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The Journey of Parenting Identical Twin Boys Kathy Brandon
This series of articles will chronicle the ups, the downs, and everything in between of parenting identical twin boys and how I learned to enjoy and love parenthood. To start this off, let me give you a little background. I waited until I was 36 to have children, I believed I was completely prepared and mature enough to handle parenthood. As any of you reading this with children can attest, we are never truly prepared for the unique creations called our "kids". Coming from a dysfunctional childhood, as most do, I learned how to parent through commands mixed with requests and when I'm extremely frustrated, spankings. I thought since I was what I considered an "evolved" person, spending many years working through my own self-destructive behaviors I would be a shinning example of parenthood. Yes, I also see the arrogance in those statements, but that's where I began parenthood. Three years into parenthood, I was losing my mind. My kids wouldn't listen, we were constantly getting calls from the daycare for fighting and other behaviors, which created extra stress on our marriage and I was a Life Coach who shouldn't be going through this. Well, let me be the first to say, Life Coaches are brilliant at bringing out YOUR greatest, not necessarily our own or our families...:) Life just sucked, I had a beautiful marriage, great kids, but didn't enjoy being around either of them. As my husband and I were talking one evening, I remembered a book a very dear friend of mine told me about a long time ago, called "Parenting with Love and Logic". I told my husband I was going to pick up the book and see if it could teach me how to communicate with my children better and maybe we could enjoy our family life more. My husband, being the wonderful man he is, said, "Well, honey, if you would let those boys have tougher consequences. Give them more choices and don't bend on your discipline and they will be ok". Obviously, that didn't go over too well with me, as I just knew there were some secret communication technique to getting kids to do what you wanted. I didn't understand at the time, that was the flaw in my thinking all along. What I truly desired was to enjoy these cool little dudes in my life. I saw people who had great relationships with their kids, and my kids are WAY cooler than anyone else's, so there just HAD to be something I was missing about this whole parenthood thing. The book came in the mail and I began reading it immediately. To tell you the truth, it really blew the top off my head. It began by describing the different type of parents, and I fell a little into all the controlling ones to my horror. It went further to telling me to keep my voice calm and offer choice. I though I had been offering my boys choice, but truly, I was masking a command with a question. YIKES!!! With some excitement, I tried one of their fit breaking techniques of asking if my child wanted to go to the car with his feet on the ground or in the air, AND IT WORKED, I knew I had a lot more practice, but there was HOPE...Then I finished Chapter 4, where it talks about everything my husband said above and the final statement of Chapter 4 is this: "The best solution to any problem lies within the skin of the owner of the person who rightfully owns that problem". As soon as I read that, along with processing the accountability they speak about in Chapter 4, I sent my husband a text message telling him just how amazing he is and sat there thinking about how, as a Life Coach, that is exactly the service I provide my clients, why am I having such a tough time offering this to my children? A place to figure out THEIR correct solution, and then I started thinking even more, taking this into all our relationships. How often in our lives, whether we are parents, friends, co-workers, family members do we judge because someone is making a choice WE don't believe is right for them. So often, we can't see the perfection in sometimes making the wrong choice to fully embrace the right choice .Life holds us accountable for our choices, but gives us the loving freedom to make those choices. Isn't it in our nature to offer the same freedom and accountability or is it? More to come....
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