Fear Less

As a mother, there are two gifts you wish to bestow upon your children: to live fearlessly and to love with hearts wide open.  But saying this you know that life will crush them at times, many times possibly, as it already has.  But if you can teach them only two things, that the only way to truly live is to not let the fear of the crushing stop them from living.  And to not let the pain of loving and losing stop them from opening their hearts.

As their mother you instinctively want to protect.  But life has bluntly and repeatedly taught you that you can’t protect them from everything, or really from anything, and that trying to shield them from pain and heartache only keeps them from truly living in the end.  Rather you strive to teach them to push through the pain and suffering that comes, and that is sure to come again, and to show through the light of living what they can become in spite of the obstacles.

So, you plan big trips that scare you which include hikes that take you high places, even though you are yourself tremendously afraid of heights. You plan these adventures knowing full well that there will be parts that are scary for you, but you don’t want to hold your children back because of your own fears.  And at one point during a hike when your fear response takes over your body, you ask your daughter to take your small son’s hand and lead him to safety.  And your teenage son takes your hand until you find your steadiness again and your breath has returned to normal. And you feel proud that they were not afraid.

And you rejoice in their loving, even when it scares you, and you encourage them to open their hearts even knowing how hard those hearts can break. With Father’s Day approaching again, you wonder what you can do to distract them.  But instead of planning something to get them off the radar this year, you just let it come.  And your daughter spends her morning taking care of homeless kittens and delivering a note to a friend in need.  And your teenage son makes lunch with his girlfriend and you can’t help but notice how joyful they are, even today.  And you hear him ask her casually what her dad was doing to celebrate Father’s Day, as if it were no big deal, and because he genuinely cares.

And you suddenly realize that sometimes, a lot of the time, it is so much less of teaching them something and more of just letting things be.  You realize that they were born fearless.  And that simply allowing that to be so is all they need.  And you see that they are loving with abandon as children do so naturally and are so grateful that they still can. You realize that just because you are afraid of heights doesn’t mean that they need to be.  And that just because you are afraid of Father’s Day doesn’t mean that they are.