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A Week of Gratitude: Day 5 – Parents
On Thanksgiving Day, I have to express gratitude for my parents. When you’re young and stupid it’s easy to take for granted how much your life is shaped for good or ill by your Mom and Dad. The food magically appears, problems get solved with little effort on your part, and there is always someone there to make things better. When you leave the nest, you learn quickly how much work goes into making all of that possible. If you are lucky, and I was lucky, you had parents who modeled the behaviors you will need when you are the one who has to make food appear, solve the problems, and be there to make things better.
Dad is a retired high school teacher and Mom is still a homemaker. With ten of us children running around the house, it took a lot of love and patience to keep things working smoothly. My Dad has a very different personality from mine. He will talk to anyone, which is the worst thing an introverted teenager wants him to do. But I have seen so many people warm to his greeting when I’d have been perfectly content to let them keep having a bad day. He also loves to laugh and to help others. My older son is a lot like him.
Mom is thoughtful and clever. She reads people well and she could see right through my nonsense in a blink. Once I was reading a “who I am” assignment to her that I had written at the beginning of a school year. I wrote something about being short-tempered (or some other teenage nonsense), “so lookout”. I thought it was clever. She looked at me and asked why someone else should look out for my character flaws. I didn’t like that very much, but she was right. The more I thought about what she said, the more it made sense to me and I try to be the one who looks out for myself.
I think that between genetics, which are out of my control, and inevitable parenting mistakes that I make my children will have enough to overcome without me consciously making life difficult for them. My wife and I try to make our home the best of what we both knew. We have a lot of good to draw on. Thanks Mom and Dad!
Published in General
Some of us are lucky enough to stand on our parents shoulders and taught well enough to have our children stand on our shoulders. I have been lucky enough to have it both ways.
I, too, lucked out on the parent lottery! Mine had eight children, and they had a dairy farm. People might characterize my mother as a “stay-at-home” mother because she didn’t have a paycheck earning job after their first child was born, but she certainly spent a lot of time out of our home: on a tractor, in the milking barn, and with her chickens. I loved how my dad cherished her–openly kissing her in front of us kids, giving her a squeeze and a pat on the fanny now and then. He knew she was his anchor.
When I was about 12, I vowed I’d never spend as much time cleaning house as she made us–all that dusting and sweeping and washing wood-work. Then, I got married, had some kids, and discovered that if you don’t do all that stuff regularly, very soon you’ll live in a really dirty house. So…good thing I had lots of practice with it!