, they are medicated. No matter. Here’s how I roll on family vacations:

“Stop running in the hotel hall! Please don’t wrestle on the bed. Keep your voices down there are people next door. Can you PLEASE stop teasing your sister. Don’t run around the pool! Stop arguing. I SAID stop ARGUING. Did you hear me? I SAID did you HEAR me? "

And so it goes. Vacation is over. I’m back at work. The kids are back in school. And I miss the little dears terribly (really). Upon reflection, I find it ironic that the thing that bugs me most about them is their repetitious pattern of bad behavior – promising to stop doing something and then, when I turn my back, doing it again. And again.

Can't imagine where they get that from.