Originally posted on Facebook on Sunday, August 3, 2025.

In Week 31 of 52 Weeks of Gratefulness, I give thanks to God for their best.

As a parent, I now realize that there's no manual for raising kids.

So many things depend on each other that one small difference can change everything. You can't necessarily take what you did for one child and apply it to another one, even from the same house within the same decade. So, certainly you can't rely on what your parents did and apply it wholesale to your own children. The times are different, the culture is different, you are different, and every child is different.

What I'm trying to say is this: parenting is hard.

No one has it figured out. Parents are constantly faced with having to make tough, critical decisions in real-time and as if for the first time because the changing dynamics make them so. For the most part, and speaking for parents who love their children, they are sincerely trying to make the best choices they can for their children from the options available at the time.

And I know my parents loved me.

I remember being a snotty-nosed brat that would stand back and catalog all the things I thought they did wrong—all the ways I believed they had failed.

But now, as a parent, I see the things that often go uncelebrated:
The sacrifices—what they went without so we could have.
The non-stop, day-in, day-out effort required to hold our world together.
The fortitude to keep going somehow when things were falling apart.
The things they did, but didn't have to, to put us in a better position, or simply to give us a moment of enjoyment.
The good they wanted for us and the countless things they did to give it to us.
All this on top of their own personal struggles.

They did an awesome job.
It was nothing short of superhuman.
I'm so sorry I ever thought otherwise.

And if you don't see it yet, as our elders would say, "Keep living."

They gave us their best.
You can't ask for more than that.

I'm grateful.

#52WoG #parenting