On trusting my children enough to let their lives become their own.
Children grow into the space their parents are willing to trust them with.
But trust is not the same as expectation. Sometimes expectation is simply another form of desire. We imagine the kind of person we hope our child will become, the life we hope they will live, and the choices we hope they will make.
Trust asks something different of us. It asks us to put down our own picture and say:
Even if your life looks nothing like the one I imagined for you,
I believe you will learn to draw one of your own.
That was the kind of trust I wanted as a child. Even when I was clumsy or unprepared, I wanted the chance to try things on my own. Now that I am a parent, though, I understand the other side much better.
No parent wants to watch a child fail or get hurt. Looking back, I can understand much of the control and over-involvement I experienced growing up. Sometimes it was simply love that was too afraid to watch me fall. And now I wonder:
How much will I be able to trust my own children?
Even with newborns, I found myself wanting them to follow my plans—how much they should eat, when they should eat, when they should sleep. Such small things, and already I wanted their lives to fit inside a schedule I had made.
But when I let them follow their own rhythms a little more, they told me what they needed.
When they were hungry, they cried.
When they were full, they pushed the bottle away.
When they were tired, they slept.
Sometimes my job was not to make them follow the plan.
It was simply to pay attention.
God has given me free will.
That makes me wonder how much freedom I will be able to give my children.
Not freedom without guidance or boundaries.
Just enough room to try.
To fail.
To discover what they can do before I rush in and do it for them.
If they truly cannot manage and ask for help, I want to be the first person running toward them. But I do not want to teach them to give up before they have even tried.
Maybe motherhood needs to make my life simpler.
Fewer plans.
Fewer checklists.
Less need to control every outcome.
And more time simply watching these little people work so hard to figure out how to live.
I hope I can stand close enough to help,
but far enough away to let them try.
And I pray that my trust becomes solid ground beneath their lives—
something steady enough for them to stand on while they learn to draw their own picture.
