One of my favorite things to share is authenticity. Being real is key to who I strive to be. I love the freedom that comes from living life this way.
To allow oneself to be fully known is a risk, but one I am striving each day to live. I find this especially important in cultivating deep relationships with my children.
I am in the stage of having half of my children become adults and the other half still in school including four teenagers at home. God help me. I realize that my vulnerability is key to growing my relationship with them.
I am finding that all my children, but especially my young adult children, need to know that I faced challenges in my youth, things I did well and times when I failed, picked myself up, tried again, fell, began again and hit repeat on that cycle many times before I allowed God to guide my path.
This side of me, my highs and lows and some of those stories, show a side of me I’d rather not revisit. I think those stories, however, are real and necessary, as my children, too, will have highs and lows in life they must navigate. Neither the mountaintop experiences nor the valleys determine their worth, but how they walk through them matters.
My young adult children often look at me as if I came out of my mother’s womb with a rosary in my hand. Nothing could be further from the truth, and yet Momma Mary has always been my guide. It’s just taken me a bit to see that.
We often discount the in-between time when we are allowing ourselves to grow, when the Spirit is moving within us. We want to show the new and improved version to everyone, the “I was one way, but I am now another” version of ourselves. But that in-between period matters, and it must be shared with our kids, young and old. They need to know we struggled, hear our struggles, see our struggles because they, too, will struggle!
It is humbling to have learned this the hard way and to be just now revisiting those stories so that I can show my young adult children that we, too, faced challenges and yet here we stand in awe of how God has worked in our lives.
Having practiced this with older kids, it is much easier for me to sit on the stairs in a timeout with a younger one and say, “Yes, Momma struggles with her temper, too. I remember when …” It softens the reality of our humanity. It lowers the bar in the eyes of our children enough that conversation can flow. It brings challenging moments to a, “You, too?” moment, and God is made manifest in these moments.
Oh! How I feel His arms around us in these moments. Hearts are opened. Walls are down, and it is here that we must meet each other. This is the secret to not only building relationships with our adult children but also in evangelizing to them.
If you have children who are being lured by the temptations of what the world offers, sharing conversations like this, listening and allowing them to feel truly seen and supported is paramount.
This is not to say that we must share every poor choice made, but rather prayerfully discern if sharing a personal struggle might open a door for God’s grace to flow between you and that child. Does this bring them closer to Christ? I have often found that vulnerability does.
Ultimately, my goal of parenting is to witness the love and mercy of Jesus to my children. I have learned that the best way to do this is by showing them the broken, wounded, healed and redeemed version of myself and sharing that cycle over and over again. There is something so very wonderful about being known and still loved.