I love Gilda Radner. She was crazy and funny. Like most people though, that crazy and funny behavior is what she used to hide her pain. Gilda had a nanny whom she called "Dibby" who raised her. Her mother was a legal secretary and her father was a business man. She struggled with several eating disorders and when she was little her weight was such a distress to her mother, that she took Gilda to the doctor to be put on diet pills when she was just ten years old. When she was twelve her father (whom she was very close to) developed a brain tumor and died two years later.
Later in life when Gilda had fought the battle of ovarian cancer and won, only later to find out that it had once again returned ,Gilda, went in for a routine CAT scan, and was sedated and never woke up. She died May 20, 1989.
This is a little story that I found that Gilda told about her nanny (Dibby).......
"When I was little, my nurse Dibby's cousin had a dog, just a mutt, and the dog was pregnant. I don't know how long dogs are pregnant, but she was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawnmower and her two hind legs got cut off. They rushed her to the vet and he said, 'I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She'll be able to deliver the puppies.'
Dibby's cousin said, 'Keep her alive'
So the vet sewed up her backside, and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn't spend any time worring, she jut learned to walk by taking two steps in the front and flipping up her backside and then taking two steps and flipping up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. She nursed them and then weaned them. And when they learned to walk, they all walked like her"
Our kids are watching us. They are watching every move we make. They want to be just like us.....JUST LIKE US.......I don't know about you, but I don't want my kids to be just like me....I want them to be better.
If you tell them to love but never show them how, they will search to gain love from anybody. If you tell them not to hit and you hit them, they will struggle to find their worth. If you tell them to pay attention to you but you don't clear you schedule to pay attention to them, they will feel unimportant. If you raise them to be who you wanted them to be and then tell them later you are proud of who they have become, they will struggle to figure out who they were suppose to be in the first place. If you beg them to talk to you, but you didn't take the time to get to know them, or to be apart of their life when the problems were small, they are not going to come to you when the problems are big. If you tell them they are the most important people in your life but you cannot put your phones down long enough to show them, they are not going to believe you. If they want to play but you can't get off of facebook long enough to show them that you truly love spending time with them, they are going to feel like a burden in your day, or a thorn in your side. Then the time will come when they are grown and gone. They will then become parents and raise their children by the only example they saw......you.
We can make the choice now. We can break free from the chains that are binding us and keeping us from being the parent God intended us to be, so that our kids struggles in parenting will be few. Or we can keep doing what we're doing and then we will have raised another generation of struggling parents that are raising children who will do anything to gain attention from anybody.
Being a parent is more than just a couple of hugs and kisses at the end of the day, or the peace that comes with nap time, or the sigh of relief at the end of the day when they are all sleeping in their beds. or the five seconds of silence as they eat their lunch. It is more than teaching them who their "athority" is and demanding their respect........They are a blessing in every way, a blessing that God expects us to put our blood sweat and tears into......because we are His children and that's what He did for us.........
