Happy Family

Tonight my bubble was burst. I go along thinking that we have it pretty good, I stay home and can be with the girls all day; we don't have a lot of stress and we aren't too busy - all things I have intentionally done to keep as much peace and harmony as possible. And though I am not perfect, I perceive that I am doing an all right job raising my girls. I mean, they are pretty awesome. I consider things happy. You know, for the most part, anyway.

But tonight I was reading to Laura while we were waiting for Rachel to fall asleep, as we do most nights, and in our book ('Ramona and her Father'), Ramona asks, "Then why can't we be a happy family?" Her father replies and tells her that they are, and that having a happy family does not mean that everyone in the family is happy all the time. This sparked a discussion with Laura and she brought it to my attention that she didn't think we had a happy family either. Slap. In. The. Face.

We ended up having a long talk about it, which involved a lot of tears from me, about what she thinks a Happy Family would look like. It is my soul goal in life for my kids to be happy. I mean, I'd like for Josh and I to be happy, too, but really, hearing that my kids don't think we have a happy family was really about the worst insult you could give me. And I know she wasn't trying to insult me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized things from her perspective: I harp on Josh for some little thing pretty often. Probably almost every day. Its nothing major, but its negative. She sees that. To me, its not a big deal, just something that he could improve on, or whatever. But maybe I should try to turn that around. Maybe instead of nagging, I should consciously try to compliment him on something he did well, or something that made me happy. It is so easy to focus on negative things. And the kids, well, I do make more of a conscious effort to positively reinforce behaviour I like, but lets be realistic, they receive a lot of correction throughout the day too. So, even though to me, I think things are going pretty well, and am happy most of the time, when I think about it a little more, I can see why Laura might think our family is not 'happy'. Reality check.

Part of it, too, I told myself, is that she is a child, and so her perception is a little skewed. She has no idea how bad a truly unhappy family could be. But then, does that really matter? That her perception is, in my opinion, skewed? Not really. She sees unhappiness, and that is her reality. Sigh.
She doesn't see my constant struggle to react calmly to situations I reflexively am angry about. I literally struggle with this on probably an hourly basis. Sometimes I tell her, "I really wanted to ______ when ________ happened, but instead I stayed calm and used my words (or whatever)." But I don't think she realizes how hard I try to model the behaviour I'd like to see. And though I fail daily, I like to think that overall I'm doing all right. But apparently she doesn't think so. Heart. Breaking.

I'm sure the tears on my part did not help. Laura immediately changed her stance, not being able to stand upsetting me in this way. She called Daddy to come up and help me stop crying, and also continued displacing her discomfort with the situation for much of our discussion. Oh. My. Soul. Feeling like such a failure tonight. :(