Parenting three teen girls is not for the faint of heart. It’s refining and emotional and often the most personally reflective of my own challenges and limitations.
How will I model living within and seeking to alter my imperfections while aiming to grow and mature?
This makes a tremendous difference if I’m willing to reflect, shift, and mend my errors. Yes, raising my teen girls is simultaneously trying and rewarding.
Building character takes patience and moral courage. It would be easy to let many things go and chalk it up to the corrupt culture and succumb to the ordinary. But I’m not going to live an ordinary life. And I don’t want my daughters to live anything less than their best.
This isn’t an issue of glamor but of the quiet humility of ordinary moments. Of becoming the best versions of ourselves we can be —
Loving, kind, joyful, gracious, peaceful, patient, gentle, faithful people.
We can become people who demonstrate self-control and long suffering, love God and others deeply, something which my daughters have practiced their whole lives. I think it starts with my own honesty — of sharing with them how I’m aiming to grow, or what my struggles are, so they know they aren’t alone. They know I’m not perfect (they have stories and tears to prove it) and I haven’t arrived to some moral high ground or emotional success.
If I’m honest with myself, first, and self-aware of limitations or challenges, I can then see clearer to share those with my girls, and help them do the hard work of self-reflection. And all of us, working to grow and sharpen each other and change.
This is the summer we are getting our eldest daughter ready to move away to college, and we must shift expectations and perceptions, too. These summer moments together are so precious.
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