Mothers Be Good to Your Daughters

She sat in the chair next to me in the salon, the ends of her long hair wrapped in foil to absorb the bleach that would be the base for magenta tips. She was young — 18 — and her attention was on the small screen she held in her hand, a smile slowly appearing on her face as she responded to whomever was on the other end. When the stylist inquired about school or work or boyfriend, she readily entered into conversation, polite, cheerful, engaged.

The bell on the door clanged against the glass as a woman my age pushed through. She addressed the girl with the kind of familiarity that bypasses social conventions, cutting straight to the point like a laser beam. “How long is this going to take?”, she barked, then glanced around at the other women like me in the room before taking her annoyance down a socially acceptable notch. “How much is this going to cost me?”

I couldn’t hear the girl’s response, but she looked up at her mother to meet her gaze, quietly answering the questions and putting out the small smoldering flicker with her own calculated calm. She’d had to respond this way before.

The questions continued. “Who are you going out with tonight? Are you going after work?” She wasn’t asking because she cared in the way friends ask, “Hey, what’s going on with you?” She was shooting fiery darts meant to pin the young woman-daughter to the wall. There was a tense edge in the salon that hadn’t been there just a minute before she broke the calm with her irritated voice.

And it made me ponder my relationship with my own three daughters. Mine aren’t yet legally adults, but they are fast approaching 18. I can confidently assert from my current vantage point that we have a strong mother-daughter relationship. Note here that I also have three adult sons, and while I have a great relationship with all three, I’ve been around the parenting block long enough to know that relationships are fluid, living entities, and as such can morph into stressful or less-loving seasons. I don’t pretend to have this sewn up.

But this I do know: 12-year-old girls can be frustrating. Stifling. Or in the words of a friend raising her own teen girls, “Like a booger you can’t flick off.” That sums it up. My 12-year-old is all up in my business all the time. All the time. Right now every day is an opportunity to use my workplace polite and patient voice with her — the voice you use with co-workers you need to tolerate and work with everyday and better not offend or risk having your lunch stolen from the communal fridge or your name dropped at the water cooler. If I can drum that up for them, why not for my own flesh and blood?

Sometimes when we choose to be polite, we come out on the other side with a greater understanding of what might be making that person such an irritant. In the case of pre-teen girls, that irritation tends to stem from a lack of maturity and a surge of hormones, neither of which they can control. If I take a deep breath when my preteen is doing her own breathing down my neck, pestering me with questions of who, what, why, where, and when (as in, “Who called you? What did they want? Why are you doing that? Where are you going? and When will you be back?”), I can absorb the annoyance and be kind. Kindness covers a multitude of annoyances.

Love covers a multitude of sins, and mothers of teens and preteen daughters, listen: snippy, unkind, disrespectful responses to our daughters are sin. Cover that stuff with love. Someday soon those 12-year-old boogers will be 18-year-olds in salon chairs beautifying themselves and still hoping your smile of approval means something. What you sow at 8, 10, and 12 can be reaped at 16, 18, and 20. Sow love, reap love. Mothers, be good to your daughters.

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The Power and Freedom of Realistic Expectations

I spend a lot of time with young moms. Heck, with 8 kids, I was a young mom until last year. Or so. When they tell me their deeply felt frustrations with the day-to-day management of children, the squeeze of time to maintain a healthy relationship with husband, and the things they want to do, I get it. Really, I do. 

They also tenderly tell me about the conflict in their marriages, with their sisters, with their toddlers, with their mothers-in-law. They share their hurt feelings, their frustrations, and their desire that things could have gone differently than they did.

"It was my birthday, for cryin' out loud! Why didn't he think to get a babysitter?"

"She knows how important clean eating is to our family. Why would she feed the kids cookies from a box and let them drink soda, to boot?"

"I had planned a day at the park but it all got taken away when he told me he needed the van. Why couldn't he have remembered to tell me sooner?"

I'm going to say something here that might not be very popular:  

I think we all need to lower our expectations.

Are any of the above statements unreasonable? No. Do those moms have a right to feel disappointed? Sure. And yet, how could their contentment with what God had crafted for them in those moments be unshaken if their expectations were at ground level?

