“Get over it.”Have you used that expression with your kids? I think I’ne heard my kids use it with their boys—I may have used it myself with those grandsons of mine. And we are parents who have to Get Over It, many times as we struggle with rebellion over our stations in life.
As I have adjusted to a vastly different routine in my own life, caring for a bedfast mother-in-law, I hear God saying: “Get Over It, Charlotte!” I remember leaving my profession to raise my first baby, intending to go back at least part time and finding I could not part with my little nursling. She was a clingy baby (of course, I did move three times in her first year and five times by the end of here second—Mommy was her only security!) Joe arrived home from Viet Nam when she was five months old, and we traveled a bit during his month leave, settling in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for the last ten months of his two-year hitch. Then we returned to his residency in New Orleans, and Charity Hospital sucked him in. Shy by nature, all these changes combined to make her a mom-centric toddler, as only nurslings can be!
I remember thinking one child didn’t fill up my time, but I couldn’t leave her, so we adopted a “hard to place child.” Candace was two weeks before her second birthday, Heer birth mother was an alcoholic and she hd featal alcohol syndrome. Moreoverher foster mother never taught her independence—to the point that she wanted to be spoon-fed! Since Tom was due in three months, she had to feed herself. I handed her the spoon and swept up two inches of rice from under the high chair. Get Over It.
After being pregnant or lactating for over a decade, I entered into some semblance of release from home confinement. At least I could volunteer in the schools! But one day—how many years was it that seem like such a brief moment?—the last child pulled a U-Haul away from our door, and it was the End of an Era. We were alone again. And I found freedom in that—freedom not to close the doors, for example. I could walk around the house totally in the buff, no teenagers piling in with all their cohorts!
But the brief moments ended in a crash seven months later when our daughter returned home with her two-year-old son, totally devastated by an unexpected betrayal and quick divorce. The time of life I had planned for ended. My daughter had to go to work, and a toddler needed care. Get Over It. I learned the value of MOPS as this insecure toddler, who would not let me out of his sight, made friends and looked forward to MOPS meetings so he could play with his little friends.