Nobody likes confrontation. Nobody likes having to enforce our boundaries. Nobody likes having to have an awkward conversation with their parents. Or the boss. Or the mechanic who is working on your car.

But you know what we should like even less? Being burned out when we get home. Not having patience or energy left for our kids. Not having a shred of slack left to deal with the inevitable stresses that will occur in the course of picking them up from school, getting them dinner, getting them to bed.

So guess what? If you don’t want to be guilty of the latter, you’re going to have to be proactive about the former. It’s wonderful that you want to be nice, low drama, that you don’t want to be the squeaky wheel, that you’d just rather let stuff go. But if you’re too nice, you’ll run out of kindness by the time you get home. If you bottle it all up in the course of the day, it’ll explode all over the people you care about the most. If you’re not protective enough of your space, of your time, of your worth, you’re not going to have any left over for the people you’re supposed to be protecting.

As parents, we have to stand up for ourselves in work, in the course of a day, against all the things liable to intrude on our lives and our sanity…because it’s also a way of standing up for our kids. It’s a way of showing them not to be doormats. It’s a way of showing them what good priorities look like (that they are our priority mainly).