What Raising Kids Taught Me

There are things in my life that I wish I could change, things that if I could go back, I would do differently. Having and raising my 3 children is not one of those things.

Having my kids will always be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

When I was younger, I didn’t want kids. I liked kids. I thought they were fun and great to be around. But I did not see myself as a mom. I was fine being the fun “auntie” figure. Then I met my ex-husband; he wanted kids. I loved him, I didn’t hate kids, so I said, “Sure! Let’s have children.”

I ended up with three. Raising those three amazing human beings has been the best experience of my life, and it has taught me so much about life, about love, about patience, about humor, and about myself. It healed things that I didn’t know needed to be healed. It’s taught me things about myself that I didn’t know, and it’s changed me for the better.

I have three great children, a girl and two boys. My mini-me, my daughter, is 22, my middle one. My oldest boy, my miracle baby, is 21, and my youngest, my baby boy, will be 20 this month. Yes, you read that right. My children are all a year apart. It was not planned that way, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

If you ask me about my children, I will tell you that each one of them is different and raising each one of them has taught me a different lesson because they’re all unique individuals.

Raising a daughter has taught me humility, patience, and kindness. As a woman raising a daughter, you learn a lot about yourself and if you’re lucky – as in my case – it heals your relationship with your own mother. I love my mom, and if you’ve read my previous pieces, you know that my mom has been gone for three years. It still stings. I was very lucky in that towards the end of her life, she became my best friend. My daughter had a lot to do with that, because my raising her opened my eyes to my mom.

I realize that for all her faults, my mom was human, and she did the best she could raising us. She wasn’t perfect; she made a lot of mistakes. But if you knew her upbringing, the fact that she did so well is a miracle in itself.

There have been times that I have unintentionally wounded my daughter emotionally. I’m human. Humans say things when we’re hurt. We say things when we’re angry, and we don’t mean it. Raising a daughter humbles you, because you start to realize your mom did the best she could, that she was human. She made mistakes but there was always love behind it.

Raising a daughter, you have to have a lot of patience. My daughter is a fashionista – her shoes have to coordinate with her outfits, her hair has to be perfect, her makeup has to be perfect. She’s been like that since she was little. I swear she was the only four-year-old who went through four outfit changes in a day, and I had to learn to be so patient with her because if we were getting ready to go anywhere, we could not leave until every part of her outfit was perfect.

As with most girls, she’s indecisive, and she’s very picky about what clothing she wears. When she was younger, going through back to school, shopping for clothes was an event in itself. There were going to be tears from both of us, and I knew I would say, “I’m gonna wanna quit and go home.” But I knew that if I kept my patience and let her try on 600 different outfits before she picked just 3, then I would leave with a very happy girl who is ready for her first day of school.

It taught me kindness not only to others but mostly to myself.

There’s this little girl who suddenly becomes a mirror of who you are, and what you are leaving behind. You want her to be better and you want her to be kinder. And you realize it has to start with yourself.

My daughter always had this knack with just knowing when I needed to decompress. I remember one time while I was in college – I was stressed out about a lot going on. I walked outside for a minute to take a deep breath, and when I came back in my daughter was preparing me a bath. She knows I love baths, so she told me I needed a break.

I learned to be kinder to myself, because I realized that there was somebody watching me, somebody was seeing me as an example, and I want her to be kind to herself. I want her to forgive herself when she makes mistakes.

Raising boys taught me humor, fear, and just when I thought I knew everything, I realized I didn’t. They always gave me something new to figure out. Growing up my two boys were thick as thieves. When they were younger, they shared a room and had bunk beds, as children do. One night I told them to go to bed and I found them in the same bed and I said, “No, you need to sleep in separate beds, you have school tomorrow. No sleepovers” Because that’s what they called it. I put them to bed and said good night, and went to relax for a little bit before I went to bed.

Every night before I would go to bed, I would go in and check on all the kids, kiss them and look at their beautiful sleeping faces.

