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This year my son Eric and I are going to be going into some deeper waters with our ministry The Parenting Dare. We feel called to really delve and will be going through a blog series entitled “Raising Strong Children in Today’s World.”
Before we get there, I thought it would be wise to take a couple of weeks and just explore the inner landscape of us moms. If you think about it, stepping back and getting some things in order is important because how we feel about ourselves shows up in how we talk, act and breath in our home and with our most favorite people! Friends! Listen to this post instead of reading! We are podcasting again! Yippee!
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My son Eric and I have worked together in the ministry of "The Parenting Dare" and we both know it is time to go deeper with parents in the realm of raising strong kids in our culture. Before we go in that direction, we felt it would be prudent (because of all of the crazy that has happened in the last eleven months) to take a couple of weeks and attend to the inner hearts of MOTHERS.
This post is one in a series of four where I will invite you to look deeper into you. What a crazy couple of months we have had around here, as Mama Lori got the ‘Rona in November. I could not taste or smell Thanksgiving dinner!
Then this month one of our daughters (living at home) tested positive. (Two of our adult children have had it, too.) The past two months have been different….we’ve had to be on house arrest more than we would have liked. The year was 1999. I was sitting next to a friend on a bench at the Sedgwick County Zoo; we were watching our children hang like a bunch of monkeys on the fence near the giraffe exhibit.
I turned to my friend and told her that I was expecting child number four. Her face froze. I could see her pull inward. And then she almost got angry and said, “I knew you would do this.” And I was like, “Whoa...wait a minute...do what?” “Have another child.” Imagine that you are a mother of five great kids, ranging in age from 13 to 23.
You have been a consistent mother to them, loving them through the difficulties of growing up, while setting clear boundaries. You have built into them individually and collectively. After all of the sleepless days and endless daytime activity, you can honestly say that you love each one more than you could have ever thought possible. Several years ago, I walked into a room and saw a friend kneeling next to her son, who had just asked about the rosary. He had heard his cousins talking about it and he wanted to know what it was.
His mom quickly squashed his curiosity, saying that the rosary was “boring prayers that you say over and over.” I chuckled. And I had to admit, when I was young, that is how I used to think of the rosary. Whenever my mom called us kids to pray the rosary, I usually stalled. I had a hard time leaving whatever I was doing to go pray. The rosary seemed boring. Lifeless. Something to get through. Friends, for the past four or five months we have been experiencing Life in a much different way. We've seen our schools and churches close. We've been isolated in our homes. There have been lay-offs and shut downs. We've seen police brutality, rioting and looting. There is fear and panic circulating.
Fear.is.not.of.God. It's just not. How to get peace? We have to put God first in our lives. And we have to understand there is an enemy of God and he wants to steal, kill and destroy life. I love it when my kids sleep until noon. You know why? Because I get time to myself.
It is glorious. The house is QUIET. No one is breathing in my space, no one is asking questions, no one has needs. I can just be. It is absolutely beautiful and a HUGE, massive part of me says, “Lori, this is genius. Talk about a win-win situation. They stay up late while you go to sleep and they sleep while you get up in the early morning and have quiet time.” I recently sat down and asked two college graduates this question:
What do you wish your parents would have taught you but didn’t? Why did I ask them that question? Well, I had this brilliant idea of making a blog post, “What you wish your parents would have taught you before you graduated from high school.” Author's Note: When this post was originally written, I believed the the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement was composed of good people with good intentions. I am about that. However, I have since learned that a group of Marxists more or less hijacked BLM for their own devious purposes. I am not about that life and I do not support The Black Lives organization.
I decided to leave this post up, simply because it showcases just how naive I was. Read. Learn. Grow. ********************************************************** Last week I wrote a post about George Floyd and how his needless death had greatly impacted my own life. I dug a little deeper into the background of racism in America and frankly, I was appalled and grieved by what I discovered. Read that post now: We are at a Defining Moment. As a white woman living snugly and safely in the heartland of America, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. |
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, The Daughter Dare, Now What?, and The Triple Dare.
Send us an email: lorianderic@theparentingdare.com
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