I hate feeling this way. I feel so much rage and frustration. It feels like every tiny little thing makes me want to lash out and hurt someone, maybe physically and maybe emotionally. Under all the angry feeling is this pervasive feeling of sadness. Like feeling this way at all, ever, proves just how terrible and unworthy of any love I am. I feel like I can’t say anything that is even neutral. Everything is a criticism or complaint. I feel so mean and hateful and I don’t know how to stop. I don’t even know why I feel this way. Nothing bad happened. I haven’t had to deal with anything awful lately.
I feel like a despicable terrible person. I feel like I deserve to be hurting so much. If I weren’t inherently awful I wouldn’t have to go through this. It’s really hard not to cut. It’s really hard to restrain my language around Shanna and speak gently to her. I’m not doing a very good job. So of course I feel like I don’t deserve to be her mother. She should have someone better than me. Someone who is not so mean and hateful.
And she’s telling me over and over to “Stop it.” I think she means to stop crying but I’m not sure. I don’t feel like I can even ask.
Don’t believe everything you feel.
Just because it’s what you’re feeling doesn’t mean it’s true. I don’t know if that really helps much, when you’re in the middle of feeling all of this (because true or not, it’s still what you’re feeling). But it’s something my therapist and I came up with once, and it helps me cope sometimes.
You’re a person much like the rest of us: human (not awful or despicable or terrible). You deserve love and kindness. I am so sorry you’re hurting.
Does it help to talk to yourself as if you were your own best friend?
Hugs to you my friend. Don’t know for sure but it sounds like your hormones are really whacked.
I don’t know any one else who works as hard as you do to analyze your way out of corners 🙂
Or she’s being two and is telling you to “stop it” for some froot loop reason that no normal adult person would ever figure out in a million years. No, wait, that’d be if she was screaming at you to “stop it.”
I find it a bit easier to not be mom-bitch from hell if I give myself permission to be mean. For instance, saying no to going outside in the hottest part of the day, only giving her 5 minutes instead of 30 to get in the car seat. Yeah, those are “mean” but they keep me from telling her to STFU–translation “Mommy can’t pick you up until mommy has a handkerchief or mommy’s hayfever will make you a dead baby.”
I don’t know if this helps, but in the past it’s been when I feel safe and secure that the demons and the dark places come out to play; or when I make confessions that overturn the applecart of a relationship, or when I challenge a partner – their loyalty, their love for me, whatever.
I don’t have any real words of wisdom but I’ll listen anytime you want to talk, read anything you want to write or share.
You are doing fine. No mom is perfect right? You are not actually doing anything wrong with your child, you are just having a hard time, which I think is allowed in the Book of Mom.
“And she’s telling me over and over to “Stop it.” I think she means to stop crying but I’m not sure. I don’t feel like I can even ask.”
I have my own theory about this. Children often have an uncanny emotional intelligence when they are young and still largely pre-verbal.
Yes, Shanna is developing vocabulary at a rapid pace, but not fast enough to verbalize a response to what she is sensing, but cannot yet analyze.
At this age, you are her world – or a hugely major part of it, anyway. She senses something in her world which feels unhappy or unsettling. So, she says one of the few things she can say: “Stop it.”
I don’t see that as a negative towards you as much as a desire for her world to ‘feel better.’
I don’t mean this as a criticism or some statement of what kind of negative impact you may be having on your child. I admire the connection you are nurturing with her. This is one of the side effects of having that kind of connection — that she is able to ‘read’ you so well.