Jen is a work-at-home mom, parent to three, and she’s been a stepparent for over 15 years. She is well-equipped to discuss and write about the great, and the not-so-great, details of all-things-parenting. Along with spending quality time with her family, Jen enjoys music, chocolate, camping and relaxing. And laughing!
I often find myself saying, “Adults know things that children don’t.”
Waiting for the school bus, “Stand back from the road. A car could lose control on this ice…Adults know things that children don’t.”
“No,we can’t pick our three-year-old brother up over our head…Yes, I know ‘he likes it’…Adults know things that children don’t.”
And…they often tune me right out! “Yeah, yeah, yeah…uh-huh, Mom. Yep.”
But the other day…
Just inside from playing in the snow, my daughter carelessly flung off her boot – as only a 7-year-old would – which slammed into a glass bottle, shattering it throughout our entire garage. (Ten…nine…eight…breathe…seven…six…BREATHE…) As I swept up the mess, I called her back outside. It originally felt like a punishment of sorts, as in, “You’ll sit here, at least, while I clean up your mess.”
“You know how I always tell you that ‘Adults know things that children don’t’? I know better than to fling my boot like you did, because I know that it could not only have broken an object – like this glass – but imagine if it had hit your brother or sister in the face? It could just have easily shattered their nose…”
She began to tear up. And I realized I was being harsh. I am an adult…and she is not.
“You know, I wasn’t always an adult. I had to learn these things, too, just like you. I once did something very careless when I was just about your age that I still remember to this day…”
Her ears perked up. She was listening.
“The management in the apartment complex I lived in had just planted new trees all throughout our complex. They told us kids never to climb them, because they weren’t strong enough yet to bear our weight…and even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to…I climbed one of the trees…”
“You did? What happened?”
“It seemed so harmless, and the tree was just my size…but, just as the adults had said, the tree was not strong enough to hold me, and I broke off a whole limb of the young tree. Not just a branch, but one whole side of this baby tree broke off and lay on the ground in front of me…”
Silence. Eyes wide open.
“I ran home, and cried. I felt so horrible for hurting the tree, and for…not listening. I had to confess to my parents what I had done…They walked me back to the tree, picked up the broken limb, and my dad said, ‘I hope you’ve learned a lesson. Adults know things that children don’t.’”
“And every time I played back there, I saw that tree…”
True story. I hadn’t thought about that story in a long time, and how – just like her – I learned the hard way about careless decisions.
Many of life’s lessons get easily tuned out. “Yeah, yeah, yeah… uh-huh, Mom. Yep.”
But through sharing stories…dots can be connected between lessons learned and lessons lost.
A few days later, bringing a snack to my daughter and her playmate, I was rounding the corner into her room…I quickly tucked back into the hallway unseen as I heard this:
“And then she climbed the tree…even though she knew she shouldn’t…and every time she saw that tree, she remembered…”
Stories are Lessons Remembered By Heart