By Heather Spiva 
This last week at church, I sat behind a little boy. As we stood to sing worship songs, he continued to sit in his chair drawing in the bulletin. My hands were right behind his little head while I stood. As a mother of two boys who used to be six years old, it took everything in me not to put my hands on his head and tell him how good he was being.
His hair looked the way my sons’ hair used to look, his little body looked the exact way my boys’ bodies used to look—gangly, skinny, and always moving. It took me back a decade and a half ago to when my boys were young and didn’t mind me holding them or helping them, talking to them, or being with them. It’s not that they don’t need any of that now, it’s just that I’m not the one they get their affirmation from anymore. They have their friends, their work, and college. They don’t need me the same way.
As the church service progressed, the little boy asked his mother several times how to spell a word. She would write it out in her bulletin, and he would copy it onto his. All the while, she listened to the sermon, made sure her son had what he needed, kept him quiet, and continued to keep her head on a swivel. She was doing a fantastic job and it also took everything in me not to lean over and tell her so.
Moms, if this is you right now, and you’re tired of doing everything, tired of being your little ones’ all and all don’t despair. The days of talking, being, living, helping, speaking, listening, directing, and everything else will come and go like a good rainstorm. It’s hard to do all of it and it takes much effort now, but in time, that work is done. You’re doing a wonderful job!
The years you spend guiding them now are years spent doing the most important thing: training your child (or children) in the way they should go. You’re directing their paths the way God directs ours. You’re speaking life into their world and affirming their being by helping them learn, teaching them how to behave, and instructing them how to navigate the world around them.
While this overwhelming task of being their everything is draining, and is often the last thing you want to do some mornings when you get out of bed, remember they won’t need you to be their everything much longer.
Sure, it may seem like you can’t go on sometimes. It may feel like torture having to repeat yourself for the umpteenth time about cleaning their room, not stuffing their homework in their backpack, or eating lunch so they have the energy to make it through the day. But it all ends one day. The whole job is over before you know it.
My sons are in their late teens and early 20s, and I recall the constant struggle to continually help them (and also have a life). My life was about their lives all the time, every day, no matter what. But now that they’re independent, their lives are all about their lives, and I have very little to do with it. And that is as it should be.
That little boy in front of me at church will be independent in less than a decade. His mother doesn’t know it, but she will yearn for those moments when all he needed—and wanted—was her.
Those days of my boys asking for help are few and far between anymore, but when I get them, it takes me back to being their mother—a mother of young ones—and it all makes sense. I worked hard to care for them so I could have strong, godly, independent men later. That is all we really want from our kids, isn’t it?
It’s miraculous to see my boys become the very men I prayed for and molded even though I still wish I could run my hands over their hair, hold their little bodies, and help them spell out a word they can’t spell on the church bulletin.
by Mikala Albertson 
