As many of you know, it’s been quite the week in post-op puppy nurse land!
Luther is healing well which is great because I’m pretty close to wiped out. I’m thinking of having my mail forwarded to the magic chair where I’m pretty much living at the moment.
In an effort, perhaps, to channel my early years, there has been a lot of Grey’s Anatomy going on.
One episode in particular hit home for me just now.
An explosion, thought to be a bomb, happens at a shopping mall. Many people, including a number of children, are injured.
One of the ER docs, a young woman who is pregnant, reacts with tremendous fear and wonders over and over how to bring a baby into a world where such a thing is possible.
Her mother-in-law, a woman more given to snapping orders than to extending comfort, offers a surprisingly profound response:
Raise your babies well. This is how the world changes.
The obvious question, especially as the American Mothers Day holiday dawns, is “How?”
Allowing that we must each find our own answers, I’d like to offer a framework that has been hugely helpful in my journey. It comes from the late Dr. H. Stephen Glenn, whose work, Developing Capable People, I first encountered when my own baby was four years old.
According to Steve, much of parenting (and grandparenting) comes from helping kids to believe three things:
I am capable.
I contribute in meaningful ways and I am genuinely needed.
I can influence what happens to me.
Raising Self-Reliant Children In A Self-Indulgent World, p. 49
I believe!
In fact, I know. And it isn’t easy. It involves ditching our societal obsession with success and claiming the amazing possibility that there’s no such thing as failure. Only experience to be learned from.
Kind of like acrylic paint!
Here’s the catch.
In order for our kids to learn these amazing truths, we have to at least experiment with believing them ourselves.
It doesn’t make a great Hallmark card. It does help us to raise kind, confident children, even in this world.
Steve walked on some years ago and the book is a bit dated in terms of language and examples but it still lives in my study on a shelf I always know how to find, no matter how much we rearrange the furniture. And it lives on in my own book, Grandmothers Are In Charge Of Hope.
With my whole heart, and with hope for my own girls, I invite you to check it out. It’s never too late to start! We need all the capable, significant, influential kids we can get.
This is how the world changes.
Many blessings to all of you who are mom-ing and grammy-ing anybody, anywhere and teaching these truths in whatever way works for you. This day and every day. Amen.
Luther, our Newf Rescue who is healing from eye surgery, has needed constant supervision. Sarah’s on floor duty. I’ve spent most of the time camped in my magic chair with a stack of books beside me.
She was painted in a storm, that one. While my dear friend was in the hospital, hurricane Irma raged on and I couldn’t get to Florida. And so, I made dots.