Tuesday, April 27, 2010

It's Not Fair and it's Not Going to be.

Here are a few things that are not fair in my house.

Teena is a year and a half younger than Genea but Genea goes to bed at 8 and Teena at 9.

Genea could not handle the kind of birthday party where all the girls in her class come to our house for a party. Ditto for having a party somewhere else. Ditto for having just a few girls over. She is doing so much better and I expect within a few more years she will be able to handle this. Until then, neither girl will have a birthday party with her friends. We have small family parties instead.

There is an insane lack of judgment and impulse control in both my children.  Does one drive the other? I don't know. But Genea, she really has reduced reflexes and decision making. We have no sidewalks in our neighborhood and neither of my children will be learning to ride a bike any time soon. I have to beat off offers with a log from people who want to give them bikes, along with the chorus of "but- what- abouts". You know, like "but what about taking them on a bike path?" and "but what about using training wheels?" etc.

Teena has no friends in the neighborhood, but Genea does. Genea gets to play with her friends and sometimes I make them play with Teena too. Sometimes Teena doesn't get to play with anyone. 

Last summer I had both of my daughters out at a local park. It was *sigh* one of those *sigh* days *sigh, pass out from lack of oxygen*. I was giving myself an enormous headache, certainly not helped by all the sighing, over being fair to the girls. There was a time when I struggled massively trying to make things fair for them both. I wanted to be an even handed parent, one who distributed evenly love, attention, affection and consequences. A parent who approached both children the same, or as similarly as possible. That day at the park I was trying desperately to be fair. Trying to juggle a million things in my mind ensuring equal treatment. I realized I was doing neither of them a favor, and making myself crazy in the process. I was trying to compromise constantly so that one or the other would not feel left out, or that one was getting what the other wasn't.  Parents are supposed to be fair right? Life may not be fair, but parents are expected to try.

My daughters come from diametrically opposed backgrounds. I have to shove one to get her to try anything, I have to yank the other back from trying anything. So I gave up the idea of being fair that day in the park. I don't get to be one parent either. I get to be two different Mom's to two different children. Makes life more interesting. You know, in a crazy sort of way. I think I am remembering all this because it is getting nicer out and people are trying to give us bicycles again. Anyhow, it's freeing, giving up on that pressure and letting the expectation go. It's not fair. It's not going to be.

Ps, please don't suggest all the options we could use to balance any of the situations I wrote about at the top. We have thought them all through, we are okay with our decisions and it will change in a year or two anyway.

22 comments:

  1. Hey, it all sounds good to me! Sounds about like life at my house. We do what we can and we deal the best we can with what we've got to work with...and then we let what doesn't matter go.

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  2. I get it. I have four kids. I am four different moms for each of them. I realized this the other night at an autism support group meeting when they asked each of us how we handle discipline with our kids. I had four different answers. I guess I knew it all along, but to hear myself say it really made it apparent to me.
    Keeps me on my toes.

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  3. Fair means everybody gets what they need, not everybody gets the same thing. You are a perfectly fair parent in my opinion :)

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  4. Go you! Way to find what works best for your daughters, and not what you feel (or others tell you) SHOULD work best for your daughters.

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  5. we are not at all fair about anything because they are not the same kid and thiings are different for everyone. That's my take on it anyway.
    PS Yes I do wear store bought socks, I have about 3 pairs of knit ones and I owuld love to have more but knitting is one of the things that has sort of fallen by the wayside. Are you on Ravelry?

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  6. I am glad you stopped trying to be fair. When I was growing up, if I whined "it's not fair", my mother inevitably answered "Who told you life was fair?" and that was the end of the conversation- she wouldn't discuss it further.

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  7. Kids are like the fairness police. I have news for you: about 8-10 is prime "it's not fair!!!" age. Or, wait, maybe that's just at my house, where I have a 10 year old who (sigh...maybe I will pass out from loss of oxygen too) has to go to bed at the same time as her 6 year old brother because she does not do well on any less sleep than that! If I had a dollar for every time I said, "life is not fair, kids, that's not the way it works..." (I bet they hate that and will use it against me when they're grown-ups too.)

