Everyone of us has heard the old saying “This is gonna hurt me alot more than it hurts you”. I always thought that was the stupidest saying I had ever heard. Until I became a mother. Countless times, I have had to tell my children no, ground them, or some other form of discipline, just to teach them a valuable life lesson, or to protect them in some way. And I believe that it always hurt me worse than it did them.
There’s just something about being the reason for your child’s unhappiness that will rip out the heart of any mother. I never realized, growing up, whenever I would be angry or upset with my mother, that she was upset too. Mother’s are supposed to love their children, protect them, bring them infinite happiness. And until I had children of my own, I never realized that by protecting them, sometimes you have to hurt them.
I have tried numerous times over the years to shield my 4 children from any and all pain. I pray every night for God to protect them and help me to raise them to be good, compassionate, respectful adults. In my opinion, that is exactly the way that they’re growing up.
I have upset my daughter by not letting her go out late on a school night. I have insisted that she always wear her seatbelt. I have also held her while she cried when one of her close friends and schoolmates was killed in a car crash midway through his senior year of high school. And I breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God above that it wasn’t my child, while feeling the worse kind of sympathy for the mother who just lost hers.
I have watched as my children lost both their grandfathers this year within 2 weeks of each other. And although I was feeling the pain of losing my father, my heart was more with them, because I wanted to protect them from the worst pain anyone will ever endure. I thought that I should have been able to spare them this awful feeling of helplessness and unfairness. And although I have countless times scolded them for fighting, sometimes so loud the neighbors must have thought we were outlaws or something, I watched as they held and tried to comfort each other. I watched as they searched for ways to comfort me, even though I didn’t think there was any comfort, I realized that just having my children with me helped me more than I could have imagined.
All this just goes to show that although we can’t shield them, we can’t always protect them, and sometimes end up hurting them ourselves, we want so much for our children to be happy and without any of the pain and emotional scarring that we endured at their age.
A mother’s love is the most complete and satisfying love on earth. We’re not always cool. We don’t always do just what they want us to. And we will probably always embarass them at one time or another. But one thing is for sure…..I would not trade being a mother to my children for anything in the world. I have come to realize that sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. A mother’s love is eternal. I thank God every day for allowing me to be a mother to my children. And I thank him for allowing my mom to be my Mother.
