there is always so much. too much.

i have lots to write about. lots to think about. lots to do. always.

today has not been a great day and all the lofty goals i have of writing books, especially on the topic of teaching our kids how to intereact peacefully, just blew up in my face a short while ago.

my oldest son and i have always had an interesting relationship. he's been described as defiant. oppositional. after a year with a very hippi-dippy (and awesome) counselor, i was told he definitely had some "attachment issues" but a real attachment disorder diagnosis was never made. why? because my kid is pretty sweet, considerate, sensitive, and talkative to everyone but me. always has been. i've been known to joke that he's hated me since he was old enough to say so but it wasn't funny and it was true.

today i've decided that it probably existed much longer than that. he's hated me since at least the womb, if not lifetimes before.

i don't talk about this much at all on this blog. my name is awesome mama, afterall, and how awesome is it that one of my kids hates me?

anyway, even though i get sick of hearing my own story (and sometimes oh so sick of living it) here's the back story. i was 16. i didn't want kids (yet). i didn't really like kids (that much). i got pregnant. loser tried to kill himself. and cheated on me. i broke up with loser. i had a baby. i wanted to go to college. i did. i moved out. i worked. i got public assistance. when i was 18 i liked to go out once or twice a week, when i was 21 i had a big corporate miss corporate job. i hated it. i left, got depressed, temporarily sent my 5 year old to stay with mom. she wanted him for good. she'd always wanted him and he'd always wanted to be with her but up until then i felt as though i was better equipped to raise my own kid. oh and he'd also just started a fire in our living room.

i stayed in bed for a few months. brought son home. found another job. hated it. went back to school. let my mom move into our home. like julia roberts in pretty woman would say, "big mistake. HUGE!" son and i move out and eight years after he was born, we started getting child support.

a year later i fall head over heels with the future awesome papa. nine months later i'm pregnant. nine months later i have middlest. the following year was so bad, my oldest went with my mom again. still didn't think that was the best idea but i was honestly terrified of him. mom and i were always at odds about whether it was permanent, i was still torn, still wanting to do right by my son but understanding that life was manageable when he lived with her and only visited us on the weekends. accepting that he was better, too. he had made leaps and bounds of improvement in school that i was elated for him and knew he was where he belonged. my mom, too.  then {omg so much shit happens here, i can't even get into it right now without starting to hyperventilate}. he eventually and abruptly moves back in with us. he comes out and i see lots of improvement and take a little bit of credit for helping my kid love himself just a tiny, tiny bit.

anyway, this is a lifelong tale of me trying to pry apart dysfunction, fucked-up boundaries, and other various "everyone has their problems" sort of boo-hoo-ness related to the empty toolbox i was handed as a child and all the broken tools the adults around me were working with.

this has the very real possibility of turning into a long-story and it eventually will even if i don't write the most awesomest book on peaceful parenting ever, but today, after a blatant and final lack of respect my son is going back to live my mom. yes, a third time. yes, i still have doubts but after giving as much as i had to give, at any given moment, for the last sixteen years  and after coming to accept that for all her parenting mistakes, my mom did try to break some of the cycles of her own childhood and her mother's before hers and so on, at this point i have to accept that it's the last time.

i will go into more detail about this, i will. i know it sounds like i'm giving up and some people may not understand. i truly want nothing more than to treat other people the way i want to be treated and promote peace, yet i find it nearly impossible to serve in such a manner, 100% of the time. especially when my oldest has never been willing to compromise, meet me in the middle, see eye to eye and other cliches - as a child he wasn't just tempermental and at odds with anything and everything i had to say because i was a horrible parent or because he behaved that way, in general. the only way i could describe it then was to say he hated me. it was the only way i could describe it without thinking about evil spirits and kids that kill their parents in their sleep. despite all the times i tried to remain calm, speak logically, or "promote peace" between us, there were old patterns already in motion and i was far from being an awesome mama all of the time. of course i put myself first. i yelled. i even smacked him a few good times. on the other hand, i was pretty aware of attachment parenting without having a label attached. i breastfed, at sixteen years old but lacked the confidence or support to nurse more than four and a half months. i co-slept. i carried my son until he was three and bitches at the mall thought he was retarded because SSCs had not been invented and babywearing american (or african) style wasn't cool yet.

i was the young teen mom of a young teen mom of a young teen mom....do you see a pattern? that's just but one. the men that knocked them all up were also liars and cheaters and, for all i know, also suicidal. i did what i could with what i had, all the while begging and pleading with this kid to accept my mistakes and with my mom to please give me credit for the cycles i was trying to break. anyway, anyone that knows me also knows that i have taken full responsibility for my son's behavior. when i say full i mean i usually fail to even recognize that half of my son's DNA was imprinted by his father's angry, non-communicative DNA or that the very women who set such horrible examples for me to follow were the ones with the bigger influence on my son. i think i've finally accepted the impossibility of it all being my complete and total fault.

it is with this acceptance that i understand i have even more cycles to break. bigger, badder, and more painful ones. i used to talk so much shit about the same family members whose goddamned ugly shoes i had to walk in. lesson fucking learned. karma IS a bitch.

i understand now i didn't want to be like some women in our family that gave their kids up to other women in the family. i wanted to be different, better but instead i was like the teen moms that kept their kids and resented them for making life a little less enjoyable. being a single, young chick with a kid is super unattractive and you can't do shit without everyone judging you on your merits as a mother. now i know it doesn't matter how old you are, the moment you have a child everyone begins judging you on your merits as a mother. i can speak about this now, almost like i have to, because i've come to another recent realization: the judgment and negativity is always going to be there, but so is the positive, and it's just a matter of which one you focus on the most.

this is sad. it breaks my heart. but there is good in all of this.