A Mother's Love

Everyone of us has heard the old saying "This is gonna hurt me alot more than it hurts you". I always thought that was the stupidest saying I had ever heard. Until I became a mother. Countless times, I have had to tell my children no, ground them, or some other form of discipline, just to teach them a valuable life lesson, or to protect them in some way. And I believe that it always hurt me worse than it did them.

There's just something about being the reason for your child's unhappiness that will rip out the heart of any mother. I never realized, growing up, whenever I would be angry or upset with my mother, that she was upset too. Mother's are supposed to love their children, protect them, bring them infinite happiness. And until I had children of my own, I never realized that by protecting them, sometimes you have to hurt them.

I have tried numerous times over the years to shield my 4 children from any and all pain. I pray every night for God to protect them and help me to raise them to be good, compassionate, respectful adults. In my opinion, that is exactly the way that they're growing up.

I have upset my daughter by not letting her go out late on a school night. I have insisted that she always wear her seatbelt. I have also held her while she cried when one of her close friends and schoolmates was killed in a car crash midway through his senior year of high school. And I breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God above that it wasn't my child, while feeling the worse kind of sympathy for the mother who just lost hers.