I’m convinced that hoarding skips a generation. My mom tells this super sad story about how her mom threw away some of her treasured keepsakes while she was at school one day. That traumatized her so much that she doesn’t like to throw things away. Now, my mom is clearly NOT a hoarder, but there are closets that when you open their door they will attempt to crush you with their contents. Growing up in a home where you knew your mom just might go through your trash if she thought there was something of sentimental value in there (like a note you passed to your friend about a boy you liked) made me the kind of person who got rid of things. A lot. I would get to the end of each school year and gleefully burn my school papers. I always had a bag of stuff ready for Goodwill. I hate clutter.
So now my poor son hides his papers from me so I won’t throw them away. We are not even finished with his first year of Kindergarten and he already has a drawer full of papers and projects he insists are priceless and irreplaceable. He also looks at his baby pictures and asks very pointed questions about where specific toys and clothes have gone. It feels like a physical weight on my soul to have to keep everything he loves.
I’m not actually telling you this so we can talk about clutter and hoarding tendencies. I want to talk to you about how you don’t want to parent like your parents did.
My mom didn’t like having her things thrown away, so she saved everything, so I threw everything away, so my son saves everything. I think that’s a pretty concise summary of our parenting. We work really hard to correct the mistakes of our parents and in the process overcorrect and make mistakes of our own. Maybe we break the cycle but instead make entirely new mistakes for our kids to want to fix.
I think about this a lot when I consider that my children will some day stumble upon my writings on parenting. I bet they’ll laugh. I bet they could write a whole blog dedicated to refuting my “wisdom” by showing what problems it created and how they were hurt by my parenting. I’m not going to argue with their reality of being my child and I’m not going to parent in fear that someday they’ll disagree with how I raised them. I’m absolutely positive they’ll disagree with some aspects of how I parented. They’ll try to parent differently and end up making mistakes of their own. And the cycle continues.
This problem can be keenly felt by parents of adopted children. We know that while your kids are comparing their lives with the lives of their friends, our kids will also be comparing their actual life with a fantasy life they may have created about their birth family where everyone understands them and they’re allowed to do whatever they want. It can make you feel so insecure about your parenting decisions when you feel like you’re going to be second-guessed in favor of someone who may not actually be involved in the life of your child. And of course there are many adoptees who have complaints about the way they were raised, or didn’t feel they “fit” with their adoptive family, or weren’t happy with how the adoption issue was handled. We work so hard to learn from their experiences and want our kids to grow up happy and confident in their identity, but we know that ultimately that choice rests with them.
I think this has become a unique problem of this generation because our kids (both biological and adopted) are growing up entirely in the public eye. We have social media documentation of their first breaths, first steps, first days of school. We can embarrass them and they can embarrass us on an entirely new level these days. A child’s rebellion is no longer a private matter, but is now publicly viewed and judged by the world. This can make a mother terrified of what her someday child will tell the world about her parenting. We are afraid of the unknown of what this child will become and how it will challenge our well-crafted reputation.
Let me take this fear away from you. Let’s make the unknown a known. You ARE going to mess up. You will likely someday hear your child say, “I’m not going to be as _______ as you were.” You can fill in that blank with whatever your current flaws are (maybe ones you don’t even know about), and it’s probably a safe bet that it may even have something to do with the way you’ve tried to correct for your parents’ mistakes. I don’t think we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents, I think we may be doomed to make the opposite ones.
So if I write something controversial and somebody tells me I’m messing up my kids, I don’t want to argue about it. They may be right. I ask others for wisdom because I am not raising four miniature versions of myself. I’m raising four unique beings who may more closely resemble you and your needs than what I understand of my own. I’m not afraid to be wrong and I’m not afraid to ask for help. Because I’m not afraid, I feel free to parent boldly.
I’m giving it my best in the hope that my kids will remember more good than bad. I’m hoping they complain about how I hated making them a hot breakfast or how I never had kleenex in the house or how I wouldn’t let them give the dog a haircut or how I embarrassed them by telling their friends “we don’t say that in this house” or only let them buy things from the dollar menu at McDonald’s. But in all that complaining, I hope they know they were loved. I hope they know they were safe and cherished and really mattered. I hope they know Jesus and live every day with his priorities in mind. I hope the forgiveness I’ve offered them throughout their life makes it easy for them to forgive their mom when they realize I didn’t have all the answers. And I hope the first time their own little child packs a backpack and says they’re running away over some perceived injustice they’ll remember how when they tried that I told them I’d run away with them because they could never get away from my love. Maybe they’ll tell that to their own little feisty troublemaker. And when they say it, I hope they remember that as much as I may have made mistakes, my goal was to be the best mom I could for the glory of God and the good of my children.
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