Pushing Boundaries

Every couple months or so, my kids decide they want to push their limits.  Not physically, but thier  Mommy-imposed limits.  Thankfully they tend to be on a different schedule so I am not faced with two little monsters at the same time, although there have been particularly rough patches when their push time has overlapped.  I’m guessing the girl’s time was when my parents were visiting and she was going through a “No!/I don’t want to” phase.  Now it’s the boy’s turn.

Granted, he’s been a little under the weather since returning Saturday from his dad’s (par for the course) so he’s been medicated most nights just so he can breathe well enough to sleep.  Thanks to the benadryl, he is getting sleep, but it also makes him very tired in the morning.  (Of course it probably doesn’t help that his dad also lets him stay up to whatever time he wants with the hope that he will sleep in the  next day…nothing like taking the needs of your kids above your own!) 

Anyway, the boy has been cranky, whiny, defiant, and argumentative, and it’s driving me nuts.  Add to it that my PMSing (read: insomnia, lack of concentration, achy body, and general all-around crankiness) and today marks day three of not smoking, and that makes for an all around unpleasant mood in my house.  *sigh* This too shall pass…right?

I get that kids push their boundaries, but when half the time they don’t have any boundaries whatsoever, they push that much harder when suddenly some are imposed.  This is making life as a co-parent/single mommy very difficult.  I have friends who mourn the fact that their kids’ other parent is not involved at all, but I have a hard time sympathising when I go through this tug-of-war constantly.  I feel bad about bitching that my ex-men and their families (yeah…they live with their parents, still, after 6 and 2 years, respectively…I have great taste in boys men!) are so overly involved in my kids’ lives, but really, when all you want is to be able to work together to make a child’s already broken life more stable and you find yourself butting heads with not just the other parent, but the other parent’s parents, it gets very frustrating.  I could suffer through it all, money, stress, balancing everything on my own, if they would just step the hell off!  But they won’t, so I find kids and myself the victim of their whims and bad judgement time and time again. *sigh*sigh*

A bright spot: the boy rarely goes through this pushing thing for more than a couple days, so by the time the girl comes back home this weekend, he should be back to being his normal princely self.  Hopefully the girl has got it out of her system for the month and we will have peace over the next couple weeks…hopefully.