I’ve been struggling with my middle daughter for a little while now.

I wrote this post about a particularly tough evening we’d had just over a week ago and if I’m honest, things between us have continued to go downhill from there.  Her behaviour has in actual fact (I realise as I’m typing) probably remained fairly constant – no better, no worse.  However my reactions to her behaviour have steadily declined to the point where I’m ashamed to admit that my tone of voice has been far from loving, I haven’t voluntarily reached out to her to give her a cuddle and I’ve said several things to her that would upset me enormously if anyone ever said them to me 🙁

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading various different positive/peaceful parenting blogs, hoping for some tips on how I can better manage myself so I can stay calm in difficult situations and so I can get my smiley, happy girl back, instead of the cross, sad one that I have at the moment.  Heck, I want to be the smiley, happy Mummy I used to be, instead of the cross and sad one I’ve become.  I got some ideas but something was stopping me from actually implementing them and using them.  And so the cycle continued.

And then it occurred to me this morning after I’d dropped all three girls at school, that if I’m feeling all of the things I’m feeling, she must be too.  I’d become so focused on how crappy I feel and the negative thoughts incessantly repeating themselves in my head that I’ve been completely forgetting to think about how she must be feeling and what she must be thinking.  If I feel like the worst Mum in the world, she must be feeling pretty terrible too.

As I walked quietly home I reviewed all our recent arguments in my head, but this time from her perspective.  It was like I was seeing her properly for the first time.  I suddenly got why she was doing the things she was doing, and why she was saying the things she was saying.  I think I now kind of know what I need to do to help make things better between us.

I just need to show her more love.

That’s all she wants.

It seems so simple when I write it down here and yet it’s been such a struggle for me to reach this point – I think perhaps because I’ve probably got some old stuff that I need to work on in myself.  Old buttons being pushed that I’ve unfairly been blaming on Mimi when she has absolutely no clue about any of it.

Truly seeing her for the first time felt incredibly powerful.  It made me realise that the stubbornness and loudness and ‘naughtiness’ and downright silliness that I’ve been battling against for months are really just her own personal brand of determination, opinion, feistiness and imagination.  She’s an energetic extrovert who loves being the centre of attention.  I’m an introvert who wants peace and quiet so I can organise my thoughts.  She knows what she wants and will go to any lengths to achieve it – that is a quality I hope she never loses in life.  I feel like I’ve been squashing that when in fact I think I need to be encouraging it.

So when I pick her up from school in about an hour’s time I’m going to make a supreme effort to continue to see her as I see her now – my independent, strong-willed, creative girl with the big heart.  That heart hasn’t been filled up anywhere near as much as it needs to have been and so my mission from now on is to make sure it’s full to the brim every single day no matter what.  That goes for all my girls actually, because as a result of my struggles with Mimi I now realise that I’ve been too hard on them too.

I’m going to keep in my mind the words “I see you”.  Only two people in the world have ever said those words to me and both times I felt so accepted and so ok-to-be-me that I cried.  I ‘see’ Mimi now in a way that I haven’t before and that feels like a breakthrough.

Even as I’m writing this I can feel a bit of the cloud lifting.  I can see a bit more clearly and I feel better about things.

I hope that in some way this has helped you too, whether you can directly relate to this situation or whether you can apply it to another area of your life.  If it has, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening.

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