Lifelore

Today marks the first day that both of my children are sitting in a college classroom. As I sit here, in a very quiet house, I have many thoughts going through my head. Most of them deal with reflecting on the past 18 years.

I think it is the same for most, if not all, parents. You have your firstborn child and suddenly your life has changed. You have this little person to care for and attend to for their every single need. It is a very exhausting time, but also so incredibly wonderful, especially as I sit her alone with my memories. Certain stages are very rough and you wonder how you are going to make it through. Just as that stage passes, you have another stage that your children go through and it seems to be much harder than the previous stage . Basically, your time is totally devoted to the needs of these little humans. Most importantly, your time is totally devoted to helping to guide and form these little beings into responsible, loving, compassionate, kind, and God loving individuals.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I homeschooled my children all through their school years. Every year certainly wasn’t easy. In fact, I kept a journal, especially during the elementary school years. As I look back, those years were the most challenging and frustrating as I tried to figure out how to deal with certain obstacles and bumps in the road. A few months ago, I pulled out this journal and had to giggle to myself. The challenges that I wrote about were so huge and frustrating at the time that sometimes I wondered how I was going to make it to the end of the day. Now, most of those challenges seem tiny and I wonder why I was so frustrated! For example, my daughter really struggled with Penmanship in 3^rd grade. I thought I was going to lose my mind some days! Now, she has the most beautiful penmanship that I have ever seen. Why did I worry about it so much? It would be so helpful if we could look into the future to see how things are going to turn out, but then we would miss out on the life lessons that we need to learn from the frustrating times.

Parenting is all about learning as you go along. One thing that I have learned is that, as parents, we need to not be so hard on ourselves. I look back at some situations and think, “Boy, I wish I would have handled that differently” or sometimes even “I sure messed that up”! The truth is that we just do the best that we can. We are humans and we are going to mess up. Forgiveness is a huge part of parenting. Just as we need to forgive our kids when they mess up, we need to teach them what forgiveness means so they can forgive us when we make mistakes, because we make A LOT of them!

I miss homeschooling my children terribly! As they walked out the door this morning, I wanted to go with them so badly, but how would they learn their own life lessons if I did that? Also, how would I continue to learn my own life lessons if I went along with them?

If I had to summarize my feelings this morning, I would only use 1 word: thankful! I am so incredibly thankful for the 2 awesome kids that God gave to me and for the years that I was able to be at home with them and learn along with them and from them. I am so proud of them and can’t wait to see how God uses them for His Kingdom! I know that He has already used them in gigantic ways in my own life!

Written by Kathryn Conrad