A lot of parenting, by necessity, involves involuntary alterations to best-laid plans. I recently started my morning by spending a solid 45 minutes slowly crawling up the stairs, through the hall, on a brief sortie into the bathroom, and then across the boys’ bedroom floor, picking up the scattered fluff that had previously filled a large plush elephant—after choosing a new and less convenient home for the scissors. The young scientist who created this experiment helped a little, but he was honestly more interested in experiencing the fluff than in removing the fluff (valid, but our goals were not aligned and mine won out).
That is not my preferred way to begin a Monday morning. But I made myself a delicious smoothie to carry with my collecting bag, put in my earbuds with an audiobook to listen to, and approached it as a meditative task. Once I realized that my “helper” was going to be helping by refilling the cleared floorspace with additional handfuls of fluff, I sent him downstairs to watch Work It Out Wombat, because a few episodes of a mildly educational PBS kids show is better for everyone in the long run than me trying and failing to patiently include him in the clean up.
Something I am realizing is that I tend to be deeply dishonest about my own capacity, and no one benefits from that. Saying that I can do something does not automatically make it true, as much as I sometimes wish it did. And also, I can do more hard things when I confetti in nice things (like my smoothie and audiobook for the fluff clean up).