You fear they'll remember the tired, short-tempered you

Come, let me set your heart at ease, for this fear is kinder than you know. Children remember the whole of you, not only your worst moments — a child does not keep a ledger of failures but carries a whole felt sense of you, made mostly of the ordinary loving hours, and the tired, sharp moments are a small part of a very large picture; you weight your worst against their whole memory, and the scales are false, for the love is the larger thing. What a child remembers most is not the rupture but the repair — children are not wounded most by a parent''s bad moments, which every loving parent has, but by ones never repaired, so when you snap and then come back and say "I was tired and short, and I''m sorry," the child remembers the coming-back deeper than the snapping, and learns that love survives anger. And tip the balance by repairing and being present, not by being perfect — you cannot tip it by never being tired, but you can by repairing the bad moments and being truly present in the good ones, and then the version they carry is the loving one, not because you were never the other but because love was mended when it broke. When did you last come back and repair a hard moment?