Mother, Will They Try to Break My Balls

I’m discovering as the days go by, that I am continuously ill-prepared for parenthood.  Every day is a crap shoot, but I can’t let the kids know that I have no idea what I’m doing.  If they smell fear, I believe they may attack.

The first issue that I’m having is school.  Lightning’s teacher sent home a speech evaluation, and then we spoke at length about his speech issues.  He has a tongue-thrust issue, can’t say some sounds and has some other speech patterns that are not severely problematic, but need to be corrected.  Unfortunately, since they don’t appear to be hindering him in the classroom, he can’t go through the school for them.  We have to go through private insurance to get this resolved.  Apparently the speech teacher is only there part-time, and the district probably won’t agree to services.  We’re working through alternatives now, but I’m really frustrated that  I can’t seem to get what I need.

The other problem is bullying.  Just today, a little girl who I will call “Roberta” punched and hit Lightning.  This is not the first time someone has called him a “baby” or pinched or hit him.  I’ve been trying to teach him that he just should walk away or tell a teacher, and that’s what he has been doing.  But inside, I’m cringing.  I started getting bullied in the second or third grade.  It didn’t stop until I graduated high school.  My heart is going to break if I have a kid that people pick on.  Every time he tells me a story I remember how I used to have to run home because the kids would throw tennis balls at me.  One time, a kid actually threw a bicycle at me.  How do you tell your kid to walk it off, when inside you want to tell him to start kicking butt before he gets his butt kicked?  How do you mask your own pain whenever your kid tells a story?

Only 15 more years of this to go.  I better put on my big girl pants and suck it up because these kids are wearing me down!

~ by lhuber17 on October 24, 2011.