sorry nicole..i was having a hot bath and pondering..i will call you after i write my ponderings down.

this has nothing to do with rescue or animals so feel free to skip this introspective aging reviewing of life thing.

i had lunch with one of my daughters...she has a diary of all the mean things i did when she was growing up. today she told me i once was mad at her and kicked her out of the family and said she could no longer watch any of my movies. ok..that is the young kids perspective..the adult perspective?..i haven't a clue cuz i can't remember anything even remotely close to any of that.

my other daughter once gave me a fridge magnet that said "it is easy to have a clear conscious when your memory is fuzzy"..and yes, we all know i have a fuzzy memory.

hmmm...so i asked lindsey today if i was a good parent? and she said yes i was..(like she is going to say, "no you sucked.")

anyway, so here i was sitting in a hot bath and pondering the past, trying to dissect the truth of who i was.
and i do remember somethings...

like i was woefully unprepared to be a parent. i was 18 years old when my first was born and 3000 miles away from my family. none of our friends had kids and i was never around kids when i was growing up (except for my god parents son's baby..once..who i accidently dropped on her head and never told anyone.)
i was in a marriage of mistake with a mother in law who i really believed, ( whether it was true or not) thought i was not good enough to be the wife of her son or the mother of her grand babies.

all three of my little ones were busy, noisy, hyperactive, accident prone horrors..one was with his little pack of kindergarten friends, putting hoses down neighbors fireplace flues and flooding their basements, one little preschool sweetheart was pooping on the nieghbors lawns, and the third who still a babe in arms, cried with colic all night long. all three slept in my bed every night and one of them always peed the bed at night too.

they survived young childhood, barely and so did i...and moved into their teens..one was growing pot in the closet, one was running away, all of them were smoking and driving me insane.

all through the motherhood thing, i felt so inadequate, so ill prepared to deal with what mothering meant. i tried to be suzy homemaker..i had a huge garden and grew tomatoes to make into tomatoe paste (like this was worth the effort and not spending 62 cents on tomato paste in a can) i collected windfall apples and hand picked grapes and home pasturized the juice that they drank...i was beyond stupid, i was totally insane. i had no idea who i was, and who i was trying to be was not even close to me.

no one told me it was ok not to be a perfect mom, no one told me that those innocent babes would grow up just fine with an incompetent mom. no one told me that i could just be who i was..inconsistent, not martha stewart, a child myself at times, make mistakes and still have my childrens love.

i wish someone had told me that..then i would not have tried so hard and in my anxiety as a not so good parent...sometimes messed things up.