By uss_dad
The Mom and Dad titles last forever. The titles and the child’s expectations of what those titles imply last forever.
Many years ago, I was working with a high school youth group in Southern California. There was a troubled girl in our group who always looked at life as a cup half-filled. In general, she lacked the confidence and joy that should have punctuated her young life; she had even attempted suicide one time. In her senior year of high school, she was old enough to legally find out more about her birth-mom, which she did. She found out that she had been given up for adoption largely because her mom was single and an alcoholic. She used this last piece of evidence as proof-positive that she was genuinely worthless and destined to an equal if not worse fate than her birth-mother, and it went downhill from there.
Most of us place significant stock in the parents who bore us, and it is an often heady endeavor to navigate past a parent who did not measure up. Some parents erroneously reason that they are off the hook once the kids are grown and out of the house, but the titles we bear as parents are timeless. We owe it to our kids, our extended family, ourselves, and ultimately to God to press on to be men and women of integrity every day of our lives.
I love the picture to the left of the little boy saluting his father standing there in his white Navy uniform. The little boy probably sees his dad from a bigger-than-life perspective…as most little boys would at this young age. The bigger question is this, however, “Will the son still salute the father when he has become a young man himself, knowing who his father is in full measure?”
As adults, it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that the little details of our lives go unnoticed by our young children. By the time that they have grown to be teenagers though, nothing escapes their gaze, and they easily connect the dots of our past thereby revealing who we are and who we used to be.
Decide even now that you will be the Mom or the Dad worthy of your child’s salute for the rest of your life.
