This mothering gig.....

Sometimes it sucks.

I've really been struggling with it lately.  Trying not to make the same mistakes my parents made with me, but making my own along the way. I grew up in a house where one person drank and one person hit so I was determined not to make those mistakes with my children. For the most part we have managed or more likely, just muddled through.

But this holidays I'm not really coping well.  I have yelled a lot more than is normal for me and that makes me feel bad.  Last night I ran away to a friends place just to get away from Girl Child, who insisted on following me around while I was on the phone.  It was just for 90 minutes or so but it was enough to help clear my head.

I probably talk more about Boy Child on here than I do about Girl.  But despite having Aspergers he is the easiest of them both (personality wise anyway).  They are both stubborn, but Girl Child has a lot of attitude to go with it.  She was the child who could throw up on the way to daycare at the same place every single day for weeks, she was the one who told me I'd ruined her life at age 4 when I gave her the wrong bag for her preschool library books.

But over the last few weeks her attitude is doing my head in. Add to that, we have found out she needs fillings (including one in an adult tooth) and on Friday we discovered that she has a lazy eye.  You would have thought that as she has assessed twice last year at the same place and has glasses from there, although by a different optometrist, perhaps it would have been mentioned earlier. At almost eight and a half, she is too old for patching. Boy Child's lazy eye was obvious when he was quite young and he wore an eye patch for maybe nine months when he was about two and a half. Hers isn't obvious to me (Boy's was noticeable early) but apparently she barely uses one eye at all.  She is now also short sighted like me.

For me, though, apart from the dodgy genes she has inherited are the issues she is having with others.
Rarely a shrinking violet, she unfortunately spent most of last year playing with a troubled child which then meant no one else in class would play with her.  Once the other child left near the end of term 3, she had no one.  While she did make one good friend (L) she was held on to tightly and clashed with another child in her class (Z) over L.  Now Z and Girl are going to be in the same class for the third year in a row, unfortunately they clash big time. L is going to be in a different class to them which is probably good for L and may help Girl even though she is devastated.

Form L's parents, I have heard on a few occasions about things Girl Child has done that have worried L. In fact they are all in a kids computer site like Club Penguin and I have been spoken to twice by L's parents about things that Girl Child has said there.  The first time she admitted what had been done and apologised to L.  

On Friday night I was contacted by L's parents with a copy of a message that Girl Child apparently left on the website.  The message itself was concerning as it talking about attacking Z when school starts. Girl Child  swears that she wasn't online the day the message was sent and that she didn't send that message. In fact when I read the message to her and got her to write it down the spelling of certain words was different. Add that to the fact that she had given her password out to a number of people and that she vehemently denied writing it and cried for almost 30 minutes, we don't know what happened. We can't prove or disprove it. So I have changed her password and she can only go on to that website while an adult is sitting with her. Normally someone would be in the same room as her but now we will be watching a lot more closely.

On another note, she will be in Year 3 this year and school hasn't started.  Girl Child is already worried about NAPLAN (Australia wide academic tests for children in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9). I wonder if that plus knowing L is in a different class but she will be with Z,  is adding to her attitude?

So there you'll have it.  My beautiful daughter and her very minor medical issues plus her very strong personality had this week culminated to dent what little faith I had in myself as a good (or even just a good enough) parent this week.  Tomorrow is a new day, right?