You Can Do Hard Things
Our role as mothers can be summed up in one word: guide. We are a set of experienced eyes for our daughters who have younger eyes. As a result of these different perspectives, we naturally see things differently. But… there are times when our teenage daughters are smarter than us🤷♀️
The older we get, the more we have to think about... well, a lot. For a 16-year-old girl, life is simpler and the things that may be small to us are a big deal to them. In other words, their responsibilities tend to be less threatening: chores, homework, managing friendships, etc. We might say that they simply do not understand the complexities of adult responsibilities - it’s really hard sometimes.
Hear me out though. Are these so-called adult responsibilities that complex? Or, are we just making them complex?
Because, yeah - remember when “life used to be so simple?” When all we had to worry about was what we were going to wear to the Spice Girls concert💃 Putting a whole budget together for your family is so much harder. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t still make the Taylor Swift concert the best night of our lives, let alone our daughters.
When our daughters find themselves in situations that are a big deal to them, it’s often something small to us and we may laugh and roll our eyes knowing you’ve been through it before and they’ll get through it too. But, whatever that thing is that’s a big deal to them is probably really HARD for them and it may truly feel like the end of the world.
Story time: I have a friend who’s teaching her first year of second grade. She loves to share her goals with her students to sort of inspire them to have goals of their own. She doesn’t consider herself a runner, but she wanted to be able to run a mile straight without walking. Sharing this with her 8-year-old students, she explains how yesterday's run in the hot sun was really hard and she hopes today's run is better.
On her way to parent pick-up, a student stops my friend and says, “I just want you to know that you can do hard things.” I’m not crying, you are 🥲 We know that someone has said this to her student and they probably got through that hard thing even if it seemed like the hardest thing in the world.
We’ve made it through the hard things we faced as a second grader. We’ve made it through the hard things we faced as a teenager. Who’s to say we won’t make it through the hard things we face now?
Maybe the situations we face now aren’t much more complex than they used to be. They’ve just become more challenging. Yet, time and time again we’ve proven to ourselves that we can do hard things. That YOU can do hard things.
Keep moving forward and never fail to listen to the wisdom of our young friends ❤️
