women's wisdom

Tonight I was rocking the toddler to sleep, holding her bottle of goat's milk, gazing out at the mountain
Finally catching my breath after ten days of taking care of both kids by myself while my husband was away on business
Reeling from how overwhelming, stressful, altogether whacky I feel from dealing with rudeness, poor eating habits and such
Trying to raise my children well, make the right decisions and not make others feel badly along the way
But the four year old can be so nasty, he can really make other children feel very bad and I can't help it, I feel like his behavior reflects on me, as in:
I'm a good person and care so deeply about being gentle with others, so how could I have created somebody so insensitive and cruel?

Rocking my child to sleep, these feelings swirling about
But I was thinking about the goat's milk in the bottle and wondered what my grandmother fed her babies
I heard she was pro-breastfeeding, this was in 1941, when formula feeding was just beginning to go on the rise, and women who didn't breastfeed were giving their babies condensed milk with corn syrup (I just looked this up), so it's hard for me to say whether she would have breastfed for very long or not

And with all the parenting stress still heavy on my mind, I began to wish for my grandmother's wisdom and stories
I tried to envision her as a young mother, with her '40's hair rolls and dark-dyed hair, completely overwhelmed and stressed by her crazy three and four year olds running around the house, utterly disobedient and horribly rude
This was hard to imagine, though, because I knew her as a self-assured, calm, positive woman in her later years.
I wish she was still here so she could assure me that it was crazy for her, too, that she, too, felt like she would lose her mind one of these days.

Sure, my mother can give me this affirmation, too, indeed she still has this old '60's plaque on her kitchen wall that says, As soon as I finish my work, I am going to have myself a nervous breakdown. I earned it, I worked hard for it, and I deserve it.
But to get her take on this is not satisfying to me. Grandma had reached her pinnacle of wisdom in her old age, and her assurance feels more valuable to me at this point.

I began to cry. I miss my Grandma and I need her tonight.