Hello everyone!
I hope you’ve had a fulfilling summer and that autumn is shaping up well for your family.
A few years ago, a wise Christian woman counseled me briefly on my journey into motherhood, at a time when I had three very young children. She made a statement that stuck with me: “Time is short; your window of influence in the lives of your children closes little by little with each passing year.” I was struck by this thought and couldn’t imagine how my boys, still so young and totally dependent on me at every moment, would one day become independent teenagers and adults.
But one day, it began to happen! When my first children were around 12 or 13, they began to drift away, although physically still with us at home. In a perfectly natural and normal part of growing up, they wanted to be more independent and set their own course. The first no longer accepted direct instruction from me, except to help him with more difficult math problems; the second stopped participating in our joint reading and instruction sessions. Recently, the third began to detach himself and lose interest in our lessons. Access to his heart has become somewhat restricted, and my words have become “too much”… (We still communicate, don’t worry!).
Each time, I experienced a bit of a shock, a sort of mourning for not having been able to fully pass on to my children the values, culture, and knowledge about life that I considered important, in the way I had imagined. I realized that, when it came down to it, the curriculum itself was so unimportant…
Just recently, a mother of 10 (and grandmother of several) wrote to tell me that her biggest regret was not having told her children about the Lord’s wonders sooner.
All this has made me realize that it’s absolutely imperative to communicate EARLY ON what we deem essential to our children, to focus on what really matters, not to worry excessively about our children’s purely academic achievements, but to set aside what’s not important, because time is short…
For this new (non) school year, I hope that our children’s learning projects are not just bureaucratic forms that we fill out, but that they are truly the life projects that GOD has for them!
