I was always two seconds from ripping my son apart verbally or even physically if I thought that was needed.
I refused to raise a kid who doesn’t respect authority and ends up dead or in jail.
That belief ran deep in me. I carried it everywhere. Every interaction. Every correction. Every moment where I felt like I had to prove that I was not going to raise a kid who turned out “soft” or out of control.
After his attempted suicide, I dialed it back almost to the extreme of being passive.
But that didn’t solve anything either.
Eventually I’d snap again. Sometimes it was because he took a mile off the inch I gave. Sometimes I was too overstimulated from work. Sometimes I was worried about how ends were going to meet.
One day I scared myself so bad that I thought if someone called the cops on me, it would be deserved.
That’s when I knew I had hit rock bottom.
I completely broke my son’s heart that day.
I felt ashamed of myself.
That’s the baby I begged and prayed for.
I was done being that Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde mom. I didn’t want my son to graduate high school and walk away from me carrying the same bitterness in his heart that I carried toward my own parents.
So I went looking for answers.
I dug deeper into who I was. I thought I had to “discover” it.
That wasn’t it at all.
I had to decide who I’d be.
But even that wasn’t enough.
I could decide who I wanted to be all day long, and I still found myself going on frustrated rants in the car on the way to school because his grades were lower than I knew he was capable of getting.
So I humbled myself and started taking real accountability for how I had reacted to him.
That helped.
It made my son feel a little more comfortable.
But he didn’t trust it.
I could see it in his body language. He was bracing himself all the time, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And honestly, I couldn’t blame him.
Because knowing who I wanted to be wasn’t enough to actually become her.
Owning my behavior was a start. It helped me begin making amends.
But it didn’t eliminate the urge to go off.
So I started working on being a better communicator.
But even that had limits.
The right frameworks and words didn’t matter when the beast inside me was ready to bite someone’s head off.
I ran out of ideas.
So I prayed.
And what was revealed to me changed my life and our relationship permanently.
The main reason I struggled to keep my cool was because I was communicating my expectations through emotional outbursts.
My son knew what NOT to do because I flipped out to show him.
That’s what reactive parenting is.
Trying to reinforce on the back end what wasn’t established on the front end.
At that point, I reached a real choice.
I could keep doing what I had always done and raise an obedient kid who hated my guts.
Or I could learn something completely different.
I could learn how to feel angry without acting it out.
I could hold standards without becoming the kind of person who might need the cops called on her.
I could enforce my rules without theatrics.
I chose the second option.
And something surprising happened.
My son started relaxing around me.
He began doing what I asked without a fight.
He stopped avoiding being in the same room with me.
Our home got quieter.
Not because I gave up my authority, but because I finally learned how to use it without emotional explosions.
Now my son checks on me throughout the evening.
He sends me funny videos.
He comes to greet me at the door and tells me he missed me today.
His teenage hormones were never the real problem.
My inability to regulate myself was.
And so was the belief I had been carrying for years.
The belief that if I softened up, it meant I was a punk raising a soft kid.
That belief kept me trapped.
And if you’re anything like I was, you probably need to hear this.
You’re not just an angry person.
For the first time in your life, you’re doing something you can’t effortlessly excel at.
You have no model for it.
You’re trying to avoid being like your parents, but they’re still the only example you’ve ever seen of what parenting teenagers looks like.
So you’re trying to build something new with tools you were never given.
And you don’t know where to start.
That’s not a character flaw.
That’s a skill gap.