This is another topic suggested by a friend.\u00a0 This is another topic I would never have chosen on my own, and there are a lot of different directions I can go.\u00a0 So, I’ll start from the beginning.\u00a0 My beginning.<\/p>\n
I was an accident.\u00a0 A teenage girl and a teenage boy had unprotected sex, and later on, I came into the world.\u00a0 We all know how that works.\u00a0 But knowing I was an accident had a profound impact on me.\u00a0 It shaped my feelings about sex and parenting.\u00a0 Fear of producing an unexpected child kept me celibate even more than my religious beliefs.<\/p>\n
You can’t choose your biological parents, but your parents can choose you.\u00a0 My biological mother wasn’t ever really in my life.\u00a0 I’ve never met my biological father.\u00a0 The people I think of as Mom and Dad adopted me, and made sure I felt chosen at an early age.\u00a0 That is the first lesson in parenting that they gave me: make sure your children feel not just loved, but chosen.<\/p>\n
My parents weren’t perfect parents.\u00a0 I can go into their faults, but that doesn’t seem important right now.\u00a0 I learned from their mistakes and tried to be a better parent by not copying them.\u00a0 For example, I wasn’t an alcoholic.\u00a0 I tried not to hit my kids beyond a certain age.\u00a0 I made sure never to call my kids names like “idiot” or “stupid.” I tried to make it to all of their school functions.<\/p>\n
One of the lessons I learned from my parents about parenting was that I was going to make mistakes, and there wasn’t anything I could do to avoid that.\u00a0 Kids are more durable than we give them credit for.\u00a0 We make mistakes, shape our kids in ways we didn’t expect, and then we have to hope for the best.<\/p>\n
Parenting is a journey.\u00a0 We start with babies that need everything, and our role as parent is to do everything for them.\u00a0 Then our babies turn into kids, then into young adults, and before we know it, they’re grown adults.\u00a0 We never stop being parents, but our responsibilities shift.\u00a0 Every step of the way, we have to learn to let go as our children grow and stand on their own.\u00a0 That’s a tall order for some parents.\u00a0 None of us want our children to fall and get hurt.<\/p>\n
My kids are adults now.\u00a0 In some ways, they’ve had more life experiences now than I had when I was their age.\u00a0 In other ways, they’re less worldly.<\/p>\n
There are things that we can’t teach our children.\u00a0 We can try.\u00a0 We can throw words at them and hope that some get through.\u00a0 But with subjects like responsibility and ambition, words don’t do enough.\u00a0 My kids have to learn to be responsible and drive themselves the same way I did.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter how many opportunities I try to give them.\u00a0 There are things they won’t learn any other way but the hard way.\u00a0 That’s been a part of this parenting journey that I’ve really struggled with.<\/p>\n
I’m proud of both my children.\u00a0 Melissa and I made really good people.\u00a0 The world is a better place because they are in the world.<\/p>\n
That’s all I can really say about parenting.\u00a0 There is no single answer.\u00a0 The best we can do is love our children, listen to them, and listen to our hearts.\u00a0 What worked for my kids probably won’t work for someone else’s kids.\u00a0 We’re all different.\u00a0 As children, as parents, we’re just fumbling our way forward, trying not to break too many things along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is another topic suggested by a friend.\u00a0 This is another topic I would never have chosen on my own, and there are a lot of different directions I can go.\u00a0 So, I’ll start from the beginning.\u00a0 My beginning. I was an accident.\u00a0 A teenage girl and a teenage boy had unprotected sex, and later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":931,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930\/revisions\/931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}