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Posts Tagged ‘week’

  1. The Other Side {Squishing my fears}

    April 28, 2012 by Laura

    There have been SO MANY won­der­ful posts and com­ments this week.  You ladies are seri­ously amaz­ing and are show­ing me (and whomever else comes across this site) the many lay­ers to being a Plane Jane.  I have to say there was one com­ment that struck me deeply this week.  I think I was so struck because it came from some­one on the ‘other side’.  From some­one who has raised their chil­dren and now they are young adults.  One of my biggest fears as a Plane Jane is that some­how grow­ing up the way my chil­dren are will scar them– leave them hav­ing ‘issues’ when they are older or resent­ing my hus­band and I for choos­ing this for them.  I have an immense amount of guilt each time we are not able to do some­thing like a ‘tra­di­tional fam­ily’ would; or I let my daugh­ter watch another episode of Go Diego Go! while I get her brother out of the bath, or when we say good night to daddy via Face­time (God bless the iPhone). There is a voice nag­ging con­stantly and it is ugly and it makes me feel awful and I decided after read­ing the won­der­ful words from a wiser Plane Jane to tell that voice to shut it.

    Here is why:

    As the wife of an air­line cap­tain, our four kids were raised with daddy miss­ing birth­days and base­ball games, sleep­overs and even cam­pouts. We made the deci­sion EARLY on that we would not move every time his base changed. Decid­ing to com­mute took a toll on our fam­ily, but it also was a bless­ing. We have four grown chil­dren who have seen places in the world that I have not! They are each strong and con­fi­dent and can nav­i­gate the globe when­ever they want. They are adven­tur­ous and under­stand the value of mak­ing your time together COUNT! They have learned that the dates on a cal­en­dar don’t dic­tate when a fam­ily cel­e­brates, or what those cel­e­bra­tions look like. We ski on Decem­ber 25th and have Christ­mas on the 27th when daddy gets home!More than any­thing else though, this not-so-normal life has taught each of us the value of “being there.” 

    I am decid­ing today that my kids will be like Teri’s kids.  They will be explor­ers, they will be con­fi­dent, they will NOT let the cal­en­dar or other  people’s expec­ta­tions dic­tate any­thing about who they are and how they behave.  But above all they will learn to VALUE ‘BEING THERE’ really mak­ing the time they have count.

    See, I have been fail­ing mis­er­ably to see the VALUE in the life we are liv­ing– what amaz­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics will my chil­dren posses BECAUSE of their ‘dif­fer­ent’ child­hood? I am not sure, but I know that this mamma is going to start rein­forc­ing every pos­i­tive ele­ment of our lives, I am going to look at our cir­cum­stances with new eyes.  While it is hard, yes, it is not impos­si­ble to give my chil­dren every­thing they need and more.

     

    What other val­ues are unique to the life of a Plane Jane that we can rein­force in our children?  

    Category Parenting, Resilience | Tags: ,,,,,,,,,,,,, | 1 Comment

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