Last week, a friend shared an anonymous quote that really hit
home: “Only parents with gentle children can gentle parent. The rest of us have
to square up and fight for our lives with the tiny bullies we made.” We only had
four children. They’re a product of the same two people and the same couple of
decades. And yet each one was their own unique variety of difficult. Nothing we
learned from parenting any one of them was even remotely helpful with the other
three. One lesson Heather taught us – repeatedly – was to choose your fights. She
spent an entire school year with shoes on the wrong feet. We’d fix them, and every
time she’d switch them back. Another year, she signed her name “Oliver Twist”
on all her school papers. And she refused to answer to any other name. We learned
– eventually – some hills are just not worth dying on.
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