Instructions

Instructions: Prompt For Sunday Scribblings

I’ve always said that my children should have been born with instruction manuals.
How much easier it would have been to raise them if I had had a book of instructions to puruse all the appropriate guidelines laid out in a straight forward manner for me to follow. During delivery each child should have come with one, a manual, that would give me the direct guidance with all the answers to ensure me that I did all the right things and avoided all that was wrong when it came to handling each of my children.
Guidance through the sleepless nights of infancy to the terrible two's in toddler years, through the worry, stress and anxiety that their teen years brought me. I’m quite certain that instructions would have come in very handy.

Teen years would have been a breeze if I had directives. If mapped out I could have planned ahead and been prepared for the worst and would have saved myself the stress of getting through the laborious chapters of existence with them. I’d be emotionally intact with no worry lines etched in my brow to prove that I had mothered a teen. They would be better off for it too, wouldn’t they?

Once I had figured out what to do through each segment of their growing up years it seemed they were going on to another phase and I would have to start all over again. An instruction handbook would have saved me the time and frustration spent on thinking about what to do next, what I should advise them on or more appropriately, what would be the best way to advise them? An instruction booklet would have tutorials and coaches that would help you the whole way through and make my job so much easier.

Wait. Wait, just a moment! I have to take all of that back.

Now that I have written this down I realize that I wouldn’t change a single second of the worry and the sleepless nights, the arguing logic with teenagers and the worry lines, nope, I sure wouldn’t change those!
They are what make me a Mother. They are also what made my children who they are today and I like whom they are!

I’m proud of my children and I now know that I was their instruction manual. I had to give them my knowledge to carry them through their childhoods, which in turn would take them through life.
Within them they carry around their own instruction manuals now, which are filled with many words, emotions, feelings and all of our shared experiences. Be they good or bad does not even matter because this is how we all grew. This is how we become us.

The only instructions that parents really need to have when a child is born is not anything that it easily written in a manual. It is to love that child no matter what. Love that child and love them with all your heart. If you are able to love them enough the rest of the instructions in life will work themselves out.

What seems like a long, long time ago ...

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