Lesson Two: Trust Your Parents

Continuing the list of lessons I learned from my recent vacation,

The second lesson is: Trust your parents.

Now, let me say right off that I am certain that some of my readers have parents who should not be trusted. But you’d better make mighty sure before you decide your parents are in that category. And there are others whose parents should be trusted in some areas, but distrusted completely in others.  This is where you apply the Biblical idea that “there is safety in a multitude of counselors” (Proverbs 11:14).

But I digress. For people with normal, decent, loving, intelligent parents—parents who generally try to do the right thing—you can trust your parents.

How did I learn this specifically on this vacation? Well, first off, my mother has been telling me for ten years that I need to get away. That I need a vacation. And I have resisted. “Can’t afford it” was my usual excuse once the issue of having enough tenure in a job made the “don’t have leave time” excuse invalid.

But the fact is that I hate to be out of the action. I’m always afraid I will miss something. And I don’t trust others to do my job as well as I do—not so much from pride in my own abilities as from experience that, when I delegate to others, I’m usually left holding an exploded disaster. (Which probably says more about my delegating ability than about anything else.)

I also hate coming back to the inevitable stack of stuff to catch up on. I don’t do well with big, long-term tasks.  I thrive with short-term, achievable goals. To perform at my best, I must break down big projects into very small parts, or I become overwhelmed and can’t function. The return-from-vacation stack-of-stuff is just too overwhelming.

My sensei is probably the only person who knows this characteristic of mine as well as my parents do. When I learn a new kata, I can’t handle all 26 moves at once. I want the first five. Let me get those down pat, and then give me the next five. At first, I think, my sensei thought (as my parents used to) that this was due to perfectionism. But as he’s gotten to know me, I think he’s begun to see that giving me the whole form at once only confuses me—even when I know he doesn’t expect me to remember the entire thing. I am far more confident and learn my kata much faster if he gives me the first few moves and lets me drill on them until I am certain that I know which moves go in which order, and then adds the next segment of the form.

All that to say, your parents know you better than anyone. Maybe even better than you know yourself. And they can see areas of strength and weakness far more clearly than you can. Trust them. My mother knew I was driving too hard and needed a break. Had I trusted her years ago, I might not have been such a mental and emotional mess over the past several years.

The second illustration of this lesson came from my sons. They wanted boogie-boards to play in the surf. Now, on the first day there, I had gone down to the beach shop and bought each of them an inner tube and a plastic foam boogie-board. But my parents and I thought it best to give them the inner tubes first, and then wait several days before giving them the boogie-boards. (The boys didn’t know about either item at the time.)

My younger son just took everything in stride, playing with whatever was provided. He has a very laid-back, accepting personality. But  my older son is more intense. He had seen a really nice, wooden board while visiting the shop with my mother. She told him it cost too much, and that there were other reasons why she would not get it for him. She asked him to just trust her, and wait. But he just kept badgering us. Every shop we went in, every trip down to the shore … that boogie-board.

Finally, he got himself in trouble by announcing to a shop-keeper that her boards were much more expensive than the same boards in the shop down the street. One of our group overheard him and told me about it. Of course, I had to correct him, an unpleasant task which was all the harder because this particular child (with that intense personality) takes mistakes far too hard. There was an unpleasant scene which cast a pall on the rest of the morning.

It was late that afternoon when we returned to the beach, and I presented the two boys with the boogie-boards I had bought for them days earlier. And my older son began to cry when he realized that he had gotten himself in trouble for nothing. I took him in my arms and simply said, “Always trust me. Even when you don’t understand. Because I love you and will always do what is best for you.”

The final illustration of this lesson came from my own dad. Before the trip began, we had discussed the possibility of adding a couple of extra days to our trip so that we could take the boys on the museum tours. But I had been told that my ex-husband had tickets to take the kids to a special event at the zoo, and I didn’t really want to even suggest breaking those plans. After 13 years of fighting with my ex, I am sick of the drama, and I did not want my vacation spoiled by a confrontation.

So when Daddy asked me in the middle of the week what I thought, I told him that I thought the museum and battleship tours were a fabulous idea, but that I was not going to be the one to call my ex about it. If Daddy wanted to talk to the ex about it, I would be glad to give him the number. A bit cowardly, perhaps, but, well, you’d have to know just how intense and drama-laden the last 13 years have been to understand.

Daddy, however, is a prince. He called the ex and just said that we’d all decided to extend the trip a couple of days so that we could take the kids on these tours, and if the ex was upset about losing his tickets, well, Daddy would pay for them. I don’t know if the ex agreed because he really wanted to, or if it was because of the way Daddy approached it, but the fact is that Daddy handled it masterfully and there was no drama, no contention, and no unpleasantness to mar the end of our trip.

So I learned: Trust your parents.

Tags: boys, character, Christianity, Family Life, karate, parenting, Religion, True Stories, vacation