Last night I brought Charles Hugo Doyle's "Sins of Parents" to adoration. This red book looks a bit daunting with such a condemning sounding title written in gold. He wrote it in 1949 and he simply says it like it is about the importance of marriage and parenting. Doyle does not cut any corners and he speaks truth. He begins the book with a quote from Exodus 20:5 when Moses is at Mount Sinai God says to him, "I am the Lord Thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." And I was immediately struck thinking : It is SO TRUE, parents not only affect their children, but their grandchildren and GREATgrandchildren and in turn the generations to come.
With Faustina's birth I, quite naturally, have been thinking more about parenting and I have been surprised how memories from my OWN childhood and how my parents raised me flood back. Things I haven't thought of in years and did not really even remember. Intellectually, the weight of parenting is not new to me, yet experiencing BEING a parent certainly makes me think more seriously about the this enormous responsibility of training, teaching, and guiding Faustina to be a young woman of God. Little things ARE important. I think of how my Mom sat with me for hours upon hours at the piano, she worked at the dance studio so that I could take lessons, how she spent million (literally) of hours in the kitchen making meals from scratch, how my Dad randomly brought flowers home for both my Mom and me, how he told me a story from his childhood when he put me to bed each night. (Thanks Mom and Dad!)
Of course being a good parent stems from a solid marriage relationship. Again, when I was reading this last night I was reminded of a marriage retreat at Nativity. A man who was in his 30th year of marriage shared how his own dad left a note every single morning for his wife on the coffee machine telling her how much he loved her. Every SINGLE day he did this for decades. He must have been pretty creative! And here this man at Nativity was in his own successful marriage of 30 years loving his own wife well. As Doyle says in his book, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." These stories encourage me to think more of what kind of loving acts I could do in my own marriage.
Mike and I are in the easier stages of parenting Faustina right now, but I appreciate all the reminders I can get of the wonderful responsibility of parents and I also love hearing how other people before me have successfully raised children who love the Lord. The book "Sins of Parenting" might sound intimidating - but then, parenting is no easy job!
