Mama the Monster

This morning, I was chatting on-line with a "service" representative for our internet provider. I had an email delivery problem. Namely, I was only getting some of it, not all of it -- which is maddening, to the point of feeling like a crisis.

"Monica" was unhelpful and unsympathetic.

As my blood pressure rose, my fingers clacking away with increasing speed and force, my children -- predictably -- began to lose patience with my inattention. They began to play more and more raucously. First with each other, and then by poking and prodding at me.

I was too immersed in my frustrating exchange with "Monica" to react to them -- though their escalating maniacal laughter, squealing and poking were having the effect of nails on a chalkboard. But then. Just as I reached for the mouse to send off a particularly heated reply, my older daughter grabbed the mouse and took off running.

Well.

I chased her and, when I caught her, I growled TERRIBLE growls and gnashed TERRIBLE teeth and rolled TERRIBLE eyes. I snatched the mouse from her and stalked back to the computer where I slammed the send button and then gnashed my teeth some more.

And my daughter, who requests Where the Wild Things Are nearly every night, did not take Max's example. When she encountered Mama-the-Monster, she began to cry.

To me, being a 'good enough' mama doesn't mean getting it right all of the time, but it also doesn't mean that getting it wrong is okay. It means trying, always, to weigh honestly and appropriately the importance of what I get right vs. what I get wrong -- and to keep the scale clearly heavy on "the right."

Today I got it wrong. I was in a crazy, heart-thumping, seeing-red rage. And I lost it -- with the stranger via "chat," but more importantly, with my daughter, innocent of all but the inability to understand that sometimes it's best to let Mama do her thing from a little bit of a distance.

That's not good and I'm really sorry I yelled at her. I'm really sorry I scared her.

But it isn't the end of the world for her to discover that among the varieties of normal human emotion is rage. Even mamas have it. Nor is it bad for her to see that a person can be very angry without resorting to violence.

Further, I hope she also recognized in my aftermath that when we are not nice to the people we love we feel bad.

These are lessons worth knowing.

Of course, I didn't set out to teach her any of that today, but I nonetheless hope some of that comes across in what I do get right: caring. Caring for her. Caring about being a good enough mother and person. Caring about what that means. And caring enough to keep trying to get as much right as I can, even if sometimes that means cutting Mama-the-Monster a bit of slack.