Excuse me! Can you run that by me again?

My mama once told me that one day I would have kids and through that experience I would learn how hard it was to walk in her shoes.  Of course I shrugged it off as if she was talking Chinese.  “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” I playfully asked.  It was a question I often used to derail a person’s train of thought when I thought a subject was getting too touchy for me but what I didn’t realize at that moment was that my youthfulness was interfering with my ability to reason.  I guess Socrates was right when he said the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. 

Now three kids later, the truth has slapped me out of my stupor.  Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine my kids and I verbal squabbling.  “Not my kids”, I would often say to reassure myself whenever I would see disobedient kids arguing with their parents.  My kids know better.  I truly believed that until that day I an argument with my son in a Footlocker store over a pair of Nike's tennis shoes.  I thought I was handling my responsibility of providing but a verbal dispute over a high priced pair of tennis shoes changed my view on that.  My son said and I quote, “If you don’t get me the Nikes then I don’t want anything”.  I stared at him for a second as I let the words settle in my head.  After composing myself, I turned to him and said, “First thing you need to do is fix your face before I give you a makeover in here.  Next, I want you to understand that my responsibilities are food, shelter, and clothing for you.  I do that, so don’t get upset with me because your high priced shoes don’t fit into my budget.  What I suggest for you to do is to take a second to collect your thoughts and show more appreciation for the things you have”

Moments like these happened frequently throughout the years. There were wars of attrition.  Of course I was the last man standing but the fact still remained that my kids had a warped sense of reality.  At times it was quite disturbing but humbling none the less. 

A lovingly dislike of my kids seemed oxymoronic to me but that was my take on the situation. It chipped at the cinder blocks of my emotional wall.  I love my kids unconditionally but I was at odds with their unappreciative ways.  I guess I was naïve because I should have seen this coming.  The bible says you reap what you sow.  Could this be the repercussion of that? Or was it just a case of the pot calling the kettle black? Whatever it was, it was not a good feeling.  I thought I heard my mama saying “I told you so” through the whistling wind.

Where did I go wrong? I wondered.  But the truth of the matter was— no matter how good a parent thinks they have raised their kids there is no way to control the outcome.  Sort of like a Hypothesis in a science project.  You make an educated guess that may or may not support your conclusion.           

When I was growing up I thought the Jekyll and Hyde personalities that my mother exhibited were a part of her psychosis.  She could go from happy to downright sinister in a matter of seconds, screaming at the top of her lungs with no regards for my future hearing deficiencies.  At the time, I thought she had a mental problem but now I find myself losing my mind trying to keep up with my kids’ underhanded schemes. 

What’s funny to me is my kids actually believe they are smarter than me.  I call it a declaration of psychological warfare; a battle of wits between two factions.  What my kids fail to understand is I have nearly four decades of experience on this earth; seventeen of those years were spent trying to outsmart my mother.  A tactic I failed at miserably.

Parenting is underrated.  It is by far one of the most fun loving yet difficult experiences one could encounter.  Just to experience the phenomenon of birth then to witness that creation morph into a full blown headache is incredible