We all get a finite amount of time to live on this earth; our days are numbered. Imagine that the time given to you is a bag of gold coins. Just what will you trade your coins for? It will run out no matter how you spend it. When you’ve spent the last coin, just what will you have?
I recently read the statistics on the effect a working mom has on her family. They were sobering: a professional woman is more likely to get divorced, more likely to be disloyal to her husband, less likely to have children, and, if she does have kids, she are more likely to be unhappy about it. A study in Social Forces (Aug. 23, 2006), a research journal, found that even women with a “feminist” outlook are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.
Be cautious before you trade those gold coins of time to earn money. You have so much more influence and power right at home, in training and educating your own children! It is easier to buy children things, or to provide entertainment and classes for them, that it is to give them our time. Yet nothing is so valuable to them as our time!
Louisa
Recently, after a morning of homeschooling and then the excitement of shopping for new clothes, my young daughter Louisa sat on the couch looking at her new clothes and feeling contemplative. Suddenly, she pronounced, “It is better than all the clothes I have, and cotton candy, to have you alone to myself!”
I am not sure how cotton candy fits in (as she has only had it once at a fair) but I guess it ranks high on her list of “desirables”! But I was blinking back tears as I remembered that nothing is as delicious to a child as a loving parent’s attention.
I love old stories! Read this tender, yearning glimpse of what a working mom feels like from a child’s perspective: “Mama’s Boy”.
Enjoy your time with your children!
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