What I Don’t Know

From time to time I will include journal entries or old blog posts because I like them and I think you might like them, too. This is one from early 2020 at the beginning of CoVid.

I was FaceTiming my daughter the other day and I managed to shut my mouth before I said something stupid. 

She was expressing, as has every mother I’ve spoken to during this pandemic, how difficult and how frustrating it is to live with toddlers (well, any age kid) right now. 

I’m a grandmother so my sympathies tend to lean more toward the little kids. I mean, think about how toddler life has been disrupted! First, their parents are upset and they don’t understand why. Then, their little routines have changed. Their park trips, Target runs and Chick-fil-A lunches have been cancelled for no good reason. What’s a virus? They have no concept of time so, they can’t wrap their little minds around seeing their friends “soon.” How long is soon? And they haven’t collected enough vocabulary words to express their frustration and disappointment so it comes out in tantrums and meltdowns which upsets the grownups even more. 

**Wait a minute, now that I write this we are all feeling this way! What is this virus and how does it spread again? Our lives will get back to normal soon? When is soon? Anyway, back to my story…

But I listened to my daughter and I wanted desperately to be helpful. I’m usually the kind of mother who tries to draw from my own experience to offer understanding and advice. I would typically say something like, “I understand because when you were little, I…” 

However, I stopped myself from trying to make some lame connection and said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through because I never had to raise a toddler through a global pandemic, under a stay-at-home order in a mask-wearing, no hugging, socially distant world. And unless you’re like 102 years old, no one in the world has had to do it.” 

“Sister” (that’s what I call her sometimes to differentiate between her and her brother’s wife with the same name), I said, “Sister, you are Neil Armstrong, you are Florence Nightingale, you are pioneer right now! You are making history!” 

I was proud of myself for coming up with such a rousing, graduation commencement-type speech, but it didn’t seem to give her much comfort. She, as well as lots of other mothers, are grieving that their kid’s childhoods have been so disrupted. There is no handbook, no tutorial on how to parent in these times so these mothers carry a lot of guilt and worry thinking they are doing it wrong or messing their kids up. 

That feeling of doing it wrong, feeling guilty and worrying thinking that you’re messing the kids up is something all parents understand. Can I get a witness?

Every parent wants the best for their kids. They want their kids to have better and more (of whatever they felt they missed) than they did. 

Every generation lives in a different world than the one before it. Each generation has new challenges to face. My parents lived through The Great Depression and World War II. My older sister lived through the Vietnam War and the 60s. I lived through the 70s, the AIDs epidemic, the emergence of technology and the internet. I raised my kids through 9/11, online stalkers, social media and cell phones. And now my grandkids are living in a CoVid world.

As parents you can never prepare your child for the specific challenges they may face in their lives. There’s no way for you to know what the future holds. I mean, I didn’t raise my kids to know how to parent their kids during a pandemic. 

But I tried to raise my kids to be good people who trust in God and have some common sense. 

I raised my kids to be good people because good people are great to have around no matter what’s going on in culture and no matter what happens in the world. On a good day or a bad day, in a healthy world or in a virus world, I want to have people around me who are honest and kind, who pull their own weight and do their share of the work. I want people around me who can control their emotions and their mouths and actions and make an effort to make good decisions. I really like and admire people who are not selfish and take a minute to think about how somebody else feels, who build people up instead of tearing them down and can sacrifice a little to help. 

I tried to raise my kids to trust in God because I’ve discovered that life is crazy but God is not. There are things in the world that are bigger than me, but nothing is bigger than God. Sadly, I know that this world is filled with people who are cruel, hurtful, selfish, ignorant, who abandon you and hate you but God is not that way at all. 

I know that God is good, all the time, even when everything around me is bad. And in my life, it sure has been helpful for me to know that one thing because there is a lot I don’t know. 

We’re living in a CoVid world… then again, maybe we’re not. Maybe this is all a world-wide conspiracy. Maybe this is the End Times…maybe not. What about aliens and Bigfoot? CNN or Fox News? Who do I trust today and who will I make the devil? 

Maybe I’ll cook chicken for dinner…maybe not. Too many decisions.

No matter what, we need God and we need good people. 

One generation gets the Black Plague, another gets the Spanish Flu. One generation gets “Free Love” and Hitler and another gets The World Wide Web. In every generation we need people who can look at what’s going on in the world and make the good, moral, kind and generous choice. We need people around who will spread love and show kindness. 

So, I don’t know how to advise my daughter on how to be a mother and raise her children in a CoVid world, but I do know that loving God and being a good person whenever and wherever gives you the best basis for figuring out the rest of it.