My son is a teacher, a university professor. I find this amazing because, in spite of my father and sister being teachers, I was not born with that ability. My efforts to teach my children piano met with disaster: crying, refusing to do as I instructed, and finally quitting after a half dozen lessons.<\/p>\n
Though I play the piano well, it does not translate to being a good piano teacher. When I understand or do things intuitively, I can’t conceive of other people not getting it, so I have no idea how to teach them.<\/p>\n
I repeat: I am not a teacher. Never have been. Never will be.<\/p>\n
My son, Chris, however, has been teaching me all his life. I first glimpsed his ability when he was only seven. His little sister was in hysterics one afternoon because I couldn’t help her with homework (remember, I’m not a teacher), so I decided to put myself in time-out (i.e., remove myself from the situation.) As I walked towards my bedroom fighting back tears, Chris stopped me with these words:<\/p>\n
“It’s okay, Mom. We love you. You don’t have to be perfect.”<\/p>\n
Wow. Only seven, but still able to put his thumb on the heart of the matter, something I would see him do time and again in the future.<\/p>\n
I believed that as a good mother, I should be able to help my child with homework. When I couldn’t, I felt like a failure. I wasn’t just upset out of empathy for my child, though that was surely part of it. I was also distressed because I believed that a good mother should be able to soothe the tears, take away the pain, and fix the problem. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t.<\/p>\n
I don’t know where I got the idea that I was supposed to fix every problem. I don’t remember my mother doing that for me; I just recall working long and hard to figure out and fix things for myself.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the reason, I expected to solve things for my children. And Chris saw this. I don’t know how, but I suspect I know why. God allowed him to see truth as a way of awakening me, helping me to see the foolishness and impossibility of my self-expectations. We have to see before we can take a step towards change, a step towards letting go and giving things to God.<\/p>\n
A much needed lesson to a mother from her son\u2026God’s little teacher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My son is a teacher, a university professor. I find this amazing because, in spite of my father and sister being teachers, I was not born with that ability. My efforts to teach my children piano met with disaster: crying, refusing to do as I instructed, and finally quitting after a half dozen lessons. Though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldkaren.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}