Well, I promised. The problem with mistakes is that I am still making them and I am blinded to my own shortcomings. If most of the things that irritated me had to do with commonsense most of my own failings came in the form of pride. But here we go, not in order of importance. It is not a pretty picture and it has been painful to think about.

Here are the mistakes I know about I am sure they are only tip of the iceberg:

1. When I first had babies I pridefully went to church, sometimes within hours of having the baby. With my natural parenting approach I didn’t see any need to sit at home when I had only had a baby and that wasn’t a disease. It wasn’t until my last 2 that I began to understand how important it is for a mother to separate herself from the world in order to protect her baby from germs and to enable proper nursing and proper healing. A new baby needs to be protected from too much stimulation and believe me my babies got plenty of stimulation at home. Staying away from activities or church for 6 weeks isn’t too long.

2. I overfed my firstborn. I nursed him every time he had any kind of emotion. Thankfully, none of my children were colicky in spite of the over-feeding. I chalk that up to not using a pacifier. I tried to use a pacifier but gave up. I never gave up what is sometimes erroneously termed demand feeding, nor do I regret that. I just learned to not nurse the baby at the first sign of discomfort. I learned to stretch things out a bit. Both mothers who are avid schedulers and mothers who are intense demand-feeders like I was need common sense. Both approaches will work with a little common sense on the part of the mother but neither is successful in the hands of a ninny.

3. I deeply regret trying to schedule my 4th son after being told not scheduling him was rebellion on my part. I knew enough to know that my heart was rebellious but not enough to know that demand feeding was not a contributor. That child cried for 9 months until I stopped the schedule at 9 months. He hasn’t made a peep since.

4. I regret taking it personal when some of my older children had trouble learning to read. We all laugh now at how mad I got at a certain child every single day but I am not really proud of that episode. I am ashamed that the schooling of my children was a pride issue for me. Yes, I lost my temper a lot in the early years. When a more recent child struggled learning to read I hardly noticed at all.

5. In my desire not to be one of THOSE mothers, I always punished my children when other people complained about them. Later I wished that they had also seen that I was on their team and that I was rooting for them. Last year my oldest son, who knew I felt bad about that, told me that if I was going to err he was glad I had erred on that side and not created the monsters he was seeing in the Navy, young people whose mamas always took their side. This calls for discretion. I didn’t have it.

6. I regret that I was over zealous all the time. I think it deadened my children to spiritual things to hear about them all the time everyday. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I wince every time I read that line.

7. I regret that I was harder on my children than I was on myself.

8. I didn’t realize that hard-working even overly-worked homeschooled geniuses who obeyed on command could be spoiled. I let my boys talk me in and out of way too many things for their own good. And they were smart enough to do it subtly enough to stay under my radar. It was years later before I realized how often I had been swayed by the logic of my sons. I hadn’t learned to say, “Phooey,” yet. This is still a hard one for me.

9. Perhaps the biggest mistake was the feeling that if I just did everything “right” my children would be some sort of new breed never before seen in the history of the world. Unfortunately, I judged older parents by this high standard. The problem is that people I listened to were teaching this. My husband was not deluded for nearly as long as I was which kinda made me mad at him for awhile. The good news is that I learned from my mistake and I am very good at spotting false parenting assumptions and bad teaching. The sad thing is that I know a lot of families who did not survive this mistake. Perhaps you are thinking this was a personal failing and not a parenting mistake. Well, it was a personal failing based on pride but it also was very, very hard on the children and probably damaged them more than anything else. I was setting them up either to fail or become so prideful there was no hope for them outside of a failing.

10. I didn’t avoid the homeschooling trap of over-familiarity with my children which undermined my authority and confused the children.

I have said it lots of time here on this blog but I thought I was the potter and the children were the clay. I was deeply shocked when my oldest joined the Navy. I never once thought of the military as an option not having been around it. When I say shocked I mean absolutely lost. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing anymore. How was I supposed to raise my children when all the while God was shaping them into something different than what I was shaping?

In the end, of course, that became my comfort.

I am not the potter! I am not the potter ! Ding, dong the witch is dead.

Hallelujah, The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns!

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