At 45, I'm still slowly learning that God's ways are best. I could say it to anyone around me, "Oh, trust God, friend! His ways are best!" but when it comes right down to me, I doubt him faster than I can even gather my thoughts on the subject.

22 years into cleaning up after other people, wiping noses, clipping little boy fingernails, and dubious character training (that's the child-rearing stuff) plus relationship bungles, family tension, writing-related disappointments, and financial hurdles (that's the life stuff) and I can say that I have learned one thing, and only one thing, well: keep your expectations low.

Know what happens when you do? Everything is a bonus! Everything is fabulous! Everything feels like a gift! 

Let's go back and reframe the disappointments in the context of low (or no) expectations of others and what they can do for us:

"It's my birthday! Even if no one else remembers, I know that God does and I'll celebrate with him. In fact, I'll make myself a bowl of ice cream right now!"

"I'm so glad we've chosen to eat such healthy foods. Now when the kids are at her house, it's not like we eat that kind of junk food every day. They'll enjoy it once and then we can move on."

"Wow, I'm so disappointed that I couldn't take the kids to the park. I need to tell him that I'd really appreciate it if he could remember to let me know sooner next time, but for today, I'm going to turn lemons into lemonade. Literally. Hey kids! Let's make lemonade!"

You know, that first one isn't too far from my own story. As a summer birthday girl, my day was never celebrated by my classmates or youth group friends because it was summer break. As an adult, of course, life doesn't stop on our birthdays, either. Most people forget unless Facebook prompts them. 

It made me grumpy to wake up to demanding kids on my birthday, wanting to know what's for breakfast or asking if I would do any number of things for them that day. MY day. My birthday, for cryin' out loud!

And then one year an older friend of mine invited us all over for breakfast ice cream sundaes on her birthday and I thought, YES. I adore ice cream. I could live on ice cream. So why not start a tradition of ice cream sundaes for breakfast on my birthday every year? Not just ice cream sundaes, the best of the best ice cream, toppings, and fresh whipped cream, too. 

I changed my expectations for the day, took charge over what I thought other people "should" be doing for me, and turned around to create a breakfast birthday party that we all look forward to every July. I learned that expecting others to think of me first invites self pity. I learned that there is power in not being a victim. I learned that having realistic expectations frees me to love others well. How can you do the same?

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When It Feels As If Everyone Else is Doing it Right #ForRealFriday

Things aren't always as they seem. 

In the past few months we've had families or kids in families or parents contact us by varying avenues and lament their very real, very raw struggles. 

"This man-child needs to move out."

"My parents are at each other's throats."

"I'm so depressed, I can't face another complaint about what I'm serving for dinner or how slowly the laundry was delivered."

"They are sleeping together but we can't tell anyone because of the judgment we'll receive in our church."

These are real struggles, and we've lived long enough to get to a place where we now say, "Nothing - and I do mean nothing - shocks us anymore."

And then I open up my laptop and there appears Facebook. Ahhhh, Facebook. 

The same families - the one with the disrespectful and ungrateful young man, the one with the volatile marriage, the depressed mom, the teens having sex - those families are gushing about how beautiful and sweet life is within their four walls, as if they have found the key to everlasting domestic bliss. 

My eyes widen in disbelief. And that's my point: maybe your eyes should widen in disbelief, too, because maybe you are the mom, the dad, the adult child who is wondering why everyone else got such a cool, loving, supportive, excellent family and you got, well, something less. 

I'm not calling out the families who are posting their supposed family harmony. I understand the appropriateness of not airing dirty laundry, as it were, to the 1.35 billion people on that one social media platform. I also understand that sometimes, you just need to focus on what's going right.

But if your tendency is to think those families are doing it right and you are doing it wrong, here's what you need to know:

Everyone is doing it wrong. 

It would be wonderful and life-changing if everyone could feel safe enough to be transparent in every arena, but it's a fallen world and we don't. We don't feel like we're safe to talk about the real stuff around real people. Some of us have a few friends we trust to love us through our bad choices and mistakes, but many don't even have one. 

If that's you, remember this: no one has it all right, except Jesus. That's what makes the gospel such good news! We can't be perfect and we won't be perfect while we're on earth, but God sees Jesus when He looks at us, and Jesus is perfectly perfect. 

#ForRealFriday reality check.