It’s come to my attention during these parenting years that life has changed abundantly since I was a kid. Parents these days seem to be obsessed with giving their children every worldly thing and experience in existence. I get sucked into this idea from time to time too. I think social media has a lot to do with that gravitational pull as well. Back when we were growing up, our parents had no clue what other moms were doing on a daily basis and therefore had less to compare themselves to. Now, we can open up Facebook or Instagram on our phone first thing in the morning and see five different moms doing five different but equally amazing things for their kids. Whether it’s crafting, going on an adventure, buying new clothes or toys, there’s a lot to feel guilty about if we let ourselves. When we were kids we were allowed to be disappointed. I think that we need to get back to that mindset for some healthy reasons.
Kid’s need to be disappointed sometimes. That is life. I’m not saying we should make it our mission to disappoint our kids on a daily basis, mostly because we won’t have to, opportunities will show themselves daily, but we should stop feeling so guilty when it happens. Just this Halloween I struggled deeply with this problem. I have one child in full day school, one in preschool half a day three days a week and a toddler with me at all moments. There is a lot of running around five days a week and not a whole lot of down time. I kept seeing everyone’s pictures at the pumpkin patch and wanted to take my kids too, but there was really never any time to get there. I felt horrible because I know how much they would have enjoyed it, but at the same time I just had to realize that life is crazy right now. Something had to drop and it happened to be the pumpkin patch. We can’t do everything all the time. That’s a life lesson that we all have to learn and continue managing. Priorities have to be made and school just happens to trump the pumpkin patch.
Then Halloween rolled up on us. The day before Halloween my middle child had the stomach flu while my husband was down for the count with a different mystery virus. The next day, Halloween, I woke up with our unwelcome stomach flu houseguest. All day, between bouts of praying to the porcelain god and driving the porcelain bus, I kept thinking “by 4:00 I’ll at least be able to walk with them so they can trick or treat.”
Well, 4:00 came and went and I was still unable to move without wanting to immediately return to my porcelain place of worship. I somehow conned my still sick husband into taking the two older kids trick or treating for a short time. It wasn’t pretty folks. There were no cute hairdos and fancy makeup. There were no good pictures of happy smiling kids hopped up on sugar. I hated missing what would have been a lot of fun but there was nothing that could change our circumstances that day. What else could I teach them in that moment except that life doesn’t always work out like we want? It just happens like that and we have to teach our kids to roll with the punches instead of taking it to the guts and being down for the count.
Let’s teach these young ones that even though life can hurt and be disappointing we can still find the good, the joy and the positives that will always outweigh the negative. We aren’t doing them any favors by shielding them from reality. Let’s make the reality of our days show that we are overcomers and that disappointment does not have to steal our joy.
