People are afraid of all kinds
of things: spiders, the dark, or being enclosed in small spaces. Tell us about
your greatest fear — rational or irrational.
My greatest fear? Failing as a mom.
Rational or irrational? Well, I
think mostly it’s an irrational fear, but there’s always a bit of truth to our
fears. I struggled with my boys when
they were toddlers, not having any family nearby and a husband who was at work
a lot and emotionally unavailable to me when I needed him most. Mentally and
because of my lack of experience with children at the time, I had a hard time
being the best I could be for them when I was going through so much in the
years before my divorce from their dad. Then, there’s all the decisions after
the divorce in terms of custody and differences in how they are being raised
when they are with mom versus dad, and it’s certainly not been an ideal
situation for them to grow up in.
Fortunately, I began to realize, when I entered the career world of
childcare when the boys were 3 and 5, that I knew so little about being a
parent. Thankfully, I learned so much about how to guide them and about their
growth and development through the training I was required to complete for my
job as a school age care program instructor, but was it too late? I hope not. Don’t get me wrong, my boys are
both very good boys, but I don’t take much credit for that. I think I’ve just been
pretty lucky and blessed to have a God and His Angels watching over them since
they were born.
Having been a child of a dysfunctional family myself, I know the toll it
takes on young ones, and I know that my parents each did the very best they
could with where they were in life at any given moment while raising us, just
as I did. But, I can’t help but feel
that maybe I screwed up one too many times along the way, and I can only hope
and pray that they forget about the times I yelled too loudly or hurt them with
my rash, emotional words of the moment. I can only hope and pray that they
forgive the fact that their parents split up early in their lives, and that
they ended up in two different homes being raised away from each other for a
majority of their short childhood. I can
only hope that my inadequacies as a mother do not translate to them feeling any
less loved, blessed, or confident in the wonderful young men they are becoming
and in knowing that God has an awesome, perfect plan for them, no matter their
imperfect upbringing and imperfect parents.
As long as they know that their Creator loves them more than anyone else
in their life ever could, I hope and pray that will be enough. Love covers all else, right? That’s what I
believe at least. I hope if they learn nothing else from their childhood at home
with me that they know LOVE and what it really is, not because of me, but
because God speaks that into their hearts as He has mine.
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