Tonight I was sitting on the boat and was feeling a little disconnected from my friends. So… I logged onto Facebook. While looking at the posts, I was intrigued by the things I was reading. Maybe I am just missing my kids, but many of the posts had to do with parenting. I don’t think we ever realize what the word “parent” means or encompasses.
One post was a friend who spent her whole night in a room consoling a crying a child instead of being out at the crawfish boil. Parenting of a small child is the most frustrating, exhausting and rewarding thing you will ever do. I believe it is God’s way to remedy us of selfishness. I never thought I wanted to be a stay at home mom. In fact, I was going to go back to work the minute I got this thing out of my body. Well, that could not be further from the truth. I fell in love with this blessing and could not think to let anyone else raise him. So goodbye job and hello full time mommydom. Parenting is not always sexy nor is it the picture that Parent magazine paints for us!
The next post that touched me deeply was of a picture of my friends daughter (age 7) and her new husband planting flowers at the grave of his child he had lost years before. This was a picture of a parent who had loved and lost but then had the courage to love again a new child. I cannot imagine the pain that the loss of a child does to a parent. But to think that he had the faith and courage to love another child again and then to share that loss with his new family is mesmerizing. I feel blessed to see God’s grace in action through their picture they posted. Parenting is sometimes a lesson in grace.
My third post I read was then about a friend of ours who’s mother is missing. When we “grow up” we assume that our parents will continue to be the rock we relied on as a child. That is not always the case. In fact, many times I see the children having to parent their parents. A role reversal of this sort is never easy nor is it desired by the child. Deep down inside we are still children ourselves who depend on our parents. It must be awful to have to step up and put pieces of a puzzle together that we never knew we were assembling. Being a child sometimes means you become the parent even when you were not expecting it.
As you can read…Facebook tonight for me was not just silly posts and pictures. Tonights posts moved me. Made me really think about the word “parent.”