My older son graduates in six days. I can hardly believe it.
Time is a strange thing. I know this is the way things go, the way things are meant to be. Time always flows forward, never backward.
Yesterday evening, I attended a kindergarten “graduation” – the youngest child of some close friends. I reflected that my youngest child is finishing ninth grade and again wondered where time has gone.
I am also reading a book called Real Love for Real Life, about the art of caregiving not just as a vocation but as a lifestyle. Naturally, a lot was said about the caregiving work that parents do.
One quote near the end states, “Our human need is the same from birth through death: we long to experience embodied love. We yearn to be loved in tangible ways.”
I finished the book this morning and perhaps a combination of that and sitting between my two oldest children yesterday evening, watching the kindergarten graduation—my daughter who is in the middle of her college years and my son with a week before graduation and considering the options before him—I suppose it all got me reflecting.
I thought about my own children when they were kindergarten age. I never gave much mind to waiting for a certain age to teach them certain things. Early learning was very important to me; perhaps too important, but I was a young and idealistic mother; hopefully you'll forgive me (and hopefully my own kids will forgive me) for my perhaps undue focus on scholastics and education.
From the time they were old enough to sit up, I would use flash cards with words and fact cards with pictures. Teaching them first to sight read and filling their little minds with all kinds of facts and words with accompanying images: seasons, colors, numbers, days of the week.
I had watched Your Baby Can Read while pregnant with my daughter—a video that showed a father teaching his daughter to read before she could walk or talk, so I tried the same. It was successful overall. As my daughter began reading sight words, we began to work on phonics. Then I pulled out writing notebooks and she started learning how to write.
But the thing is, I wasn't always the one to personally teach them. I would create detailed and elaborate schedules for their training and make sure the materials were available, but in their earliest years, they were often in the care of others.
We lived in India, and I had a demanding ministry that sometimes took me away from home for days at a time. The longest I was away from my kids was about a month period. Of course, my husband was around, and they had devoted caretakers. Not just babysitters but young women who were very involved and dedicated, but it wasn't their mom.
That longest stretch was just after my son’s first birthday. My daughter's 3rd birthday took place during that month, and I missed it.
I could offer reasons, of course.
Every time I tried to take a step back in the ministry work, I was castigated (ironically often by other women). When my daughter was born and I was reeling from a lack of sleep and unspoken postpartum depression that I didn't know how to express, I missed a few early morning meetings. A woman came up to me one day and told me that if I didn't get on top of my schedule in life now, I never would. What would I do when more kids came along if I couldn't manage my workload while being a mother to one infant daughter?
When my daughter was about nine months old, I got a similar talk to by another woman.
The next time, 10 days before my son’s due date, I received a letter from my supervisor who was out of the country at the time, telling me that one of my coworkers (who I thought was a friend, but that's another story for another time) had written him a long letter complaining about all the ways I was falling down in my duties.
I could barely sleep that night. Yes, I had been falling back in my duties, feeling completely exhausted as one does with a toddler daughter and a child along on the way.
I woke up about 6:00 in the morning and wrote my supervisor a long letter of response. I told him that in spite of being tired I would really try hard. I would try better.
My son was born that night, nine days early. And from that point on, and for as long as I continued to work with those same people, my mindset was one of “the work comes first and I need to prove myself.”
I didn't want another long letter. I didn't want another patronizing talking to by women whose children were now grown or mothers who never engaged with their kids and expected others to care for them. There was little joy in those days, but that's another story.
And so, in trying to prove myself and maintain the work schedule that was expected of me, I did miss a lot of time when my children were young.
But here is the confession:
I didn't always miss it. My work was taxing but also engaging.
I didn’t realize what it was I was losing.
If I had read books like Real Love for Real Life and Courage, Dear Heart and Rhythms of Renewal and Quiet Places—the kind of books I'm reading now—about the importance of true caregiving (not just for others but for oneself as well) my approach would have been different.
I would have embraced that work of motherhood and taken a step back in other responsibilities. But like I said, I was young, and stronger voices in my life told me of the importance of being devoted to my work and not letting anything come first.
But then, my supervisor told me one day out of the blue that my kids were growing fast and suggested that I make them more of a main focus. He told me he was willing to cut down my hours of work and encouraged me not to take on more projects.
This, the supervisor who had written me from out of the country asking me why I wasn’t keeping up when I was the subject of complaint by my female coworker. This, the supervisor who pushed me to get a cell phone so I could be on call at any time.
I was surprised and even a little bit ... dismayed? No, more like incredulous. I’m a good mom, I thought to myself.
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