#ParentFail101

"Kathryn, you don't know how to be married."

I've thought about those words a lot. They came from my former mother-in-law, deceased now, and I miss her. But those words stuck to me like dog shit in a boot tread.

Fair enough, I guess. Hard to learn how to be married growing up with a widowed mother.

But to be fair to me, I think it was more a case of not liking being married. More specifically, not liking being married to her son, not once we had kids, anyway. And while kids are never to blame for their parents' divorce, they're very often why.

But imagine if instead of trying to make a marriage between two incompatible people work (and be honest, husbands, that work is tasked to your wife) we spoke up as soon as we realized we'd married each other's "unfinished business".

Marrying Your Unfinished Business

Of course, a lot of kids wouldn't be born if we did, having kids often being the prime motivating factor for a woman to rope one off from the herd, as it were, that man tending to be the one we happen to be with when the mood strikes.

No worries - we can change him later!

Alas, also thanks to Lewis Howe's podcast, which I only watch in Facebook clips that pop up in my feed, I must cop to sucking at parenting, too.

Shitty wife, incompetent mother, may as well admit it, I was never in any danger of being Employee of the Month, either.

All along I thought trying to make my children happy was where it's at, tricky when you're responsible for separating the family, the saddest development in their young lives, kids just wanting their parents to stay together - whether we want to or not.

So to be fair to parents, it's not like kids give a rat's ass about our happiness.

But it turns out, no, resilience is where it's at, and resilience can only be learned through adversity.

Oh. Okay. Well I guess mine must have learned some then through divorce, even if I did try to jolly them along into believing nothing had changed, when, of course, everything had.

Ugh. Why must everything be so hard?

Anyway, back to resilience, which, duh, can't be learned by mom jumping in whenever her kids are feeling sad/mad/bad, to distract/avoid/deny, and so on and so forth and more of the same "don't worry, be happy" disguising "I'm not comfortable with my own feelings, never mind yours!" and, oh my goodness - breakthrough!

Stop Trying to Make Your Kids Happy

Really, who knew? Well, professional parents, I guess. Social workers and teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of us amateurs are trying to raise kids at the same time we're trying to make marriage with an increasingly incompatible spouse work, while the village that used to be there to support us when we all lived in little hunter/gatherer tribes, is either behind its own closed doors or at work.

Anyway, it's all a crock, the notion we've come a long way, baby, which we only realize once we've been thrown clear in one way or another - usually by aging out.

It's the bloody system. We're still stuck trying to live our best lives within a Patriarchal system that actively works against our own and our children's happiness.

But instead of Smashing the State, parents are now tasked with ensuring our kids develop resilience.

Wtf, man?