When you speak to your children today, you are also speaking to every day of their future selves. Parenting is outside of time. Take care and take heart in that.
When you speak to your child, and you feel that they are not listening, maybe they arent. When you speak to them and you suspect they are silently ridiculing you, maybe they are. When the gift of your advice or sympathy fails in every way to touch them, and you believe yourself a failure, maybe you are. For now.
Bide your time.
Just imagine the person they will be, someday. Their now subtle and caring mind clambering back through their life, looking for support in the events that shaped them– just imagine how they will come upon your words. The gift you tried to give. Faded on the outside, yet vital still inside, it will open like a blossom. Even thirty years later.
I know for a fact that even when they are at their all time worst, children listen. After my daughter got married, she told me that everything (except about Santa and the Easter Bunny) was true and that I was RIGHT!
ReplyDeleteAfter the paramedics left, I had a celebratory drink!