I'm a judgy pants, and I am sorry!

I know that before I had kids, I had crazy ideas of Motherhood. I was one of those teens that saw kids at the grocery store with messy hair and runny noses and secretly mocked their parents. I promised myself that I would never have messy hair, snotty nosed kids. When I was dating Brian, his youngest brother was born. I remember going over to their home and having to be silent so that you wouldn’t wake up the baby. I swore that my kids would sleep through anything. Fast forward 4 years to the day I brought home my adorable daughter. We lived across the street from my Grandma and Grandpa, and if Grandpa sneezed across the street, in his house, it would wake the baby. She slept through nothing. I laughed and said that I had cursed myself for making fun of Brian’s mom and her silent baby sleeping patterns. Then, one day, with a couple of kids in tow, we jumped up and ran to the store. My youngest had an earache, and had an allergic reaction to the antibiotic shot they had given him. He was covered in hives, in his Pj's, I had not slept for a couple of days, and my girls looked like orphans. I looked back at my kids and realized that I had once again failed. My snotty messy kids were at the grocery store.
I then decided that I would not make self righteous assumptions about other people as parents. After all, we are just doing the best we can, being moms and dads. Its hard, and we all make mistakes.


Fast forward to my life with Tourette.... Yep I screwed up again. I met Moms in our support group and on the internet that HATED their kids tics. Moms who constantly complained about tics, wanted the kids to change their tics. I always felt like saying, the next time you feel like you need to breathe, try blinking your eyes and see if that helps. Of course, blinking your eyes is not going to fulfill the need to breathe just like trying to substitute one tic for another is not going to fulfill the need to tic. Wow, does that sound like one of those self righteous assumptions that I made as a teenager? Yep, it was, and right now I am eating a big slice of humble pie. I just had major surgery the first of December. Nothing went the way it was planned, and I have had a couple of complications and setbacks. My kids school is amazing and we have a week before Christmas and a week and a half after Christmas off. As most people will tell you, Christmas is the ticing season, and Monkey Mans Tics have gone crazy. So put me on house arrest, (something that I hate) and Monkey Man, out of school, plus really cold weather and lots of snow. His new tic is whistling songs. At first it was one Christmas song. But now it has morphed into songs from Zelda Ocarina of Time. Continually, constantly, without stop, high pitched, screechy, migraine causing whistling. I even dream that I have droids from star wars cleaning my house, and wake up to realize that its just the boy ticing. Now I must apologize. The fact that your kids tics drive you nuts does not make you a bad mom. The fact that each time they tic you cry in your heart makes you a mom. One placed in an incredibly hard situation. You can only do the best you can do. The best you can do is different for all different people. It doesn’t make one person better, or worse, it just makes us different. I promise to try to look at people and embrace the differences, to look for the better in everyone, to just not be such a judgy pants... and to apologize if you were on the wrong end of my judgyness.... I will try to not let that happen again.

Heather