You knew I wasn't gonna be able to not rant one more time......

before the end of the year. Yes, you do know how I roll.

I went to the Dr. on Monday. Yep, got another lung thing going on. Darn. The appointment went very nicely, no complaints about the nurses, PA's or schedulers. Everyone was great and it also went very fast. But.....and you know I always have a but....gripe numero uno: I was reading an article in a parenting magazine while I waited and there was an article about how to be a "calm parent". Calm parents raise children who are calm. (It's that whole nuts not falling too far from the tree thing) Calm parents remove themselves from stressful situations (this does not mean go running into the night screaming), contemplate how to react to the infraction (without death and destruction being mentioned), misdeed, wrong doing. Then the calm parent talks to the child (offender) and let's them know how they went wrong and how they can correct the behavior. And the article went on to say that we all make mistakes and sometimes when a parent has handled a situation in an "un calm" (normal reaction)  manner, we have to learn to forgive ourselves. Yeah, that part I agree with as well as the part that said that parents must put their needs first in order not to be stressed more with child rearing.

Okay, on the written page and in my head, I get it. I worked with teenagers for 20+ years, they don't respond well to threats, anger, angst, crying and carrying on. I was required to take a number of hours of "be nice and don't get us sued" classes. But I'm sitting in the doctors office thinking ......big bubble of words above my head....that's fine if you are that kind of calm, collected, got all your stuff in one pile person to begin with. If you're not, it's great to aspire to not screaming at your kids when they paint hair remover on the cat. But conventional wisdom says, I might scream loud enough for folks in Texas to hear me. It is wonderful to have ethereal goals in life.....but well then there are the rest of us imperfect people who have been told repeatedly, we are imperfect and that's why we scream. So the vicious circle just keeps on turning. At this point, my grands would probably think that I was at death's door if I didn't have an animated and verbose response to a crisis.

The action, reaction, blame, guilt, sadness cycle is such a part of not having any power as a child. So there we are walking a tightrope to make sure our own children (grandchildren) are not impaired by our own histories. It is lofty and noble and hard and impossible sometimes. And for folks like me, articles like that are a trigger to thinking way too much and writing blogs about it.

2nd gripe: There was this pair of females in their 60's sitting across from me. The one was chatty cathy incarnate and the other couldn't get a word in sideways. The chatty one was looking through a magazine, telling the other one what she thought of everything in the magazine and licking her finger to help her turn every single page................and I'm thinking and how many other people have done the lick and turn thing in that magazine today, let alone since it was put in the waiting room with coughs and sneezes and all manner of goodness knows what. It was at that point I put the magazine I was reading down, looked in my purse and got out my bottle of antibacterial. eeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. That's just nasty ya'll.