Putting a leash on Enzo

As much as I would like for this title to be true, it is not ideal. Although, I will no longer have to worry about him climbing into things and eating everything that looks remotely edible (like his liquid cold medicine). I realized that no matter how high I put things to keep him away, he always manages to get to them.

We may not actually have a physical leash on Enzo, but we do have an imaginary leash on him. As parents we are trying our best to train Enzo up to be a man of God. But, how exactly are we modeling ourselves for him? I've realized that we "help" him do so much that he's becoming too dependent on us. For example, during mealtimes we hardly have him eat on his own because we just don't want to deal with the mess and having to clean up after him. So, as a result he's never really perfected his spoon/fork skill...or chopsticks skills. But, he is a champ at eating sandwiches and mac n'cheese, those he can eat on his own with minimal messiness. And then there's brushing his teeth. Yes, at age 3 we still help him brush his teeth, because we can't trust him to do it properly. Lately, he's been much better at it though, he's learning to rinse and spit with accidental toothpaste swallowing here and there. It's a work in progress, I know.

Today's devotional was about trusting our kids with more responsibilities and the importance of failure. I loved how Rick Warren worded this: "Part of bringing out the best in your kids involves allowing them to fail. Our tendency is to protect our kids from failure; it's natural. We want to protect them from mistakes. We don't want them to feel bad. If they do fail, we want to bail them out quickly so they won't suffer. But what we're doing is preventing them from learning a valuable lesson. Everybody fails; nobody is good at everything. The key to this has nothing to do with not failing in life; it's learning how to rebound from a failure. When you don't give kids the opportunity to fail, you are saying to them, "You're not competent, and I don't trust you. You can't handle it, so I'm going to do it for you." That approach keeps kids dependent upon their parents." This got me thinking to myself, how many times has my parents allowed me to "fail"? Growing up in the Asian culture, the word failure is not even in our vocabulary. We needed to work really hard at not failing at anything. If we were anywhere close to anything that were a potential threat of "failing" (whether it be an extracurricular activity like youth group, or a friend who is a bad influence) we would be forbidden from it as a preventative. All of this leashing caused me to be afraid of failure, and if I ever failed at anything it hurt my self-esteem to the maximum, because it only caused my parents to bear down on me even more...yelling, hitting, name calling..etc. Very quickly I learned to blame/cast responsibility of my failure onto someone/something else.

"The Bible says this in Galatians 6:5: "We are each responsible for our own conduct" (NLT). When your kids fail, don't let them blame anybody else. Why? Because we must all learn that we are responsible for our own actions. That is a desperately needed truth today, because we're living in a nation of victims. Everybody is a victim! It's all somebody else's fault! But the Bible says we're each responsible for our own conduct. We're far better off trusting our kids too much than we are trusting them too little." Isn't it funny how sin works? From the very beginning where Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent...generation after generation we are still blaming others for our failures and differences. You would think that after all this time God would just be fed up with all this and just demolish this little blue and green marble that we live on and be done with it. But, He loves us way too much to give up on us. Despite our childlike behaviors He forgives us and continues to let us fail and then picks us up afterwards.

So working towards that goal of building our boys up to be men of God will eventually be something that they have to learn on their own. We have to learn to relinquish our leash on the boys to God. Trusting that whenever they fail at something they'll be ok because their mommy and daddy will be there to help them up again...readying them to fail again. Not only does our boys require this, but we as their parents need to fail too. Only then will we all learn that our God is perfect and that we need Him. Don't you just love how our God is constantly looking out for our needs and humblings us?! I know I do! :)

failing motherhood

I never felt more like a failure than I do at this moment. It's been a 2 day battle against Enzo...and each day I come out losing...aside from the usual him getting into things that he shouldn't and making a mess of our house, I'm getting so tired. I'm becoming like one of those Chinese parents who nags day in and day out.

The past 2 days I've been trying to get Enzo to take a nap. I'd put him down around 3pm and over and over again I find myself yelling at him to go to sleep. Multiple times of me stomping over to his room gently telling him, bribing him, begging him and finally threatening him to take a nap. It all fails. In the end I lose all control and resorted to spanking him multiple times, but he would still not sleep. By the time 5:30pm comes around I had given into my rage. I would drag him out of his bed and spanked him over and over again, screaming at him asking him why he won't go to sleep. (I know he's tired because he keeps yawning!!) Is he really that stubborn that he doesn't want to lose to me? Is it really that hard for him to listen to me?

I hate seeing myself like this. I hate losing control and lashing out on him. I know that he's only 3y/o and that it's normal. Why can't I control myself better? Why do I have to be...like my mother? Don't get me wrong...I am in no way trying to blame my mom for my rage. I was a bad kid and I deserved it. I remember that I used to vow to myself that I would not spank my children the way that my mom did. And here I am now...20+ years later...doing the same thing to Enzo. I envy those parents who are able to be patient with their children and just put them in "time out" and then come back to them and talk/explain to their kids why they were being punished.

I wonder if this is what God feels when He watches us. When we sin over and over again..when we disobey over and over again...He sooner or later punishes us.

My devotions for this morning really hurt my deep down. The title was "Don't Endure Your Your Children - Enjoy Them". It basically says that our children are a gift from God (Ps 127:3). Here's a quick excerpt from it : "Your children are gifts from God, meant to be enjoyed, not just endured. A lot of parents endure their kids; they don't enjoy them. The Bible says in Deuteronomy 16, “Celebrate with your whole family.” Party down! Have a good time. If you wait until all your problems are gone to start enjoying life, you'll never enjoy life." After reading this...I couldn't help but to feel like a failure. Lately, I have not been able to "enjoy" Enzo. I know that there are moments where I do...I know there are...but for some reason...right now I feel like all the bad moments of him rebelling are taking over. I'm trying so very hard at this, but I can't seem to do it. Every morning I'm bracing myself for what Enzo may do and afraid to see what he is up to because I'm afraid of losing patience. 

Working all these years with the (chinese) youth, I hear them complain about their parents and whine about how bad their parents are. Today, I finally understand why parents are the way that they are now, why my parents made my life feel like I was in hell. We (the kids) made them that way. We forced them into their nagging habits (when asked to do something we say ok, but don't move, we don't do it till many hours later, bc we feel what we are currently doing is more important...), we forced them into their raging habits bc over and over again we disobey them (bc at our young age we already know what's best for us and our parents don't know anything). Since we've been born our parents wanted to love us, they wanted to protect us from any harm..they never wanted to be mean, or yell, or hit us. 

Is this really what God intended for our families? For us to "endure" one another? B/c honestly I don't want to "endure" my sons. I want to enjoy them, I want to have fun with them. But, all of that won't happen if they keep disobeying me. All of this has really given me insight on how much more grace God has been showing me all my years of disobedience and prideful ways. I really have such a long way to go before I can even say that I am a good mother.