At any given time, I am entirely confident that I'm screwing up my kids in one of a thousand different ways.
It's not even of a question of how I'm screwing them up. The how doesn't really matter. What matters is that I care deeply about raising them to be good humans and sometimes it feels impossible.
Some days we eat three square meals supplemented with nutritious snacks. Some days we wake up with the sun and play outside all day and read books together and tidy the house and have a bath (including washing our hair and cutting our fingernails and toenails) and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Some days I throw a vegetable in their general direction and I huff and puff as I trip over the mountain of dirty socks piled in the middle of the floor. There are too many screens and not enough protein and my voice gets progressively higher and higher until I'm squeaking like a furious mouse to "brush your teeth or go straight to bed and let the sugar-bugs eat them!"
I hope they appreciate how much work it is raising them to not be tiny psychopaths. I hope they remember the in-between times. The nights where we all pile in the big bed and take turns giving each other back tickles before bedtime. The movie nights and pancake breakfasts and kitchen dance parties.
Mainly I hope they grow up knowing how badly I wanted to do it right for them. And how many times I screwed up, fell down, and made a mess of it all, but kept going because they're worth it.