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  8. Ugh! I HATE fair! Although I have come to the conclusion that "it's not faaaaaaair!!!!!!!" is just an excuse to complain, not a reflection of the child's "reality." I know this because when Princess claimed it was "not fair" that Peanut got a bowl of ice cream after Mommy loused up her kindergarten concert, my rant of, "was it FAIR that Peanut had to be extra brave because I screwed up? Was it FAIR that we all had to listen to you scream before the concert because you had to sound out a word? Is it FAIR that we're having to use our time now to keep your tantrum from escalating?" did nothing to educate her about the mythology of "fair."

    Go figure.

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  9. My favorite line about fairness: Fair is a place where pigs go to win ribbons.

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  10. i tell my family please don't get them this or that... i asked them not to buy bikes last year but do they listen? no!

    my kids are different from most kids too and no one seems to get it but dh an i.

    i get most of the fairness arguements from my 12 year old though who says all her friends get this and that and xyz and why can't she?

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  11. Well, my two boys come from the same background -- just varies by degree from each other -- and we still parent them differently. We call it split-personality parenting!

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  12. I was just whining...who am I kidding, I never stopped whining...about this "It's not fair" business. I (yes, ME) am fighting with it something aweful yesterday and today!!!

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  13. Since Drama Teen doesn't read your blog, I can tell her secret. At age 16, she can't ride a bike...never learned (many reasons, apartment living, working single mom with no time, no $ to buy a bicycle, etc. etc.), and now that she's had surgery to correct her aneurysm that involved a bypass that prevents her from wearing a helmet, she never will. I'm not sure she misses it at all.
    And it is no not fair that my children don't obey every request I give them, go to bed without whining or crying, get up without me turning from Mom to drill sergeant, and go to school all day every day. Not f-a-i-r!

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  14. You ARE being fair, by giving each of your kids the choices, boundaries, and parenting that they need....which may (and probably isn't) not be the same for both of them. But, being kids they will always find the un-fairness in it all. I have started to tell mine (they are 11 and almost 16) that life isn't always "fair", and that they are learning how to cope with things that life throws at them!
    Someday....it will all pay off! Stick to your guns, and sorry about the bike pushers....doesn't everyone ELSE know so much better how to raise YOUR kids??!!!
    :-)

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  15. I here ya sister! It's not fair and it's not going to be. The End.

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  16. Oh and parenthood is not a democracy!

    My little guy recovering from adenoids outta here just said, "What's dem-a-crazy?" lol

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  17. I won't suggest any changes, I don't have any to make! I always remember something a professor said to me in college- fair does not mean the same. It helped me in my classroom when dealing with children who were very diferent from each other- you don't treat them all exactly the same. And the same applies to my own children. They are different people and different ages and they are not the same. So I treat them fairly, but certainly not the same.

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  18. I guess I am probably the one who worries about it more than anyone else. Like the girls for example, lol. Neither of them has said it's not fair. In fact, they rarely even use the phrase. Hmmmm.

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  19. I don't think it is possible to be fair. (My obsession as a child was whether or not things were fair - I have that in common with Sergei; he makes me crazy.)

    Equal certainly doesn't mean fair. You could let both girls have and ride bikes...but one might like it more than another; so that wouldn't be fair, would it?

    Fair isn't possible, but some people see unfairness everywhere. What can you do.

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  20. Great post!! When I was a teacher I used to tell my students who complained about me not being fair, "Life isn't fair, get over it and deal with it." Not my brightest, most inspiring phrase, but it's one that former students still say back to me when the see me out and about, lol.

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  21. Who's idea of fair are you going by anyway? My daughter has never had a birthday party with a bunch of her friends, and I never bought her a bike. She's had very few sleepover with friends, and none at our house. I don't drop her off at the mall and let her run around unsupervised, or stay up til whatever time she wants to stay up, and believe me, I hear the "that's not FAIR!" cry all the time. I don't care. I'm the mother, I get to decide the rules. You do whatever you need to do, parent the way you choose to parent for what works best for your family, and don't worry about being "fair".

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  22. Totally agree. My brothers and I are of very different temperments. What was a punishment to me would have been ignored by my brother. What he needed for discipline would have crushed me. My youngest brother had medical issues that weren't a factor for us, he had different restraints to keep him alive. Sometimes that meant he wasn't going tobogganing with us. We were different people who needed different rules, different treatment, different parenting. It's fair, but not the same.

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