This past weekend we enjoyed a wonderful Stake Conference.
The highlight came during the rest song this morning, when we sang all seven verses of How Firm A Foundation. It is quite an experience to stand and sing with 2,000 people and full organ, those amazing words.
My four year old Ben kept looking at me, surprise on his face at how fun it was to sing standing with the whole congregation. He was perhaps too young to remember doing this before, but I could tell he liked it.
We enjoyed excellent talks on both saturday evening and sunday morning, and Paul told me the priesthood session on saturday was excellent as well. The theme for our Boulder conference was Arise and Shine Forth.
Several of the talks were directed to the youth in our congregation, and the messages they received to prepare now for life were excellent and timely.
Then tonight we enjoyed our Young Womens Night of Excellence. It is the night for the girls to share their talents and hobbies with the rest of the ward. Each girl had a display table set up to share their accomplishments and our young womens president prepared a short video with pictures and short clips of each individual girl sharing spiritual experiences. It was fun for Paul and I to see our two daughters talking on the tape about spiritual things.
Sometimes we wonder how everything is going to turn out with our family. It is so easy in the thick of family life to feel somewhat lost and overwhelmed. I get a great deal of comfort out of the teachings of the Savior on the subject of the Purpose of Life.
In a nutshell, this is the plan:
Receive a physical body.
Exercise agency and learn to choose between good and evil.
Learn and gain experience that will help you become more like your Heavenly Father.
Those topics encompass all sorts of issues and subjects, but for us mormons they are the basics.
One of my LDS friends asked me years ago why I tried so hard as a mother. I explained to her that I did not want to leave anything to chance. She was a committed stay at home mother but she felt that I put way too much effort into cooking and spending time with my family and was absolutely ga ga at my dedication to breastfeeding long term as this had such a huge impact on the lifestyle we were able to lead.
She was a friend who spent much of her free time looking for people to tend her children, and was always leaving them for the whole day or taking off with her husband for long weekends away. She did not understand why I was so willing and happy to stay home with my little ones.
I look at my two daughters now. Michelle will be eighteen in a few weeks and Allison is almost fifteen. They are so busy with their own goals and plans for life, we have very little time to spend together. I am so grateful for the quiet times we shared when they were babies. For the hours and hours we lived at the park, just playing and soaking up the sunshine. I am so grateful for the years we spent living our life focused on the needs of toddlers. Mothering a child during the trying twos, and even more ferocious (in my opinion), the angst filled threes, can take a mother to her depths in terms of patience, love, and charity.
Yet I can’t think of one thing that would have been as fulfilling for me as it was to nurture those little girls when they were so small and helpless.
My prayer is that as my daughters go out into the world to learn how to live as adults, that having lived this sort of a lifestyle in their own home, they will desire to also give the best of themselves to their children.
I remember one year, Allison was a baby, and we were living in a small apartment in Boulder. That year I had seven mothers ask me to provide Day Care for their babes while they worked.
I said “NO” to all. I wanted to completely focus on my own little ones and not be distracted by caring for someone else’s child. Sometimes I felt guilty for not helping these women out, but I always came back to the idea and the very strong belief I had that mothers should raise their own babies if possible.
My gut instincts were correct. Over the years I have occasionally tended a kindergartener while Mom worked, and even tended a few babies.
I tried to give them good care. But they did not want to be with me or my family. They cried inconsolably in the early weeks because all they wanted was their own Momma.
The guilt feelings I experienced tending these children was intense. I did not love them the way I loved my own, and I could not muster up the extra room in my heart to feel those gushes of pure loving energy that was present with my own babes. I was a hireling, working for a check, and the baby knew it and I knew it and it was horrible.
Both times I tended newborns, it did not last for more than a few months.
I have now vowed that I will never again do childcare, and I don’t plan to raise my grandchildren. My prayer is that my daughters will choose to be home with their babes and that they will recognize the blessing and responsibility of being a full time stay at home mother.
I believe giving our children the gifts that are embodied in the saying “Everything money CAN’T buy” are the best use of time, energy, and purpose for a woman in our day and age.
It was a temptation for me in those early years to do a child care business and bring some extra money. We could have purchased so much with those dollars. But some of my happiest memories are tied to a little dumpy apartment in Boulder and three happy little ones constantly demanding the best that I had to give.
Expecting Andrew 1996
It is not so challenging now. I only have one demanding little person, and four older children who help in a thousand different ways with the chores of family life. If I could go back, would I change anything?
No.
As I said, I did not want to leave anything to chance. I wanted to teach our children our values. I wanted to teach our children a pattern for happy living, which even if they chose to move away from during their teens or twenties, would always call to them as a reminder for how family life could be lived. I don’t claim that our home life has been perfect or even what is best for everyone.
But I don’t have any regrets about spending my 20’s and 30’s raising my family.
I give my husband Paul all of the credit for enabling me to have the opportunity and blessing of being at home while our children were babes. He is the foundation in our lives, and I love him with all my heart.
Jenny Hatch
Benjamins Blessing Day 2002
Healthy Families Make A Healthy World!
