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Twin Cities Mom Collective

Steadfast in the Season

Steadfast in the Season | Twin Cities Moms Blog

In some ways, I’m an incredibly patient person. I get up night after night to feed my little one (even when most other babies her age have been sleeping through the night for what feels like years already). I continue to do load after load of laundry even when it mounts up again. And somehow, the dishwasher gets filled and emptied and filled again.

But in many ways, I’m incredibly impatient. I love results. I want things to work— work well and work fast. 

I once remarked to my husband that one of the worst jobs I could imagine for myself would be working as a construction worker— specifically, the kind that constructs buildings from the ground up. When you drive past the worksite, you see mounds of dirt and perhaps a big hole where the foundation will go. My husband, the visionary entrepreneur, gets excited imagining what they will create. My reaction? It almost panics me. In my mind I know they will end up with a building, but how? How in the world can that flat space be built up into a trustworthy building we will someday walk into? The project feels too big, too intangible, too daunting.

Ironic, then, how often parenting is like building a tower. We have a vision for the kind of mature adults we long for our children to be someday, but in the beginning, we’re looking at a blank excavation site and hoping that someday that ‘building’ will come.

I have no idea how to actually construct a building, but I imagine that the project has phases. You don’t start putting up sheetrock until there’s framing to put it on (that sounds right, doesn’t it?). Parenting is similar. You don’t hand your 3-year-old the car keys or tell your 4-year-old to make a chicken pot pie for dinner (unless it comes in a microwave package because pressing buttons is rad). We start simple and build up into responsibility.

None of this is groundbreaking, but I need to be reminded that parenting has seasons, because sometimes, I just want results now. Especially when it comes to training and discipline. I’ll be the first to admit that my patience for discipline is low. When my child does something, and I subsequently discipline, and then said child commits the same crime again? I’m quick to abandon ship: “It’s not working! That method is faulty! My child is an anomaly! Nothing works with this kid!” You can find me furiously Googling solutions to ‘woman who has a precious child that only one very specific unicorn discipline method works with.’ Or you’ll find that I have given up; all hope is lost; the 2-year-old has bested us.

Steadfast in the Season | Twin Cities Moms Blog

Rather, the principle of sowing and reaping is helpful here. The little years are entire years of sowing character and obedience. No method, no matter how great, creates a mature 18-year-old in the body of a 1.5-year-old. Children continue to be children, and they continue to need consistency. They need me to remember that my job is to love and to train and to persevere throughout the season. As someone wise once told me, “give it a week.” Give it a week and your angel might have learned the lesson you thought he wasn’t learning; give it a week and your sweetheart might have moved on to another behavior equally frustrating— but hey, they stopped doing that thing from before! Give it a week, or two weeks, or a couple of months, and continue to be loving and consistent, remembering that we often sow for entire seasons (weeks! months! years!) before we reap the lovely results we’re longing for.

Much to my ire, buildings don’t spring up overnight, and no one that I know has given birth to an adult-toddler, complete with tidy eating habits and self-cleaning abilities. But I do know many families that have loved over the long-haul and put in the hard work of training and disciplining and loving, day after day and night after night, trusting that their hard work is for the good of their children, their family, and even society. 

And if I can make peace with the idea of phases and seasons in parenting, perhaps it might even allow me to enjoy the one that I’m in just a bit more, too.

What about you? Have you considered what your long-term ‘goal’ is for your child (what sort of ‘building’ you’re aiming for when you’re ready to launch them out)? How could this vision help you grow in perseverance during the difficult seasons of parenting? And, perhaps most enjoyable, is there a family ‘farther down the road’ that you could learn from and be encouraged by?  

Here’s to donning construction hats and continuing on! 

*Note: When it comes to discipline, there are of course some unique children and unique situations. This post is aimed not at those situations but rather at the daily, mounting tediousness of general parenting.

 

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