By Serennah Harding (written at age 15)
[2006]
My family has an amazing story, and people have always been interested in how we’ve come to be. My mother took it upon herself to make this thought a reality. I’m just here to help.
Every day Mom would try and write something in her spiral-bound notebook, in between schooling the five-year-old and answering phone calls. Most often, she only had time to write a few sentences, maybe a couple of paragraphs, but they were always in the same used notebook with missing pages. It probably belonged to one of my siblings for journaling. In a large family, everything gets re-used. My old third-grade math notebook is now my little brother’s essay-writing companion, only the first thirty pages have been torn out.
My parents have found that, like a good notebook, one’s parenting and teaching skills must be re-used if they have proved themselves successful. Not every family is bound together by the same principles, disciplines, or our kind of love. In any case, it takes a lot of emotional, physical, and mental work to keep a family together as long as needed to prepare children for their future lives. This is required first by the parents and eventually by the children if they wish to lead successful lives of their own. A parent cannot plant desire in a child, but a parent can foster it.
There are many facets of a child’s personality that need fostering. I can only name them through personal experience as a child, not as a parent, even though I feel I’ve raised a couple in my time! A child needs emotional stability, reasonable intelligence, physical and mental health, and to be loved. My parents never failed on that last one, and because of it, my siblings and I aren’t lacking severely in the others. Although, I’d have to say that on a practical level, my parents were far from parenting experts when our family began and aren’t experts even now (sorry, Mom and Dad, I’m just speaking the truth).