Cha Cha Cha Changes

I feel like my kids change so quickly and constantly that I have a hard time nailing down who they are at the moment. I stay home with them, and they still just change so fast, I can't possibly keep up. Every week I find myself thinking "who are you going to be this week?" There's a million versions of Miles and Lilah and I feel like I'm always drawing straws on their personalities. Sometimes I get lucky and both kids are the best possible versions of themselves, other weeks I get the short end of the stick. Usually it's somewhere in the middle, Lilah might be more energetic and hilarious, but more dramatic and whiny too. Miles might become more independent but also more clingy.

I start to feel really drained by such massive amounts of change. Once I finally get something nailed down, ways of dealing with whiny Lilah she quickly becomes aggressive Lilah, and all of the methods and strategies I had become so proud of are useless. I feel like I can't ever get a leg up. I don't know why this seems new to me. In my years of teaching, my classroom was always about as schizophrenic as they come. Every day there was a different life force that I had to become accustomed to in about 0.5 seconds or risk drowning in chaos.

I did learn a thing or two from those teaching years but it feels different with my own kids. I guess maybe it's that I become attached to certain versions of my kids. I'm not one of those people who wants to preserve my children in baby form. For me, the older they are, the better, but there is a certain level of innocence, not dependent on age, but life exposure, that I want to hold on to. Every time Lilah becomes subjected to one of the many downfalls of having a sibling, I feel like she loses a part of her innocence. Every time Miles has to forgo a cuddle so that I can tame his maniacal sister, I see a shard of his youth fall away. I definitely want my kids to get older, but I don't want them to become hardened. I have to realize that change is part of experimentation though, not a reflection of my parenting. As my children learn more, they start playing with who they want to be, testing physical and emotional boundaries.

As I write this, I am feeling like it's really neat that my kids go through a daily metamorphosis. In the moment though, it's draining and annoying. I guess maybe that's because I'm rarely the best possible version of myself either. My kids are probably rolling the dice with me too, the same as I am with them. It's always an adventure to see what random combination of personalities come up each day and what we can make from it.