Parents of young children: listen up.
I once heard a friend say, “the days are long but the years are short”. I wasn’t sure what they meant. You can now ask any parent that just dropped off their youngest child at all-day elementary school and they will explain.
Our home is now quiet during the day. The sounds of our infants crying as they wake from a nap are long gone. The milestones of four word sentences have been replaced by chattiness and existential questions. We read to our children less and less as they read to us more and more. Their little round chubby faces have grown long as each of their baby teeth have dropped out to be replaced by the longterm varsity players.
This morning, I held my daughter’s hand as we walked into the school. She reached over with her free hand and slowly removed each of my fingers one at a time, smiled at me and then gently said, “I want to walk on my own”. Her hand slipped out of mine as her pace quickened and she moved freely ahead of me. She then took a knife out, stabbed me with it and backed over my body with a cement truck. The second series of events was less painful than the first.
I keep telling my wife that I don’t have any specific regrets about the years my kids were younger except this: I wish I had appreciated it more.
I squandered a lot of beautiful moments with my kids simply by allowing the longing for more personal freedom to poison my attitude. (I REALLY wish I had believed Jesus when he told us to trust God and not to worry about tomorrow so much.) Now that I have more freedom to choose what do with my time and energy, I find myself realizing I’ve already had what I really want. I want to connect with my children.
The cruelty of parenting is that we have to share our energy with other people besides our children. By the time our careers, responsibilities and other relationships take their cut, we find ourselves showing up with a fraction of what we’d envisioned to give them. This is disappointing as parents. But I think our kids are far more gracious about this than we realize.
Kids don’t want our perfection. They want our presence.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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