Utterly undone, I sat in my hospital bed cradling my screaming newborn. Nothing worked. He wasn’t hungry; he was dry; I was holding him. What more could I do?! Remembering babies like to be swaddled, I clumsily tried to wrap him. The nurse entered to find baby howling and me miserably fumbling the blanket, near tears myself. She took one look and snatched Benjamin out of my hands. She calmly laid him on the bed, snugly arranged his baby blanket into a perfect burrito, and patted his bottom three times. He immediately fell asleep. Without a word she handed him to me and left. Completely defeated, I wondered if the hospital would let me take my son home when I couldn’t even wrap a baby blanket. Maybe he should go home with the nurse?
Most parents feel it—an overwhelming sense of ineptitude when it comes to raising our children. We want so badly to do the right thing and feel so completely at a loss as to what that is or how to accomplish it. Parenting books offer insights that sound great on paper and fall flat when we try to use them. Given our daily failures, wouldn’t our children be better off with some professional parent? The answer—a resounding no.
When God knit you together in your mother’s womb, He was shaping you to parent this child. Your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, your experiences were all ordained as preparation parenting for this child. Likewise, as God knit your child together, He shaped her to be parented by you. Experts may offer insights, options, or support—but they can never take your place. As bumbling as our efforts can be, we are the only experts for our child.
Those daily interactions—the ones that feel like daily failures—are so much more. Through them, we learn our child’s temperament and priorities, his fears and joys. No expert spends the kind of time we spend with our child; no expert has a prayer of gaining our insight. We know the heart of our child. Knowing his heart enables us to inspire, encourage, and train so he becomes the person he was made to be.
As we explore our child’s heart, we also discover our own. When our toddler waves a rebellious finger in our face, we gain insight into God’s reaction to our own rebellion. When our young child listens to his peers rather than us, we perceive God’s frustration at our own choosing of job, prevailing experts, or friends’ advice over Him. When a teen gives in to pleasurable sin rather than choosing to do right, we suffer our heavenly Father’s anguish over our rejection of His standards in favor of our own desires. As we take these to God, repent, and allow Him to guide us into a reconciling relationship; He teaches us how to guide our child into a reconciling relationship. Learning from our heavenly parent, we become the parent our child needs us to be.
Once I got Ben home I was terrified. I began praying as I had never prayed before. “Lord, please help me to parent as You do. Please help me be the mom Ben needs.” As his seven siblings followed, that prayer became ever more fervent. I encountered differing personalities which needed differing approaches. I encountered competing agendas. I encountered even more of my own faults as I saw them played out in the behavior of my children.
Yet through it all, God worked to make me an expert on my children. He brought me friends with great insight. He led me to books by astute experts. Mostly, He revealed, in the tiny bites I could swallow, the truths of His scripture to guide my heart, my mind, and my words with my children. From scripture I learned that in every situation, I needed to be gentle, kind, and self-controlled. I learned to value differences while holding each unique child to the same standard. I learned that I was teaching my children how to love others by the way I loved them. I learned to get regularly on my knees and beg for God’s provision and insight for each day. Slowly, as I became the child of God I needed to be, I became the mom my children needed.
Though over the course of eight babies I never learned to create a burrito-perfect swaddle, I learned that my children didn’t need to go home with that nurse. They were designed to go home with me. She could fold a blanket but she didn’t know that Ben needed to be warned a week in advance that we might not have hot dogs on Wednesday night or that we would need to push him into activities before he would be comfortable or that he loved quiet bike rides to talk. God and time with Ben taught me that. As you seek God in the daily-ness of life, He will guide you into being the parent your child needs.
This month’s topic: What are the ways you treasure your days with your children?
