” leave the house again and learn to be a better parent. But I already knew that Smoke had offered the better lesson: Just love me. Do what you do. Don’t go to the class. Stay home.” Such a raw honest truth. We gear ourselves so much to the going, and going, and going that we lose sight of the value of staying. Our children don’t remember the games, each new toy, every destination vacation. Instead they remember time. The minutes spent read to them each night. That time you showed them how to bait a hook or that time you held them extra long to gently smooth their hair after they’ve had a bad day or a fall. That time you kissed the scrape on their knee and magically made it better through the sheer force of your love. Forget the go. Stay. Just stay.
Last week, while reading student essays, I came across a sentence that shifted something in me. It was a Tuesday morning, and I sat in my dark and quiet office. This essay told the story of a mother-son relationship, a relationship that had nearly dissolved once the author reached adulthood. It was a beautiful essay, and in the second paragraph the author explained that his teenage years had been filled with small transgressions and punishments, but none of these conflicts had ever threatened his bond with his mother because she had made it so undeniably clear that she loved him. “Parenting is not hard,” he wrote. The knowledge of her love was all he’d ever needed.
Parenting is not hard. That was the sentence. I underlined it in purple pen.
All week that sentence kept replaying itself in my brain, often during parenting moments that were, indeed, hard, like…
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Glitter-n-Grit 