- "Mom, did you see that play in the back yard?!?"
- "Mom, watch my super ninja kick! Now watch my ballet kick!" (You'd think this comes from our girl, but no. It's always the little boy, and he does have amazing jumping ability.)
- "Mom, watch me shoot you in the face with my Nerf gun from ALL THE WAY over here!"
- "Mom, watch what happens when I mix this stuff with this stuff!"
- "Mom, look at my art!"
- "Mom, watch this HILARIOUS YouTube video we saw!"
- "Mom, watch this AWESOME Lego battle!"
- "Mom, watch this sand rock crumble into a million pieces!"
The list goes on and on and on. Hundreds and hundreds of opportunities to "watch this" every week. I have basically been setting things aside and "watching this" for 14 years. Can I be so honest right now and say that the subjects of small children's interests are almost never inherently interesting to me? Is that okay to say out loud? I mean, I love my kids to pieces. But I just do not get excited about Lego battles and YouTube videos all on my own.
So, why do I watch? Why do I stop what I'm doing hundreds of times in a week to watch things that aren't seemingly necessary uses of my time? Well, that's just it. They don't SEEM to be necessary uses of my time; but they are, in fact, necessary.
When our oldest was just a tiny one wanting me to watch his trains and cars smash into one another repeatedly (Let me reiterate the "repeatedly" part.), the Lord was so faithful to reveal to me the importance and even necessity of those moments. It was so clear to me that, if I spent all their little years telling my kids that I'm not interested in the things that excite them, they will inevitably feel like I'm not interested in THEM. Yikes! I would be training them to do life without me. I would be teaching them over the course of hundreds of moments that they need to do life on their own.
I played this forward to their preteen and teen years when emotions run high and social challenges abound. I thought about the number of times they'd be confronted with choices and conflicts and temptations. I thought about the number of things they would learn and need to process. There was the potential that they would get to all those moments, and they wouldn't even have the NOTION to come to me with their concerns or experiences, let alone know that they can freely come to me with anything.
So I watched. I keep watching. I don't ALWAYS watch every single thing all the time because I just can't. I would seriously never get anything done ever. But most of the time I stop, and I watch.
Here's how that's playing out years later. Our oldest started public high school this year, and he tells me loads of details about his days! He shares what he's learning. He shares hilarious interactions. He tells me the good and hard parts of his days. He tells me about his successes and the things he wants to improve. He lets me ask him questions. He sometimes rolls his eyes at the things I'm interested in (factoring polynomials, anyone?), but he doesn't hold back. It's just part of how we have shared life all this time, so we just keep sharing life.
I am not naive enough to think that he will always share every detail of his life with me, and I'm actually more than okay with that. The cool thing is that, even now, he's not coming to me to ask me to solve all his problems for him or tell him how to run his days. He's just coming to SHARE his days. If it turns out that part of that is a little bit of problem solving, fine. But mostly, I'm thankful for all those crazy car collisions and repeated Lego battles that trained us both to just share life as it is.
Potentially one of the best things about this is that he loves to come home and ask how our day has gone here. He loves knowing about all the parts of the day he missed while he was at school because he grew to have an appreciation for those things during the years he was here.
One of my prayers for my kids is that they grow up to be adults who love people well enough to share real life in all its stages and forms. I want them to be able to play cars with little kids; talk to their peers about school and work; and share details and feelings about their days with their spouses. I want them to be able to slow down, sit, and watch game shows or history programs with elderly people to share life with them. I want them to be able to call grandparents on the phone and talk about their lives. I want them to be able to ask people who come from different backgrounds and cultures to teach them new things.
Will all of these things automatically happen because I just stop and "watch this"? No. Is it possible for parents to create the kind of relationship with their children that I'm describing even if they aren't around as many hours in a day to "watch this"? Yes. I think it's more about percentages. Do our kids hear us say no more often than we say yes? Do they see us choose to focus on a million other things before we pay attention to them?
Parents of young ones, let this be an encouragement to you that it does make a difference to do totally random and maybe seemingly pointless things with your kids. In the process, you will both be learning to share life for what it is... that it doesn't have to be an earth-shattering occurrence before it's worth sharing... and that, in fact, the sharing of life was actually the point all along.
