As a parent we have all had those moments where sometimes we just want to scream. As a mother with two toddlers in the home, I so get it! However, I know that words and moments like that can never be replayed, can never be bought back and changed.
I think I first understand this when Liam was about two and half years old. When we moved into our house, we got brand new carpet put in the living room and the bedrooms. Beautiful carpet: the kind where you want to walk around barefoot all the time, don’t want shoes to walk on it, and don’t mind vacuuming.
Then we had a little boy.
A little boy, as moms of boys know, is synonymous with mess, dirt, and and more mess. Somehow it just comes naturally to them. (I have to say that Liam is OCD and a neat freak most of the time, but he is a total klutz.) Our living room now has numerous stains from said little boy.
Those stains show that a little boy lives and loves here. Back to the moment I mentioned earlier: I let him bring his “big boy cup” home from the restaurant one afternoon. When we get home, he dropped it.
On.
The.
Carpet.
I’m putting dishes in the sink and I hear him start to sniffle and say “Mommy! Oh no! It spilled!” He was in tears when I got to him. Of course I’m angry. Liam doesn’t like to make more than one trip when he carries things; meaning he had an arm load and it could have been prevented. He was two years old and very sensitive; he still is, oh my precious child. So instead of yell and remind him that he could haveset it on the table and made more than one trip, I grab him up and tell him it’s ok. I take care of his little self before I try to soak up the liquid and spray a few things on it and turn on the fan.
It didn’t work.
My living room has a lovely, faint tea stain near the love seat. My son’s sweet, sensitive soul does not. Carpets can be cleaned and fixed; little hearts cannot.
“How we speak to our children becomes their inner voice…”