This year for Lent

I gave up yelling at the kids.  Yelling, hollering, raising my voice, whatever you want to call it; I gave it up.  I hope God has a sense of humor and can appreciate a little sarcasm when I say, "You better appreciate this Big Guy!"  Giving up potato chips, as I have usually done in past years, is sooooo much easier.  This is really hard!  I'm not proud of myself that it is this hard NOT to yell at my children.  I knew that it was going to be hard though, and I think that's why I chose this for my Lenten sacrifice.  It is a habit that needed to be broken.  I grew up being yelled at.  Sometimes it was deserved (like when I almost set our apartment on fire playing with matches), but a lot of times it wasn't.  I hated it.  And I wasn't the type of kid who needed to be yelled at.  I was quickly repentant for any wrong-doing with a well placed glare.  Like every other kid who has gotten yelled at I swore to myself when I was younger, "When I have kids, I am not going to yell at them for every little thing."  Then, lo and behold, I became a mother.  I yell a lot.  I see the sadness in my kids' eyes when they are getting yelled at and it really hurts me, because I know they are probably feeling the same way I did when I got yelled at, and I hate that.  I'd wake up every morning and say to myself, "I'm going to do it better today.  I'm not going to lose my patience so quickly, and I'm not going to yell when speaking calmly will do."  And I would fail before breakfast was over.  Sabrina and I were fighting more, I'm yelling at them to stop yelling at each other...it was just getting ridiculous.  So, for Lent I decided this is what I was going to do.  I guess I need some of that Catholic guilt to make me stick to it.  Imagining God giving me "the look" for breaking my Lenten promise is not something I want to deal with.

My best friend's mother never yelled at her kids.  I asked my friend a couple of weeks prior to Lent, "Did your mom EVER yell at you guys?"  My friend said, "Nope."  I asserted that her mom definitely had to have a stash of something to keep her that patient because I couldn't, for the life of me, imagine how she dealt with a 15 year old girl in a 5 year old's body without yelling.  But, knowing there was somebody I knew who did this, and her children didn't grow up to be degenerate criminals or anything like that gave me a little boost in my confidence that I too could raise my kids without screaming like a banshee everyday.

Now, I'm not letting them get away with murder.  I'm still disciplining them, and I think I'm still pretty strict in that regard.  I'm just enforcing the rules without yelling, "HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY..."  It's hard, but I'm sticking to it.  Last night was very difficult because Sabrina was yelling at me because she was mad that we weren't going to the mall for new shoes as a punishment for her talking back (which she was properly warned would happen if she continued to be a snot).  I wanted so bad to go into the old bag of tricks and pull out a, "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU'RE TALKING TO?!" but I didn't.  After she calmed down, and we talked about why we weren't going, and she apologized, I was proud of myself for not flying off of the handle.  And I realized, if I stop the yelling now, when they become teenagers and say something to me that I would have lost a tooth for if I said the same to my mother at that age the "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU'RE TALKING TO?!" will be something they're not expecting and will be more effective.  I hope. 

If any of you have an extra copy of the parenting handbook, I'd appreciate a copy. I seemed to have misplaced mine.