This Hurts Me Worse Than It Hurts You

Last night I was in a terrible mood. Wes probably described it best when he dubbed it the Menstrual Apocalypse. However, that had NOTHING to do with what happened with Landry and I.

My child is a slacker. A wonderful, beautiful, highly intelligent, almost perfect little underachiever. Big surprise, right? He comes from a LOOONG line of underachievers. It's in his genes. He is so smart. Genius smart. He is so smart that he can do his homework in 28.6 seconds flat and still do better than most. He is so smart that he has had me, his dad, and almost any other adult he has come in contact with, catering to his every whim for the last 10 years and feeling guilty when we don't. He is so smart that he has "beaten the game" on just about every PlayStation 2 game known to man. I don't mean beaten another kid playing the game (that is simply a given)...I mean beaten the GAME. Gotten a score so high that the GAME says "ok, I give up" and calls it quits. And as an aside to the PlayStation note....if my child spent one tenth of the effort that he puts into playing PlayStation2 he could have solved world hunger or learned to play Mozart with his toes. But NO, he is not interested in any of that. That would be BORING.

My child also has a bit of an Eeyore Complex and a bad attitude. GOD LOVE HIM. He seems like he lost his best friend on most days. When he comes in from school and I ask what kind of day he had, the standard answer is TERRIBLE. This is normal in our house. He is not depressed or sad. He is just Landry. He wants to be entertained. His life is boring. He is jaded.

Anyway, I told Landry to write his spelling words 5 times apiece. In the standard 28.6 seconds he was back and said he did it. When asked to produce the paper that he wrote it on I found that he had written them only once. And to add insult to injury, he had not even written all of them with the right spellings!!! So I gave him chance number two and sent him off to his room. This time he returned in 43.9 seconds and confidently said he had them all down. Again asked to produce the piece of paper, he was busted a second time having written them only twice, and again INCORRECTLY. (Are you sensing my frustration???)

I began to call out his spelling words at this point and he missed approximately half of them; interjecting the misspellings with sighs, eyerolls, and bodily twitches meant to illustrate his utter disgust and boredom with the whole process.

STRIKE THREE YOU ARE OUT!

At this point the constructive parenting began (otherwise known as Mom Lost Her Shit). Off to bed he went at 8:30 pm, grounded from PlayStation2, and assaulted with a slew of parental advice. I was deaf to his pleas that he "forgot" how many times I had said to write the words.

So in the ensuing quiet I sat....(Wes had hightailed it across town to his house in self defense). I sat, and I sat, and I thought, and I cried. I felt guilty.

I know it is my job to parent. I know it is for his own good. But it honestly does hurt me more than it hurts him.