Today, this was what I wrote on my FB status: Jeana Marie is just amazed on how kids, like our children, can teach us the most valuable lessons in life – patience, perseverance, unconditional love, sacrifice – in the truest sense.
For a couple of days now, I am playing nurse and doctor to my 20-month old son. Many mums will agree that one of the greatest challenges of being a mum is when the kids get sick. This experience, like the other experiences I have had since Liam came to my life, is teaching me how to be patient. Who wouldn’t get impatient if your child just wants to be carried all the time, and continues to say “up” even if you’re carrying him already? You have to keep your cool even if you are sleep deprived and super tired already. You have to stay cool when all he wants is mum, and you can’t do anything else – chores at home, work – and try to give in to all his whims and wants. You have to stay cool when he doesn’t want to stop crying and you’ve done everything to relax him and make him comfortable. You have to be patient when he’s drawing attention from other people because he is sick. You have to stay cool even when he throws up the medicines you’ve been giving him. Patience is really no easy thing.
I want my son to grow up good. Who wouldn’t? Now that I can see that he has an understanding already of what’s happening around him, I am challenged to persevere day in and day out to do good, and to be good. As a friend once said, “We have to be what we would want our children to be.” So if I want him to be honest, I have to be honest all the time. If I want him to grow up respecting people around him, he has to see that in me as well. If I want him growing up to be a God-loving and God-fearing individual, then I have to show it to him as well. If I want him to grow up to be a loving and caring person, he needs to witness it from me as well. If I want him to be prayerful as well, then I should continue to be one. Whoever said being a parent is easy?
I believe that unconditional love and sacrifice go hand in hand. Because you love unconditionally, despite of and in spite of all their weaknesses, you get to sacrifice a lot for them as well. You can stay up late or you may not even sleep at all, you can skip a meal, eat less, eat leftovers which you don’t usually do, postponing to buy something for yourself in order to buy something for him, not stick to schedules, not doing the house chores, giving up “myself” time, trying to overlook the negatives and see the positives for him, oh the list would just go on and on. I am pretty sure many parents have done more and will do more. Each time they do it, I do it, a new lesson is learned. Another lesson that makes me understand the real meaning of the words. The kids do it without much effort on their part and that adds to the beauty and wonder of it.
Kids are truly one of God's best instruments in teaching the grown-ups. Praise Him for that!
