First Chapter

by Pat Antonopoulos
The first chapter in our book is titled: Parenting: What I Learned From My Children. The lessons continue and the chapter should have said Learning From My Children.

Not all the lessons are ones I want to learn.
Not all are the lessons that come with that joy of parenting.
Not all are lessons that I will grasp the first time.
Some lessons hurt enough to wish for yesterday's ignorance.

When a child is very young, we easily fix their hurts. Recently, my 2 1/2 year old grandson talked about burning his thumb on the stove. "I cried and Mommy held me til it was better. Mommy does that. Mommy makes me better."

Teen hurts go deeper and happen at a time when our children are struggling for independence and a stronger sense of self. Often, the teen pushes away and doesn't trust parents to make it better. Through their growing years we have worked to teach our teens the ways of independence but the lessons get garbled in peer pressure, hormones and cultural expectations.

Sharing the pain of adult children seems to go deepest into our layers of protection. Their adult pain feels raw, partially because a parent can be helpless to change the situation. We know our control is limited---or, most likely, non-existent, but still we want to hold until we make it better.

When an adult child seems to be saying that he understands that a parent's love and pride are not dependent on station in life or material success yet isolates himself as if the opposite were true, something is wrong...very wrong. When an adult child is experiencing something that he labels 'failure', the dark takes over. This helplessness is as unbearable as any pain.

A friend recently sent a card with this quote:
"People can only see a little way down the road. But (A Higher Power) can see the whole trip."
Wish I could get a peek at that map.