It’s All About Growth
LOSING
One of my favorite bloggers, Peter Greene, is on his second set of children…his older children are in their thirties and he is the father of twin babies. It’s normal, I think, that we look back at our lives with a certain amount of nostalgia and Greene does this in a beautiful and thoughtful way in his post, Parenting Is All About Losing.
My wife asked me the other day, “Is it always like this?” We had turned around and had one of those moments when you realize that your baby looks like a small child, an undersized person, but not an infant any more. It’s a truly mixed moment emotionally, one part pride and joy at how big your child has grown, and one part sadness and loss because there was an infant just here a moment ago and now that tiniest person is gone forever.
There are conflicting emotions accompanying our children’s growth…
Not that it’s all loss and sadness. Every stage of my older children’s lives was the best so far, the best until the next new stage revealed itself to be even better. They get stronger and wiser and more terribly beautiful each time. It would never be enough to try to hold them back, to trade the unnatural prolonging of one stage for an unrealized better stage to come. Not that some parents don’t panic and try some emotional equivalent of binding their children’s legs so they won’t learn to walk or run. It never works. Children were born to grow, and grow they will, with or without our help.
So, he acknowledges that the emotions are conflicted and there are some good aspects to those changes, yet he titles his piece Parenting Is All About Losing, perhaps unconsciously emphasizing the negative.
I’d like to, respectfully, turn that around, and focus on the positive. Parenting is all about growing…for the parent and the child.
GROWING AND THE CIRCLE
My first thoughts on reading his post brought me to Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game.
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down CONTINUE READING: It’s All About Growth | Live Long and Prosper
