I had one of those rare moments today where I felt like I might actually be doing something right with my parenting. You know, most days are just a mish mash of trying to organise children, trying to get them from A to B without losing your shit, trying to locate lost shoes for the 700th time in an hour, trying to keep your cool, trying to get them to eat something – anything – vaguely nutritious in a 24 hour period. It’s chaotic, really. And some nights my head hits the pillow and I end up rehashing all the things I did wrong that day. I yelled too much. I accidentally swore at someone while driving. I shut myself in the bathroom for 5 minutes because they would not stop fighting. I feel like I didn’t give them enough love. There’s always something to criticize.

Today though, today was like… a little golden beam breaking through the worry of my potential failure at parenting. My eldest has quite a few new children in her class this year. Her best friends are still with her but a lot of the classes got mixed up together, which is fine. During her first week there were a few little incidents with a child she hasn’t had much to do with before. Let’s call this kid Sarah, just for ease of storytelling. Basically Sarah had a couple of little violent outbursts and hurt my daughter and her friends. It wasn’t anything unmanageable. It was handled really well by the teacher. But when Lacie came home and told me that someone had hurt her I felt myself go into panic mode. I was bullied as a kid, and it is my biggest fear that my children will go through that. Or, potentially worse, do that to someone else. It was really emotionally scarring what I went through and it has taken me a long time to work through some leftover issues from that. So when she told me what had happened I could feel my chest tightening and my hands go clammy and my mind started to swim with memories of things that happened to me.

Then she said to me “Sarah is just a really mean person”. My head instantly cleared and I stopped her there. My husband and I had a huge chat with her about how a naughty act doesn’t make a person bad, it’s just an act. It takes a lot more than that for someone to be a mean person. We talked about how it’s easy to judge someone based on one act but if that was the case then people would never get another chance. She has the occasional violent outburst herself, and we reminded her of that as well. It was a good talk and I could see she was processing everything we had gone over with her.

Today in the car after school, I asked her how her day was. I got the usual: “good”. A few moments later though, she announced that she and Sarah are now friends. I asked what had happened to turn things around and she said she had talked to her and reminded her that they played together sometimes last year and it would be nice if they could play together again instead of fighting. And it worked.

I swear my heart nearly exploded out of my chest. Here I had been worrying about how I should best be handling this, what we are supposed to do in this situation, what is the right thing to tell her… and my little 5 year old just walked right on up to this kid who was trying to hurt her friends and sorted it out. Just like that. Kids are freaking amazing!! And, not to take the credit away from her (because seriously – high fives all round in our house) but somewhere along the line we must have done something a little bit right with our parenting for her to be able to do that.

Crisis averted – phew!

Rach x