What You Allow is What Will Continue.

Newborn Morgan Snuzzles

I was born in North Carolina and spent the first 3 years of my life in a small town. It was a nice little neighborhood, and my older brother by 3 years and I had friends in the neighborhood.  My father was a traveling salesman as he had been most of his life, and my mother was a home maker at that time. At some point she decided that she could make some extra money by watching the neighborhood children during the day.

My mother has always been good with children. I won the lottery on moms. She majored in sociology and had been a social worker. She was patient and good with children. However this taking on several neighborhood children at once presented new and unusual circumstances.

There were twin blonde girls who would instantly attempt to eat crumbs from underneath our table and there were rowdy boys who broke my toys that I was forced to share with them, knowing how it would end. They did the same to my brother's as well. This lesson carried with it 2 consequences to my brother and myself. My brother ended up with no respect for personal property, even when I was in college and he would mess up my stuff while I was away. I learned that I was supposed to let people destroy my stuff and that strangers mattered more than family. Neither of these were lessons that my mother would have taught us, it was the lesson of experience learned from the other children and parental reaction.

My mom eventually found that watching other people's kids cost more than it was worth. She tried to do what good she could before sending the kids home, feeding the poor twins who seemed to be always starving. Mom has the best heart of anyone I've ever known, but ultimately it was too much and she had to stop doing it and focus on her own kids.

Still there was damage done in that short time, damage my mother would not have wanted, damage that affected her children for years afterward. I learned quickly that I was last and had to tolerate even the destruction of my own property. Nothing really felt like mine and could be taken away at any moment for the whim of someone else, often  my brother who did things like "magic tricks" of sawing my barbie in half.

It's amazing what little things, allowed to continue, can escalate into over time.  Or how little inappropriate behaviors can grow into bigger ones. I'm no stranger to "boiling a frog" and when someone discovers that they can get away with something small without consequences, it emboldens them to try a little further, do a little more.

Now I find myself on the flip side, in my mother's shoes. It's so hard to know what is the seed of something worse to come if allowed to grow.  And it's so hard to make calls to protect your child in potential situations that may or may not develop. However I have experience that my mother did not, she herself who had an experience at a young age that effected her.  Sometimes things that seem small can leave an impact with unintended lessons that could affect someone's personality for a lifetime. And sometimes mom's have to make hard calls that are painful for the benefit of their children.

It was not so long ago that I was carrying Morgan down the stairs. She wriggled and I lost my balance. In a split second I had to decide which way to fall. If I fell forward, I could spare myself, but if I fell backward and broke my leg, I could spare Morgan. In an instant the choice was clear, and I chose to break my leg. Morgan was spared personal pain, other than watching her mother in pain as I slid down the stairs on my broken leg, breaking it worse with each step, and holding her to me to protect her.

If I thought that was the most painful decision that I would have to make, with the most lasting effects, I was probably wrong. Being a mother has come with significant sacrifice in many areas. It's always ongoing and there seems to be no end in sight.  It seems that protecting your child is easier when they are small, but preparing them to cope with other people on their own is so much harder. The pain of child bearing was short and intense (and almost killed me), but the growing pains are constant, and there's no painkiller to soothe a wounded heart when you have to make a painful and unpopular decision to protect your child. If what you allow is what will continue, and you know that it is harmful, it's still hard to put that foot down and no longer allow it. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and be the bad guy so nothing worse happens.