I Am Not Responsible!

I love being a mother!  I always wanted a big family. My first baby was not born until I was thirty-two so I was in a hurry!  Six years later my fifth child was born.  For the next twenty-five years my job was being a mother, homeschooling, as well as keeping house and running a family.  Life was hectic and even frantic at some times.  But I loved being a mother.

They are all grown and gone now.  As a parent of five adult children, four of them married, I have found that parenting adult children is far harder than parenting young children.  The first reason is that in general they may not want your advice.  They want to make their own decisions about values and beliefs, standards, and behavior.  They want their chance to make those decisions, especially when they disagree with what you would choose.  Occasionally they may want your input and they may make the same decisions you would make.  Perhaps more often they will choose differently.  Sometimes it is not a matter of right or wrong.  It merely is different from what we wish they had chosen.  They will make some good decisions and some bad decisions, just as we did.  

My problem is that somehow I feel responsible for their bad decisions.  (I would like to take credit for their good decisions, but somehow that doesn't work either!)  As an introspective individual I immediately start analyzing my parenting style, how I disciplined, how I encouraged my children, what I taught them and how I taught them, where I wish I had handled things differently.  (I do sometimes think I did something well.)

When I was busy taking responsibility for something that I was not really responsible for some years ago, I found something Ruth Bell Graham wrote.  She also had five children and did not always feel good about her parenting skills.  I would like to share her words since parents of adult children are not the only ones who need them.  It is entitled "My Part (the possible); God's Part (the impossible)".

My Part (the possible)

            love expressed

            to pray intelligently, logically, urgently, without ceasing in prayer

            enjoy being a mother

            provide a warm, happy home

God's Part (the impossible)

            conviction of sin

            creating a hunger and thirst for righteousness

            conversion

            bringing to a place of total commitment

            showing ourselves as we really are (without ever discouraging)

            continually filling us with His Holy Spirit for our sanctification and His service

For severaI years I have kept a card with these lines in a little holder on the windowsill above my kitchen sink.  I read them over and over again.  More recently I have turned these thoughts into a mantra, summarizing them into just one phrase, "I am not responsible for . . . ."  Sometimes I add what I know I am not responsible for, sometimes I don't need to do that.  I repeat these words over and over again.

I am so grateful that I can trust God's parenting.  I am so glad that He is responsible for the important things in my children's lives.

I AM NOT REPONSIBLE!  HALLELUJAH!

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