Parenting demands more love, more patience, more endurance that I would have thought possible. Mothering involves sleepless nights and cleaning up puke, restlessly trying to break a little one’s fever, talking to a teacher that has hurt a little one, phoning a doctor’s office to advocate for month’s sooner appointment even after they said it was impossible…countless challenging tasks. Ones I wasn’t sure I could measure up to…except when it involved a member of my tribe, suddenly it stopped being “if” I could do it, and only became a “how” I would do it.
Parenting has changed me. The junior members of my tribe have taught me to be thankful for holes in the wall, have reminded me of simple pleasures like a freezee on a hot summer day, challenge me to slow down to enjoy the pictures of a book, and had me ponder answers to questions I never even thought to ask. My tribe has shown me love when I don’t deserve it, and have extended grace when I have blown it…and I have blown it…big time. They forgive me and each other ways that remind me to forgive others…and myself.
In the process of raising my children, I myself have grown up and met challenges, pondered and worked through questions, matured and persevered.
I think differently because of their child like wisdom.
I see beauty in the world where I didn’t see it before.
I have a greater sense of what is important and what can slide because ultimately, in the big picture, it really doesn’t matter.
I’m a better mother than I was than when I began because of how my children have raised me.
I have watched my children experience some of the challenges I remember facing when I was their age…and with different characters and resources, it has been different for them. There’s something hugely redemptive about that…and it changes my perception of the world in good ways.
In anticipation of Mothering Day, I was thinking these sorts of things, and came across these thoughts from a writer, Ann Voskamp, who speaks the same ideas…only much more effectively…
The son births first and he grows, the woman still an infant mother.
And all the raising of the boy, this is her long labor, and she has to remember to breathe.
And it’s only after a whole score of years that she delivers into true motherhood, when her son leans down and kisses her forehead gentle. This is her full-term day. She only wishes it came sooner, at the beginning, when he first came.
It takes all the years of making a boy into a man — to teach a woman how to be a mother.
Do you know how wild this makes me?
It is hard and I have cried hard. And how I’d give anything for the woman I am now to be the girl who ran her trembling finger along that whorl of you. To birth mother-wisdom is a twenty-year gestation, and it’s the child who patiently raises the girl into a real woman and why is life always lived best backwards?
On Mothering Day, for those of you blessed to be moms…think on how your little, and maybe not so little ones, have, just by their living and breathing, their giggles and messes, their farts and fancies, their questions and curiosities have inspired growth in you.
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