Fight

We care so deeply.  The feelings surge up and I am a mamma bear when it comes to these "hot issues."  I don't want to be the one making the big decisions alone, and where, oh where, is the manual that comes with all this parenting and living out what we believe in the life of someone given to our care?

The days of deciding about naps and how to handle tantrums have floated by like mist.  In those days each day could seem to last a year -- even waiting for my son to take a nap when I was weary and he was worn seemed to take   f o r e v e r.  But, now we are in the face of this new stage.  It gets a bad name "the teen years" and we see the potential for more temptations and more misteps and misunderstandings.

But there is something here worth the fight.  We fight to retain what is good.  We fight to help him make good choices.  We fight after he is in bed -- not the knock-down, drag-out fights, but the wrestling of parenthood which entails debating the pros and cons of important decisions.  We wrestle about our own childhoods and what was done right and what could have been done differently.  We sense the minefield all around us and we feel the weight of our own influence and the importance of our choices for him in this season.  Oh how I love this boy.  He is worth the fight!

I don't fight with him as often as I fight for him.  I fight for him daily on my knees -- begging God to help me discern and convey His will and His love.  I fight within myself the urge to keep him small when he is becoming more and more mature every day.  I fight the realization that he will move on and have his own life in a blink.  I fight with him sometimes - though I don't want to do it.  But, more than anything I fight the temptation to take the easy road, to give up, to give in.  This boy is worth the fight. 

Parenting is laboring someone into this world and then laboring over them regularly.  We are helping them birth new things within themselves and we have labor pains.  It hurts to birth newness, but the birthing is worth the fight.

Stop.

This post was a part of a weekly spontaneous writing experience at Five Minute Friday ... Come join us ... We set a timer. We write for five minutes on one word.  We stop.  We post.  We encourage one another.