100 Words

Family Voting

September 27th, 2020
Mollie T. Cox

Making the best decisions occasionally required knowing the preferences of my children. Besides a survey—see Take a Survey Here—an uneven vote was another way I infrequently collected information. A side benefit was making voting a familiar part of my sons’ lives.

I might say, “We are taking a vote to help us make a decision. Each of you gets one vote. Three votes total. Daddy and I get two votes each. Four votes total. Which would do you prefer? Camping at Point Lookout or camping at Catoctin Mountain?”

This only works if you are undecided. If parents are unified and have strong preferences, an uneven vote would be cruel. Children’s votes are automatically overruled.

You can also assign one parent more votes than the other or one child more votes than siblings depending on the type of decision and who has the most at stake.

At least two of our children received their preference because either my husband or I voted with the majority.

Have you experimented with creative voting?

Homeschooling

Mistakes Were My Tuition

September 20th, 2020
Mollie T. Cox

I carefully budgeted for my sons’ education: textbooks, supplies, online and local classes. I thought the cost of my teacher education was research—innumerable hours attending conferences, talking with veteran home-educators, collecting teaching resources, and reading books now considered homeschool classics.

Along the way, someone said, “Mistakes are the real tuition paid by a homeschool teacher.” (Sorry I don’t remember your name, Someone.) What a relief that observation was to me. Tuition doesn’t judge.

The bad news? Tuition is expensive. I made expensive mistakes. Tuition is not refunded if you keep the class. My homeschool mistakes were not erased. What did I do? Like any class, I accepted the bill.

The good news? Tuition didn’t reflect my intelligence or worth as a parent-teacher. I could reduce tuition. I sold expensive curriculum mistakes. As a bonus, guilt left with the item. Someone else’s curriculum mistakes met my needs. I reduced their tuition.

More importantly, I became vulnerable and shared my failures along with my successes. I asked my peers about their failures. Together, we reduced our future tuition.

What is your tuition for this season of life?

Friendship, Parenting

Their Longings Not Yours (Reprise)

September 16th, 2020
Mollie T. Cox

Do not do unto others as you would that they do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaew

The quote above does not negate the Golden Rule found in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It gives guidance. Love, acceptance, and respect look different to different people.

A friend showed me a wedding present that was different from her tastes and would never be used. We were amused by it. However, my friend’s perspective changed when the giver shared that the item was the one wedding gift she had longed for thirty years earlier but had not received.

Four summers later, I was pregnant with my first child. An acquaintance delivered her first child a month before me. During church announcements, we were urged to visit her that afternoon. My husband thought we should. I disagreed. Hours after delivery, I wouldn’t want a room full of close friends, certainly not acquaintances.

I was wrong. Lindy was disappointed we had not joined the crowd.

How do you discern?

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.
Kevin Wilson, Nothing to Look At

Parenting

Their Longings, Not Yours

September 13th, 2020
Mollie T. Cox

My father longed to drive the family car, a privilege he was denied even after serving in the Navy. Even more, he longed to finish college. He proudly provided college and a car for me.

I didn’t care about a car and took college for granted. I provided my childhood longings: being read to, family vacations, and sacred—not secular— Christmas celebrations. My husband provided his longing, private music lessons. (We also provided college and cars.)

Like me, my children’s desires differed from their parents. Along the way, I understood I had treated my children like I wanted to be treated, not like they wanted to be treated.

A senior manager at a major corporation confessed a similar mistake. The firm told managers “Treat employees the way you would like to be treated.” When the firm expanded internationally, it realized the fallacy. Employees wanted to be treated differently than their managers would have wanted to be treated.

I explained my childhood desires to my children and how they affected my parenting decisions. I wish I had known how much their lists differed from mine.

Have you shared your childhood desires with your family?

Memories, Parenting

Their Memories, Not Yours

September 6th, 2020
Mollie T. Cox

I thought having my hair cut by my favorite stylist was the reason for the salon visit. However, it was her words that were more important that day.

I want my memories, not my aunt’s.

Shirley was explaining why she was discarding figurines, furniture, and even fine china that had been dear to her mother’s unmarried sister. “My limited space is reserved for my memories,” she said.

The same is true for our children. They don’t want our memories.

“We have to keep Hoppers,” one adult son insisted when I was decluttering. Hoppers was a 1980s skinny, stuffed, lavender bunny whose long legs had been re-sewn twice. “Get rid of that instead,” he suggested and pointed to a large Gund Classic Winnie-the-Pooh that my cousin recently had given me.

Give up a new, specialty, stuffed animal for a stitched-up, generic one? Yes, because the former held no memories for my son.

Pristine Pooh had not been tossed off the top bunk in diving competitions with Roughy Tough and Blue Bear. Pooh had not held an elected office in my children’s stuffed animal society. Zero memories. Zero worth.

Hoppers and Hoppers. Both had the same name.

Which possessions hold special memories?