Lenten promises

Ah, the season of Lent.

It came upon me so fast.  This year I had thought of what I was going to "give up" about 1 month ahead of time.  I had a priest once tell me that it is not about giving up candy, smoking, coffee, etc, it is about making yourself a better person as a whole.  He said while still giving up those things you could also resolve to do something good like help out the community, feed the poor, go to confession, donate your time helping out the less fortunate, etc.

With that in mind, I have thought about it.  I have tried to give up this up before.  This year I have decided to give up yelling to become a better parent to my children; however, if they run out in front of a car you bet I will yell.  I have decided that I do not want to be my parents in any "abusive" way and yelling is verbal abuse in my opinion.  I yell about everything, especially when work is stressing me out.  That is not fair to them, because I am stressed out they get the brunt of it, how is that fair?

My husband is on board as well.  He and I have done well since Lent started on Wednesday.  I have post-it notes everywhere telling me not to yell.  God has put us through the test believe me.  My kids said I should put one in the van because the other day I yelled at them to get in the car after the 50th time of telling them too.  I had a really busy week of work and was very stressed, but chose not to yell.  The hardest time I have is yelling to get one of them to come to me.  I have to make many trips out to the living room when they are fighting while I am working and tell them not to fight.  I have to make many trips out to the living room to tell them to clean their rooms and the list goes on.

This weekend we decided that we were going to having cleaning day on Saturday.  I really hate cleaning day, not because I don't want the house to be clean, but because I hate to have to tell my son to clean.  He is 8 years old and throws severe tantrums whenever we ask him to clean.  He and H were cleaning and H was not doing her job, so he was screaming at her to clean it up.  We told him because he gave up being mean to H for Lent that he needed to be nicer.  Well because he continued to scream at her we decided that he needed to clean his room by himself, so we asked him to do that.  Well that caused him to get severely angry and throw a huge tantrum.  We told him that he just needed to go to bed.  He proceeded to throw things at his door, tell us he hated us, he thought we were the worse parents in the world, and so on and so forth.  I only yelled at him to stop it once and me and my husband did excellent at staying calm through it all.  After about an hour he went to sleep.  I was really proud of how the situation went without yelling.

When I have done this before it always go well the first few days and then towards the end of the 2nd week I usually resort to my old self, so I am going to try really hard to do it this year.  I need to do it for my kids.  Here is to no more yelling.