We're Not Done With Them Yet!

Come on.  Spill it.  Let’s tell the truth.  All of us are muddling through this endeavor called motherhood.  It is an incredibly daunting undertaking – the task of raising kind, confident, competent, productive citizens of the world.  Yet any among us is free to take a crack at it.

Most take the job seriously, driven by the insane amount of love we have for our children.  I am certain God instilled such enormous love to keep us from killing our young.  We do whatever it takes to heal them, console them, and protect them from an often cruel world.  We want everything for them.  And we often lose our minds and ourselves trying to get it for them.  Consider me guilty on this one.

Moms are funny creatures.  We can go to the school to volunteer in our little sweater sets and cute, sensible flats.  We can attend a party in our tasteful little black dresses, making charming adult conversation.  But if we think one of our kids is in danger, in pain, or mistreated in any way, we can become ruthless, rabid dogs.  We are complex, comical, and often crazy.

Even funnier are these little people that we are charged with molding into honorable humans.  They mess up.  They make bad decisions.  They embarrass us.  But it is because we still have work to do.  As my own mother often reminds me when I am in a tizzy about one of my kids' antics: we're not done with them yet.  And they are not done with us.

In response to their missteps, moms can really further botch the situation by overreacting, ranting, lecturing, and over thinking.  I am a serious repeat offender on this one. We forget what a painstaking process it was for us when we were growing up … because we were so busy growing up.  Like most other worthwhile ventures, parenting is a marathon and not a sprint.  And we still have time.  Thank God, because I’m not done with mine yet.

The purpose of this blog is threefold (Did I just say “threefold"?):

1.        Create a forum for the truth about raising kids.  I am not a perfect mom and my kids can be turkeys.  That’s what you’ll see here.

2.        Hopefully we can laugh a little at ourselves and our families (they give us so much material!).

3.       Share tips and hard-learned lessons from my own teaching and parenting experiences.

We need to laugh about this job.  We need to share our struggles and successes.  We should support each other in this most rewarding, difficult role of our lives.  It is serious work.  But we need to stop.  Breathe.  Laugh.  Enjoy the ride.  We will blink and they will be grown.

Live.  Share.  Laugh!