I went into my daughter’s room and then I went into my boy’s room and I stopped dead in my tracks. I stood there and I laughed because at some point after I put them to bed, my oldest boy snuck down from the top of his bunk bed and climbed into his brother’s bed with him, and they had fallen asleep in the same bed.

One time my youngest came up to me and put his little hands on either side of my face and looked me straight in my eye. It was one of those moments where you just thought that he was gonna say something so beautiful and moving.

He looked at me and said, “Mommy, if you were a zombie I’d kill you.”

Now to be fair, his logic behind this thinking was that that way I don’t have to be a zombie forever. He was trying to save me technically.

Once when my boys were younger, my youngest came running outside, screaming and hollering and asking me, “Mom, what’s the plague?” I told him what the plague was, and he ran back inside and screamed at his brother, “I don’t have the plague.” I looked at my son and asked “Why did you tell your brother he had the plague?” and he looked me dead in my face and said, “Because he tried to lick me.”

Boys are weird. My two have tried to sit on each other. My youngest succeeded one time and broke his brother’s glasses.

You have to find the humor in these situations because only boys can manage to make some things just make you stop and think “What?”

People like to tell me that I had it easy – since I only had one girl, I didn’t have to deal with a lot of drama. What people don’t know about boys is they have just as much drama, and they’re harder to keep alive.

My youngest is a daredevil. When was four years old he tried to jump off a top bunk with his best friend with a jump rope tied around their stomachs – they were bungee jumping. At one and a half he launched himself off of a tall patio table across the yard to get to his “meemee.” I guess he thought he was Superman.

We lived in a townhouse when I was still married to their father and it was one of those that had two stories. My boys were upstairs playing, suddenly it got really quiet. Next thing I hear is one of my boys tell the other one, “No, it’s okay, it’s gonna work.” I’m pretty sure I ran so fast that smoke came out from under my feet.

I got to the top of the stairs one of my sons was sitting in a chair that went to one of those small kids’ tables. This particular chair had a flat back, because when you push the chairs in it looked like a stack of tires. The other son was about to push him down the stairs, because their logic was that the back was flat, so they would just slide down the stairs.

I never thought I would have to explain physics to an 8- and 7-year-old.

Raising boys, you think you have it down. You will think, “I’m killing this.” Then they do something that makes you realize you have no idea what you’re doing.

At one point I had to prevent my boys from jumping into each other’s worlds in Minecraft. If you don’t know anything about Minecraft, it’s a video game. If you give other players permission, they can go into your worlds. Well, I was sitting in my room one night and my youngest came into my room telling me that his brother had killed his dog in Minecraft. So I asked my son “Why did you kill your brother’s dog in Minecraft?”

“Because he killed my cows.”

I never thought I had seen anything more sad or dramatic than the time my son realized that he had been hacked in one of his video games and somebody had stolen all the coins he had so hard to collect. He was distraught and I had no idea how to comfort him, because no one prepares you for this meltdown.

A lesson that my children taught me and I taught them in return was to always apologize, whether you are right or wrong. It doesn’t matter whether you meant to hurt someone’s feelings or not. It doesn’t matter if they took it the wrong way. The point is, you hurt their feelings, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

We don’t get to decide how somebody takes something that we said or did. You apologize, and it’s not for you – it’s for them. You’re not admitting you’re wrong. You’re just healing an unintentional wound.

I am not perfect. I have said things to my children that have hurt their feelings, things that have wounded them. It was about me, not them. It taught me that no matter what, always apologize. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you kind. It makes you sincere.

Raising kids will teach you a lot of lessons. It will teach you to see yourself in a different light; to laugh at some of the weirdest things; to not take yourself too seriously. You will love beyond measure. And if you’re lucky, like I have been, when your kids get older they become your friend and they call you for no other reason then they just want to talk. They ask you to go out to lunch just because they want to hang out.

Your relationship becomes something beautiful, and you learn something new about them.

And as they become adults, as they become parents, you learn you did a pretty good job.

Elizabeth Graves lives with way too many animals and not enough sanity. She is passionate about the arts, especially theatre.  And she enjoys any reason to dress in a costume.