Parenting Failure?

I've been thinking about this blog and the idea has dawned on me that its biggest flaw is the facade it paints: the perfect foster-mummy coming up with advice and solutions which I beatifically impart to my friends and family. Sigh.

Of course we all know it is not like that at all, and I do try to discuss the more complicated aspects of parenting.  However sometimes it just feels like failure.  Like falling.  Like losing, and more importantly like we are impersonators of parents.  Fake parents.  This last concept gets unconsciously reinforced by the general populace: where are their real parents? what are their real parents doing?  It's difficult because it feels damn real, being a foster parent or parent or otherwise.

So, failure.  By this I mean, we have these kids and we can see them for all their beauty and potential and yet they spend all their time sabotaging this: eating food off the ground, spitting on strangers, kicking at their classmates' faces for laughing at them, lying to us, refusing to brush their teeth until their breath is fetid and smells like rotting meat... The list goes on.  I suppose in a way many things on the list are just 'normal' parenting, and many are unique to the fostering situation.  Failing to prevent disaster is a difficult topic to approach and discuss with friends.  Most are sympathetic.  Some have some ideas or strategies to try.  People sometimes discuss it like a bad business venture- like something that was always risky and likely to go wrong.  They point out how late we got the older children, how broken and distressed they already were.  Scientifically speaking, or mathematically speaking the odds were good that one or two of them would be angry, deceitful, broken little people I suppose.

None of these points capture the despairing, hope-crushing feeling in my chest.  They are not just attempts, practices at something.  They really are these incredible, potential-filled human beings.  So I have to ask, is that just part and parcel to being a parent?  Watching your children make these dreadful mistakes and just holding your breath, hoping and praying that they will learn from them?  Because if it is, sometimes it hurts a lot.

But, while I have been writing this a little three year old has poked his head around the corner and asked if I was sad.  He offered to make it better, gave me a hug and then said, "are you better?" And I guess I am.  Maybe the trick to being a parent is about being really goddamn persistent.  So I am using this healing hug to give me the superpower bravery to get up and keep trying.