Parental Discretion Advised

"My son, keep your father’s command 

   and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. 

Bind them always on your heart; 

   fasten them around your neck. 

When you walk, they will guide you; 

   when you sleep, they will watch over you; 

   when you awake, they will speak to you"

Proverbs 6:20-22

From the second we're born we start learning. 

And, unlike college, we don't get to choose our teachers. They're chosen for us.

They are our parents.  

They teach us almost everything. Things that we'll use for the rest of our lives. 

Like using the toilet, brushing our teeth twice a day, bathing, eating our vegetables, not burping in public, not to pick our nose, saying "please" and "thank you", etc. 

These are very valuable lessons. We would never function in society without them. We would be lost trying to figure it out ourselves.

Tonight, as I was brushing my teeth, my dad walked by the bathroom, smiled and said "good night, I love you." 

And I, with my mouth full of toothpaste, said, "nght, bluwv eyew doo."

And for the first time I wondered if he was proud of me for brushing my teeth. Because as a child, I hated brushing my teeth. I did it, of course, (I've never had a cavity :)) but I didn't like it. So after years and years of telling me to brush my teeth, and counting almost to 3 when I rebelled, I learned that it's just something you do when you wake up and before you go to bed. Is he proud that he taught me a valuable life lesson?

Is my mom proud when I choose to eat a banana for breakfast instead of a pop tart? Or when I scoop as much broccoli onto my plate as possible?

Are my parents proud when I tell them "thank you", and say "may I?" instead of "can I?"? Are they proud when I wash my dish and put it away? 

They taught me all of this. Of course, there are things I had to learn by myself just from living on my own, but for the most part, they laid the foundation for the rest of my life.

That's a lot of pressure as parents. 

And then there's the difficult stuff. 

The morals. The beliefs. The mistakes. 

Have I bound my parents teachings on my heart and fastened them on my neck?

Have I become the person they intended me to be? 

Are they proud of the choices I'm making independently as I transition into adulthood?

Do they think "I taught you better than that", or "did she not listen to a word I said?"? 

Are they proud of me?

The potty training mattered, a lot. But it's these bigger things that will make you or break you in the end.

And in the end... we're mostly broken. 

Most often, we forsake our parents teachings and go our own way, because what do they know?

We end up making the same mistakes they warned us about because we were too stubborn to admit they were real.

We disappoint them, break their hearts, and make them question their parenting.  

We end up having to learn the lessons all over again ultimately leading to one big lesson: parents know best.

That has to be the hardest part about parenting: 

Teaching your children everything you possibly can about life, love, relationships, society, etc., and knowing that it's ultimately their decision in the end. 

They pick and choose what they're taught, and decide which ones to follow and which ones to disregard.

And when they choose to disregard, wondering if there was something you could have done better. 

But sometimes lessons are best taught in I-told-you-so's. 

Nobody ever learned everything through watching other people's mistakes. You have to make them on your own sometimes. Sometimes you don't even know it's a mistake until you make it. 

As Lily said in "How I Met Your Mother":

There are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to know that it really is a mistake is to make that mistake and go, "Yup, that was a mistake". So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake because then you'll go about your whole life not knowing whether it was a mistake or not.

 Anyways, our parents are vital to the rest of our lives. They spend 18 years trying their best to teach us everything they know before booting us out of the nest. 

And sometimes we don't fly; we just fall. We fail to follow their teachings and have to learn the hard way. 

But when we succeed, think of how proud they must be.