When I was in the hospital giving birth to our son,
there were two guests waiting in the hallway to help us welcome our new baby.
Little did I know at that point that they were also
welcoming me into motherhood. My mom and
mother-in-law stood there together, 60 years of experience between them, ready
to pass on all that they had learned about being a mother, to me. I had at that point read several books and articles on motherhood in preparation for this day. Despite this, I felt utterly lost about being a mom.
I met their enthusiasm with open arms and a
terrified soul. I gripped their knowledge
about motherhood like I was hanging onto a tree limb over a very high
cliff. I had been around babies my whole
life, even watched a younger brother grow from infancy to adulthood, but
something about a baby that I was solely responsible for wiped any previous
knowledge completely from my mind.
Suddenly I had no idea how to hold a baby, diaper a baby, recognize a
baby’s needs, when to feed, bathe, or how to clothe a baby.
Luckily, these women were
more than willing to teach me. As were
our grandmothers, aunts, cousins, family friends, women who I met at
church and in the neighborhood. I asked
questions and listened to answers, implemented baby-raising techniques and
adjusted others to fit our lifestyle.
All the while, I read parenting books and magazine articles about
parenting to see if there was anything I might be missing. In short, I used my resources to figure out
how to be a mother.
Through the years, and another
child later, I’m still learning how to parent. I still ask questions about things that I’m
not so sure of, if only to receive confirmation that my children are not the
only ones who display a behavior that I’m not so psyched about. Is this normal? Does your son do this? Does your daughter talk about that? How do you get your kids to go to the
bathroom/sleep in their own beds/get dressed on their own/eat vegetables/do
their homework? I have to know.
I ask about experiences. I ask family members about how it was when I
was a kid, and what they would do if they were raising a kid today. I ask friends about their experiences with
allowances, pacifiers, sleepovers, cellphones, activity overload. I ask friends what they make for dinner when
their kids have extra-curricular activities.
The women in my life (and sometimes men) and I talk about what works for
us and what doesn’t not only in parenting, but also in relationships,
vacationing, intimacy, work schedules. I
learn how to do everything from these conversations.
Of course, what works for one
person will not always work for me or my family. But these things are the exception, not the
rule. I learn that we are not really as
different as we think we are. Neither are
our kids.
Still, I have found that many people
don’t want to learn about how anyone else does things. I have heard people defend their parenting
and life styles under the guise of Nobody Tells Me How to Live My Life.
It’s pride, really. Pride in thinking that I am the only one who
can do anything for my family. Pride in
thinking that I know best.
I get that. Everyone wants some kind of control in
life. Whether it is parenting, or relationship
with a spouse or mother or father, or a job – we all want to feel as if we hold
the reins, that we have it all together.
But then something happens
and we lose that control. We fall. A child gets into trouble. A husband loses his job. A marriage weakens. And we suffer. The pain is lonely.
At that moment, we can lean on others who might have had the same experience. We can learn from their past mistakes and try not to make the same ones. We can ask for help; more often than not, those we love are more than happy to tell us how they endured the hard times.
God puts people in our paths to help us learn about life. I have no question that the people who helped me through the toughest days of parenting young children were expressly put there by God to teach me something in the the exact way that I needed to hear it. He has this knack for inserting just the right person at the right time to show us a way out of whatever we are struggling with. The best part is that his teaching is designed to always yield wisdom.
Our part is to humble ourselves, admit that we don't have all the answers, and look to him for guidance. We need only be open to the lesson.
*******
Learn
everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always
come a time when you will be grateful you did. – Sarah Caldwell
I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters, about our
ancestors in the wilderness long ago. All of them were guided by a cloud that
moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground. In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as
followers of Moses. All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the
same spiritual water. For they drank
from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ. Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were
scattered in the wilderness. These
things happened as a warning to us… These
things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us
who live at the end of the age. 1
Corinthians 10:1-6a, 11 (NLT)
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