I have a confession to make. When I became a mother,
I had no credentials.
It gets worse.
My husband and I raised our two children by gut
instinct. There was no village. There was just me on the days my firefighter
husband was on a twenty-four hour shift. And the rest of the time—there were
just the two of us.
And . . .
wait for it. . .
we didn’t know what we were doing. Close your mouth.
I wonder sometimes why God gives babies to barely
grown adults. Completely uneducated, with no significant prior experience, we’re
supposed to train them up in the way they should go. We barely knew where we were going. How were we supposed to
know where our kids should go?
We’d both had examples, of course. Not perfect, but examples. So we turned to them for advice.
“You’re entitled to your own mistakes,” I was told.
Which didn’t exactly sound like advice to me. It sounded more like a life
sentence with no hope of parole. What had they learned about raising kids?
I felt like I was being warned. Like I was
put on notice that I was definitely going to screw up somehow, which was either
a reflection on me or on the frustrating responsibility of parenting. Or
both.
So I set about to do it right. Do it perfectly. Fix
all the mistakes in the next generation that had been made with ours.
It wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t possible.
I was determined to do it anyway.
Mold my breed. Train their minds. Give them my
values and watch them live a perfect life.
Like mine.
There was a problem, though. I wasn’t perfect.
Like a temperamental cake in the oven, I was in
process myself the entire time I was in the process of raising my children. I’m
not even the same person today that I was thirty years ago. Today, if I had the
energy of my twenty-seven-year-old self and was given another child to raise,
there are a lot of things I’d do differently. Then when those twenty years of
second chance parenting were finished and this
time I was sure I’d done it perfectly and trained my children to be as near
perfect as I could make them . . .
They’d still live life on their terms, not mine.
I don’t want my kids to be my clones. This
temperamental cake isn’t done yet.
I want them to live life in the same freedom God
gave me. Free to be themselves in a complicated world, able to respond to
life’s challenges with their own varied points of view, and completely assured we’re
on their side.
Thank God it was never up to me to decide who my
children should be or how they should live. It’s always been up to the
One Who loves them perfectly and never shoulds
on them.
Look at that. I think I just grew up a little.
