Like Mother, Like Son

Trust 30:  Day 15
Today is the day you make the rest of your life happen. Write down one thing you’ve always wanted to do and how you will achieve that goal. Don’t be afraid to be very specific in how you’ll achieve it: once you start achieving, your goals will get bigger and your capability to meet them will grow.

I have struggled with the prompts the last couple days.  Not because they have been hard or relentlessly soul-searching, but because I feel they have grown redundant.  They seem to have been focusing on either facing fears or achieving My One Great Goal.  Here we are, half way through this 30-day writing challenge, and here is another similar prompt. I do not care for redundancy.  I find myself growing impatient.  Instead, I choose to circumnavigate this particular prompt and focus my attention on being a mother.

My son is now ten years old.  He is, in my own biased opinion, a spectacular child.  He is creative and bright, thoughtful and caring.  He has always been what mothers would call, an easy child.  He even began sleeping through the night without any sort of trial on us.  In fact, I remember when it first happened.  My husband and I woke up in the morning, feeling well rested!  What a change.  Then that feeling turned to panic — why hadn’t the baby woken up?  We hustled into his room, next to ours, and there he was, laying harmlessly in his crib “talking” to his teddy bear.  

My worry for my child, my sweet and tender son, is that he gets discouraged easily.  So much of myself swims through his DNA that it practically spills over through his pores.  I grew up constantly feeling inadequate.  Always hearing, though never vocalized, that I wasn’t good enough.  Always withheld from opportunities or new chances to try new things.  I was constantly sheltered from possibilities that at some point — I am not cognitively aware — I just stopped trying.  My son, no matter how we encourage or cheer him on, no matter how feed his insatiable curiosity to try new things, he gives up before he ever really tries.  If something seems to be hard or a challenge he won’t want to try.  

Will he grow out of this?  More than likely he will.  He is part of me and he has my spirit as well as my downsides.  Besides all this, and most importantly, he is himself.  He is becoming his own person and his genetics are only a small part of who he will become.  I will be his constant.  His North Star.

So, thinking about this prompt not in regards to me, but as my life’s greatest role — my children’s mother — my ultimate quest is to teach them to not give up on themselves.  This is a life-long process.  I constantly strive to show my son that personal dragons are worth fighting because it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be windmills.  In the end it is the fight that matters.  

Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. 

~~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Published by C. Streetlights

I wrote and illustrated my first bestseller, "The Lovely Unicorn" in the second grade and I've been terrified of success ever since. Published by ShadowTeamsNYC and represented by Lisa Hagen Books