The Sharp Truth of Parenting

"...[P]art of what I’m seeing is that even now, even at age seven, he’s miles beyond my grasp. I can’t impose peace and happiness on him any more than I could impose it on those noisy middle school hallways years ago. He is on his journey, not mine. I’ve always known that. But I’m only just now feeling the sharp truth of it." 

--FloorPie from her blog of the same name

I love this quote, and it makes me want to cry all at the same time. The older our children get, the more they - and their life experiences - are out of our grasp, completely beyond our control.

The thing is, they really always were. 

The more I do this job called parenting the more I feel the truth of Kahlil Gibran's poem, "Your children are not your children, They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself..." and Floorpie's observation that they are on their journey, not mine. 

I can guide and commiserate and offer snacks, but they are pretty much on their own to figure it out and make the best of it. To find happiness and love and what feels to them like success. 

I hope they find it easier than I have (and with better results), but that is not up to me. All I can do is watch and love and feel the sharp truth of it.

For Better AND for Worse

"We’ve seen each other bleed, cry, and suffer humiliating defeat; we’ve given each other our imperfect best; and we belong to each other. In other words, we’re family." 

--Floorpie, one of my favorite bloggers, about her marriage

When choosing our partners for life we select for equal parts attraction and fantasy. Hopefully we also look for shared values, compatible dreams and the ability to speak the truth of who we are. 

But inevitably, if you stick together for a number of years, you get to a place I like to call the "I can't believe I married someone who" moment.

At that moment, you just can't imagine carrying on with this person. 

One of the funniest moments like that in my marriage was when I realized that my husband was using our dish-washing sponge to wipe the floor. Worse, that he had been doing this for YEARS. 

This revelation led to a shrill and shrieky argument and rocked my world for a few moments. Could I carry on being married to someone who thought it was okay to wipe the floor with the same sponge we used to wash the dishes? I just wasn't sure.....

We made it through that "for worse" moment and eventually got back to "better," but it wasn't until the other day that I realized the vow is all wrong. It should be "for better AND for worse" because it's always BOTH, isn't it?

In my younger days I always just assumed that eventually we would work out all the bugs, get to "better" and just hang out there for the rest of our days. That hasn't happened....yet. 

The other day we had one of our periodic knock-down-drag-outs about communication and somewhere in the midst of that fight, I finally got it. I stopped seeing our "worse" moments as the end of the world, or at least the beginning of the end. 

I now know that "worse" will eventually morph back into "better" (and on the flip side, that "better" will once again slide into "worse") - sometimes within days, sometimes within hours, sometimes even within minutes.