The perils of helping those in need.
I was recently confronted with the problem of helping someone that shouldn’t need help. Let me explain. The job of a parent is to provide and protect and watch our children make big mistakes while protesting from the sidelines “you’re doing it wrong”.
That being said if your child is standing on the edge of a cliff and you try to talk them back and you even offer them your hand and they still say “no”. Your job as a parent is not to push them over. They will, more often than not, come to their senses and take a step back. And if you stumble over a momentary laps of reason and push them anyway, please, please don’t hate the people that catch them and offer assistance at the bottom. Don’t claim it was their idea they jump in the first place.
I consider myself a reasonable person. I love my children and do what I can for them. I don’t want to see them make mistakes, but they most certainly will. And that’s okay. But I think our job is to be there and back their play.
I left home at 20. I wasn’t ready, but my parents didn’t say “If you leave now, never come back”. They offered love and support and helped me move and were there to console me when things got hard as they most certainly will. I can never thank them enough for that. Giving me the option to fail and letting me grow and learn from it. Now I, thankfully, succeeded, but if I had failed I had a home to go home to. Open arms to welcome me. Love and support of parents not standing over their broken son to tell him “told you so”.
We are not the mean kids on the playground. We are not the bullies from their job. We are not the middle management trolls that decided long ago to make everyone miserable because they are.
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” – ARTHUR O’SHAUGHNESSY
We are the comforters of bumps and boo boos, of scrapes and scratches, of broken hearts and worried minds. We give life and we watch it grow and hope all the best for it. We will not be petty and jealous. We will not decide who they should love. We will not give up on them for a sideways decision. And we will shake the hands of those that helped them when we lose our way and couldn’t. We will rejoice in knowing someone looked out for them when our hearts thought they were lost.
We will be the best us we know how to and we will love them. We will support them and we will take their hand when they feel lost and remember that we make mistakes too.
We will be the people we expect them to be some day. We will lead by example with humility and compassion and love. We will be parents.