Parenthood. It seems like such a simple word. But as a mom of three children I am challenged, fulfilled and exhausted as I try to meet the daily demands of these ten letters. Mistakes come with the job. I know I make them frequently. In fact, my four year old is most likely tabulating a list of these mishaps she will present within the year in exchange for more TV time. Yet parenting mistakes bring on a whole new set of guilt that far surpasses many of my other errors. There is just so much riding on this role.
It is in this parenthood journey that I appreciate and call upon all of the values I learned from Falcon. These values help me aim for a destination and not to worry about the side steps along the way. So for the next few weeks, I humbly present a few of these values below starting with how I learned them at camp and how it has carried into my life as mom.
The First Mom Value I Learned at Falcon: Perseverance
Falcon: As a camper, that first day was always the hardest for me. I kept on my brave face while making my bed and unpacking my things. But the goodbye before swim tests made my heart race, stomach turn, and palms sweat.
One of my top secret coping strategies was to think of all the unfair things my dad had done in the previous year. I fully needed and deserved to have a phone in my room. He needed to understand talking back was a way of expressing my opinion. It may sound crazy, but that was enough to get me through the goodbyes and shift into enjoying the place where I spent all of my summers.
Tough days can happen and for lots of different reasons. But at Falcon we appreciate the opportunity that a tough situation can create. It is the chance for our children to learn how to persevere in a place where the staff offers support and guidance for kids to work it out. As adults, we so often want to fix things for our kids when what they really need is the experience of working it through themselves.
Mommyhood: Just when I thought helping campers navigate toward a direction without trying to determine it was tough, I became a mom. The need to love and shelter your children conflicts and sometimes tries to suffocate that ability to step back and let your babies work through the situation.
So our moment was swim lessons. The class descriptions were rather vague and I placed my six year old as best I could based on her abilities. She had all of her high stress indicators on the way into the pool: chewing on her suit, blushed cheeks, and holding my hand tightly. But she sat down with her class and waved to me on the bench. The other students looked larger and older. It had been months since she swam and my heart began to pound. The warm up was two lengths of the pool. She was by far the slowest as the other students were resting on the wall and she still needed to swim another half of a length. It is in those moments my need to protect her overwhelms all logic. What if the other students laugh? How is she going to make it through another hour of this class? Engrossed in these thoughts, I resolve to change her out of this class and go to the lower level. The instructor, who has diligently followed next to her in the pool, asks if she is tired. My mommy brain responds: Yes! Help her! Give her a nudge! But my baby looks up and shakes her head no. She shook her head because she was too out of breath to say it. And so the rest of the lesson continued in much of the same fashion. But my girl never quit. What a life lesson for the both of us.
--Nici
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