Parental Advice

My parents have given me many excellent pieces of advice over the years, but there is one in particular that I have been thinking of in the last few weeks.

Shortly after Josiah was born, my Dad said something like this to me: “Look after yourself, and he (Josiah) will be just fine.”

At the time this rather surprised and slightly confused me. Surely now my number one priority is Josiah, along with Mark and household duties? How could I spend time prioritising myself, and surely I should feel guilty if I do so and haven’t done everything else I should do?

My thought process on this one continued the other week, when Mark picked up his guitar. He was playing it for the benefit of Josiah, me and himself. We both thoroughly enjoyed listening, and I loved watching how Josiah looked at Mark and the instrument. Mark even let him stroke the strings and experience the sound he created. It made me want a go, so for the first time in a while I had a good strum on the guitar. It hurt my fingers at first, but it wasn’t long before I was playing (though rather roughly) old songs that I know, and the love for the music came rushing back to me.

So this week, I decided to do some things that I love doing. But I didn’t want it to be at the expense of the other things I needed to do. So I decided to spend the mornings doing what I had to do, with what I wanted to do already in my mind. As a result, this week I have made puppets, put on puppet shows, compiled most of Josiah’s baby photo book (which he loves looking at while I point at people and say their names), started painting a picture, cooked, baked, gone shopping with a friend, played the guitar and not to mention spent a most wonderful day and night in Lisbon with my beautiful family. Despite all this, the flat has never been kept so clean, tidy and organised for so long and I feel I have spent more quality time with Josiah than usual. I think he has benefitted in many ways from it. For example, he spent a while watching me attempt to play the guitar and sing at the same time following which he started to let out some beautiful, high pitched and drawn out sounds as though he were trying to sing himself. For this reason I want to fill his life with culture, learning, art, music, laughter and all things good.

I think I understand what my Dad meant now. I am not putting myself before my son or husband by doing these things, but instead making myself more efficient and happy in the things I do. This in turn affects them, as a wise friend of mine said on facebook this week: the women are the weathermen in the home.