How embarrassing it is to be me.

Unbearably self-righteous at times, reality then bites me in the butt. You’d think I’d have learned more lessons in this before I faced my 53rd birthday, but just like my kids, it’s apparently taken a bit longer for me.

I’d bragged on my daughter yesterday, called her a star in our family to a social worker, only to have this same child try and sneak out that very same night. Guess who lost her cell phone privileges?

I’d boasted about another child recently, only to end up with worse than egg on my face.

I’d crowed about our ability as a family to avoid certain issues, only to have a dreadful problem explode in my face.

This article took yet another layer of my own self-confidence away. I can be thin and have fat in me? Where would it be? Am I sedentary? I don’t know. I don’t exercise so I must be, but I’m active. I thought this wasn’t a problem for me, but it looks like it might be. Oops.

My family has taken a great many embarrassing and appalling hits lately. I’d written about how to deal with our challenges just yesterday only to face yet another test of my will.

A lady on the soccer field complimented me last night on how well behaved my kids seemed to be and I didn’t know if I should even say, “Thank you, “ knowing so much more than she of their misbehaviors and sometimes criminal behavior. I just kind of gulped and smiled, told her I appreciated that thought. I really felt that hugging her, so hungry am I for a compliment, but that would have seemed odd.

Last week at soccer two of my kids got in a fist fight with each other, a thirteen year old busting the lip of a twelve year old who then had a rage. How embarrassing. Today, with five kids on one team, I had to literally yell at the one who was hollering, “You idiot,” at the other. Finally they sublimated their anger at each other into fury on the field, managing to tie the game at the last minute and earn a spot in the play-offs. Way to channel the bad stuff into a better outcome I thought.

Their coach, a professor of sociology at a nearby university, quite likely uses them, my ornery kids, as examples of recalcitrant behaviors in his class of eager young middle class kids, oh, kind of like I used to be thirty years ago before this baptism by fire experience of parenting traumatized children