Criticism

I'm trying to figure out which hurts more: criticism that comes from someone whose opinion you actually care about, or critism that reflects something you know to be true (as in, the truth hurts). When it's both, it hurts all the more.

Tonight over dinner Michael commented on how when he got out of the shower this morning, all he could hear was me yelling at the kids. Upon hearing this, my defenses immediately went up. But deep inside, the criticism leaves me feeling small, and ashamed, and cut down.

It's true: I do yell at the kids a lot. I'm a yeller. I wish I wasn't. I wish I were one of those serene moms who speaks softly but firmly, and her kids actually listen. I wish my kids had so much respect for me that all it took was a stern glance from me to take command of any situation. But that's not my life.

What I defensively responded to Michael with was this: "I'd like to see YOU do what I do every morning! I'd like to see YOU deal with all six kids, by yourself, and get them all out the door by 7:20 every morning!" And that's the thing. I get up at 5:15 and spend the next two hours feeding, cleaning up after, getting dressed, brushing teeth, combing hair, making lunches, dealing with tantrums, breaking up arguments, urging them to hurry up, we have to GO! By myself. There's no time in there for me - I usually have about two minutes out of that two hours to throw on some sweats and put my hair up in a ponytail. Michael, on the other hand, gets up at 6 and spends the next hour and a half (simultaneous to my frantically getting the kids ready for school) getting himself ready for work, at a pretty leisurely pace, I might add. How dare he criticize me?

All that is true, and I do believe that I deserve some handicap points for that.

However, his criticism hurts because I know it's true. I do yell too much. Patience is not one of my strengths. The dilly-dallying, the bickering, the having to tell the kids 6, 7, or 15 times to do something before they actually do it . . . yeah, I just don't have the patience for that stuff. So I yell. And my yelling makes me feel like a failure a lot of the time, because that's not the kind of parent I set out to be. I don't beat the crap out of my kids, I don't berate or belittle them, but yell? Yes, I yell. And I throw the occasional (okay, frequent) swear word in there.

Michael has a lot more patience than I do. He's generally just a much more laid back person than I am. I'm pretty high-strung by nature. That said, Michael does lose his temper sometimes with the kids, and I have to say that when he yells at them, I almost feel a sick sense of satisfaction. "See," I want to say, "You're no better than me." And I really do think that his patience level correlates to a great degree to how much time he actually spends dealing with them. Let's face it, he's gone all day. He barely deals with them in the morning before work, and by the time he gets home from work, it's dinner and bedtime shortly thereafter - so in the evenings he's with them for about an hour. I really do think that if he spent as much time with them as I do (and I'm not complaining . . . much), he'd not be the saintly Mr. Patience that he is now.

Anyway, it hurt. It hurt because it came from him and because I know it's true.