MY KIDS AND ME (preface)

A book in the making, entitled "My Kids and Me" that I will be sharing with you as I write...


I am not a mother goat, so my children are not kids. I never like to refer to the eight precious children the Lord gave my husband and me, as kids. But for the sake of title, I’ll use that term.

Strangely enough, this story starts with the birth of my second child, Joel. It must have been the day after his birth. I remember the nurse handing him to me, and this thought came to me: “He’s so perfect. The only blotch he will ever have will be put there by me.”

Of course, that wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now: he wasn’t perfect, and I would not be the only blotcher in his life.

What is this innate quality that we mothers are “born” with…the day our first child is born? This paranoia of having the destiny of our child, and hence the destiny of mankind in our hands? Why this feeling of needing to be perfect?...everything from bath time schedules to feeding techniques to story-telling time. If everything doesn’t go on schedule and exactly right, he might not turn out to be the person he was destined to be.

When I use the pronoun, he, I use it in the generic sense, because I also have four girls, as well as four boys.

I am fixing to celebrate my 39th Mother’s Day, and I will, as I do every year, evaluate my performance of the past year. Where did I go wrong? What did I do right? What do I need to change?

So I think the purpose of this book, is not to flaunt my abilities as a mother, and certainly not to flaunt my children. Sinners have no business flaunting in the first place, because sin is a shame.

The purpose of this book is to encourage mothers like me. I’m well past the training era in my life. I have four daughters in law, and four sons in law. They, too, have already been trained. This book is written, not only for them and for all the young parents in the world, but it’s written for the grandmothers, to whom God has given a second chance. While looking back over my parenting days, I can apply the experience of my shortcomings toward my grandparenting days.

I will neither expose the shortcomings of my children in this book, nor display their virtues and talents. Without doing either, I will, to the best of my ability, look back over the years shared with my husband, the years when we were in our twenties and thirties with all our brood still at home. I will try to draw out memories of their teen years, their college years, their “moving on with their lives” years.

Even the valleys to be crossed, the dark nights…sleepless nights of not knowing where that child was, nights that required complete trust in Him Who only could care for him…to the fun filled times, the financially grueling times, which bring back vivid memories of a big jar of Welch’s grape jam.

There were sad times we all went through, which bound us together as nothing else but tragedy can. All these are wrapped together between the covers of this book, like we would snuggle beneath the covers of our warm bed when Daddy was still here, and read a book, or listen to our shortwave radio.

So as I start out on this second journey of writing a book, I do so, not with the thought that “if I did it, you can do it,” but with the assurance that even if I didn’t do it, you can still do it…even better than I did.