Let’s just be honest, we all lose our shit on our kids every once in a while.

Parenting is HARD. Sometimes the kids just don’t listen.

I consider myself to be someone who has a lot of patience with my kids. I am a kind, gentle, calm mom… until I am not.

I’ll just give an example. The other morning my son woke up in a bad mood.

Now, this was on a morning when he had school, so we absolutely have to be out the door by a certain time otherwise my daughter will miss the bus.

With this in mind, I went calmly into his room. I sat with him, rubbed his back, asked him what I could do for him to cheer him up; and yet all he wanted to do was yell.

So I left his room. Went to make breakfast and to continue getting ready for the morning since I knew we had to leave soon.

Sporadically, I went back in to see if he was feeling better. (He was not).

He continued to whine and cry and yell. There was nothing I could do to make him happy.

After trying every trick in the book to turn his mood around, I finally snapped.

It took me a solid 30 minutes of being a “gentle parent” and getting nowhere for me to finally lose my shit.

But once I did, there was NO going back.

I just had to get him dressed, fed, teeth brushed, hair brushed, and out the door. It didn’t matter how I got it done, I just had to do it.

By the time we got to school, my son and I were both exhausted. I had to apologize dropping him off and explain that we had a rough morning. I apologized to him before I left, but I still felt really sad at how everything played out.

I went home and cried. I felt like a failure that I couldn’t be the mom he needed me to be.

In the end, we both had a fine day.

After school and work, we were finally reunited. And you know what happened as soon as I walked in the door? He came up and gave me a hug and a kiss. Like the rough morning never happened.

Do you have any idea how good that made me feel? To know that just because I lose my shit sometimes, all of the other times that I am calm have more of an impact on him. That he knows I love him regardless.

Kids are SO resilient. So much more than we give them credit for.

I find that when I lose my shit, or do something I am not proud of as a mom, the best way for me to recover is to APOLOGIZE. And to talk with my kids about it.

I explain to them that I am only human. I want to be a calm, kind, patient mom ALWAYS. But sometimes that is not possible.

We talk about how sometimes they have big emotions as well. That sometimes it is okay if they lose their cool, as long as they recover from it and apologize afterwards.

That is the beautiful, yet most difficult part of parenting, right? That we have so much power in our homes. That our mood affects not just us internally, but other little people who rely on us so much.

We have to be in so much control over our own emotions. Which is honestly pretty tough to do all the time.

In the end, the most important thing is not if you lose your cool. If you are a parent who spends enough time with your kids, then you WILL lose your cool. There’s no escaping that.

It is how you show your kids how to recover. And apologize. And to teach them that we all have big emotions, we are all human, and the most important thing is what we do afterwards.

Remember, if you worry about being a good mom, that means you already are one. Parenting is the toughest job in the world. Just the fact that you are reading my blog shows me that you are doing the best you can every day.