Sacrificial parenthood, phenomenal beauty, precious love

Today’s blog is written by a dear friend and mum to a beautiful 21 year old. When not writing blogs, you’ll find her getting stuck into a book or some arts and crafts, having coffee with friends, and in her spare time likes to dabble in saving the world. 

Phenomenal beauty

There is such a gift in seeing the phenomenal beauty of a precious moment when you are actually in it. Not how precious was that, but how precious is this, right before my eyes.

Motherhood is filled with an abundance of those moments, but like most mothers I probably missed many of them trying to keep one hundred nasty coloured balls in the air, whilst singing Barney songs and picking salt dough out of the carpet, but thankfully I didn’t miss them all.

Selfless love

As we drove back from dropping our daughter off to uni this weekend I was reflecting on how parenthood is the closest we will ever get this side of heaven to giving a perfect love. A selfless giving where you will never add up a balance of time, money and investment. This is us becoming our best selves.

Nothing will call us on as human beings in the same way as parenthood.

Please don’t think I’ve never complained about mess, or the third pair of shoes in a term, but behind that is a knowing I would give everything for her good.  Most of our children’s lives we are merely learning to love in this way, we screw up, over and over, but because we are given this precious experience of love we keep going.

The special moment that I didn’t miss is probably not as momentous as you’d think. We have a family “thing” that has happened for nearly all my daughters’ 21 years and it’s when we can’t open a jar or bottle.

“Go and ask dad to open it”.

My husband can always open it; I don’t think there’s ever once been a failure on this.  Since my daughter was probably three maybe four, her dad has opened it, but has pretended he can’t, hands it back to her totally loosened and says “nope, I’m not strong enough, you try”. She then opens the jar easily, looks round triumphantly that she is in fact the hero, and poor dad, well he has just been defeated in strength and might by a four, five, ten, twelve year old girl. By fourteen or so, the years of sacrificing his reputation and masculinity for her self-esteem was rumbled, but the jar opening performance still goes on as an homage to his sacrificial fatherhood and the sense of worth in the young woman now handing it to him.


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