I cried today.

(Two posts in one day, lucky you!)

I cried today. I never cry. Ever. Not once since I've had my children have I shed a tear.

It's strange, because I cried all. the. time. as a kid. Seriously. I was just one pile of weeping emotions. From the ages of about 8-18, if I were in the shower, you could bet good money I was sobbing my heart out for one reason or another.

And then it was like one day a switch went off and that was that. No more tears. I was stoic and solid and ready to face the world.

Whenever my lack of tears gets brought up J likes to remind me that I shed one single tear when we watched that movie with the dog Marley (maybe it was called "Marley"?) while in England. Mostly he uses it as his case for why we need a dog, but I digress. Other than that, I've never cried around J, if that even counts as crying.

Today I messed up. Badly.

I wasn't going to mention it. I was going to hope it all went away and would be forgotten. But I figured that it wouldn't be fair to make it all sunshine and roses on a blog about parenting.

Because mess-ups happen.

I could blame it on so many things. I want to blame it on so many things - like the the stress of B's lead issues and how draining it is to be parenting solo so much. The fact that my children have learned to fight and bicker and nag each other and all they were doing was fighting and whining. I want to blame it on that. But I won't.

Because in the end I didn't mess up because of any of that. I messed up because I'm human.

I have my own short comings.

After playing "throw the blue berries and stomp on them" and dumping an entire house plant (tree) out of the pot, and then running around screaming about God knows what and then running smack into me as I'm trying to clean up after them and getting a mechanical pencil jabbed into my leg - lead sticking out of my skin and bleeding - the whole 9 yards, I kind of lost it. I screamed. I don't even know what I said exactly to be honest. Something along the lines of "Mommy is losing her freaking mind and I just want everyone to stop destroying everything and just be quiet for five minutes!"

They cried. I never yell, so they sobbed.

And it broke my heart.

And H grabbed B by the hand, dragging him to the playroom saying, "Mommy's really angry."

If your heart could shatter, I'm sure mine did.

Because I knew I'd failed them on so many levels.

They're just babies.

And I legitimately screamed at them. I shattered their beautiful, happy worlds.

When I was reading Miss H her bedtime stories, several hours later, she asked me, "Are you still mad, Momma?"

I told her no. And I apologized for screaming and I told her it wasn't nice of me and I shouldn't have acted that way. She nodded and hugged me, which really only made it that much worse.

I don't want her to be me. Not in that area. I don't want her to let people treat her badly and rip her to pieces and then just forgive them so easily.

Because she deserves better.

And B deserves better.

So, so much better.

Sometimes I'm afraid that I need things to be so good, so perfect for them, that there is no margin for error. And then on those extremely rare occasions that things fall outside the margins of what I find acceptable, it makes it all just that much more devastating.

People yell all the time. I know that. But I don't. I can count on roughly three fingers how many times I've ever raised my voice at my children. J never has.

After I tucked them sweetly in bed and went about cleaning up my house that I'm fairly certain a hurricane struck (not only is everything destroyed, there is suspicious wet stuff all over the floors), I cried.

I probably could have sobbed, but I told myself to suck it up. I'm not a kid.

I'm a mom.

It's so easy to accept and forgive that other people have imperfections. Other people mess up. And we as human beings are so incredibly resilient that these little "hiccups" typically don't have any real impact on the grand scheme of things.

And yet I expect so much more from myself.

Demand it.

I will take it as a learning lesson. A sad one. One I hope to never repeat because I don't think I could ever deal with seeing my children so distraught because Mommy can't keep her shit together.

So there you go, I preach a lot, I practice more, and I fuck up on occasion, too.