Making A Change

This past month I have had two good friends pass away.  One was an example of everything good and virtuous, a wonderful mother, and an example to everyone around her. She raised her children in righteousness and taught them to love the Lord. I learned so much from this friend and will be forever grateful for what her example taught me. At her funeral it was impressive that all her children individually spoke expressing their respect and gratitude to their mother who taught important gospel truths, the tools to make them successful and happy not only in life but in eternity as well. Generations will feel the affects of this mother as her posterity walks a path of righteousness.

My other friend also taught me from her experience of life, but her example was a lesson of another kind.  Though LDS, her life was unfortunately filled with trials, making wrong choices and leading her children down a path that could adversely affect them for years to come. Her choices were made partly because of her upbringing from traditional behaviors passed down from one generation to the next, getting them from her mother who had received them from her mother and so on. My friend’s children called informing me there would be no funeral, but a celebration of life with a picnic in a park where they could reminisce about her life. This friend also left an example that will affect generations yet unborn leading her children down a path of uncertainty not to mention the probability of retaining the same habits and making poor choices.

It has been a month of great reflection for me and I have found myself realizing how important this role of motherhood is and how our teachings and philosophies will influence many of our future posterity.  Brigham Young said, “The sisters in our Relief Society have done great good.  Can you tell the amount of good that the mothers and daughters in Israel are capable of doing?  No, it is impossible.  And the good they do will follow them to all eternity.  You are instruments in the hand of the Lord.” As I read this quote I could not help think of my two friends and what legacy each left.  It also makes me stop and wonder what legacy I am leaving.

Everyone is raised with both good and bad traditions of attitude and behavior passed down from generation to generation.  I remember thinking when younger…. “I will never treat my children that way!”  I have wonderful parents, but as a teen, on occasion I vowed never to raise my children in the manner my parents raised me. Yet here I am with children of my own and teaching and treating them very often exactly the same as my parents taught me.  We are creatures of habit and example. The secret is to live close enough to the spirit to know and recognize the traits, behaviors and attitudes that have been passed down to you, realizing which ones need to be changed or retained for the next generation. The hard part is to become the transitional person who makes those detrimental traits end with you, while allowing the good traits to continue onto the next generation.  I think that every mother’s goal should be to make her children better than the past generation, a difficult task when we are what we were taught, but an easier task when we let the spirit teach us how to accomplish it.

I like the analogy of playing sports.  If a football team is poorly coached and disciplined through the first three quarters it is difficult to expect the team to pull it all together for a win in the final minutes of the game. Miracle victories are few and far between.  Where does the responsibility lie?  If the coach would have made adjustments in the first quarter, correcting his coaching oversights, rebounding from errors, the game could have been salvaged even when individual errors are made. Parents sometimes desperately plead for help because their teenager is destroying his/her life and disrupting their family during the closing minutes of the 4^th quarter in this game called parenthood.  What adjustments could have been appropriately made in the earlier quarters which would have prevented this circumstance?

Who is the coach of this game?  We chose that responsibility by default when we became mothers.   The time for adjustment is now, no matter what phase of motherhood we are in.  We need to become the transitional person who can stop the negative and damaging learned parental behaviors that have been passed down to us. We need to recognize them and start coaching with the knowledge and example that will aid our children in winning, not only in this life but eternity as well.

As for my two friends who passed away, I personally celebrate the life of my friend who adjusted the coaching of her children in the first quarter by teaching correct principles.  My other friend; I mourn her loss…her loss of opportunity to be a transitional person to break from the negative generational, traditional ideas and attitudes; I mourn her children for the knowledge they will have to discover on their own; I mourn her for the generations that will be influenced by what she did not change and did not teach; I mourn the legacy she left as it now becomes the role model for her posterity. I pray that a transitional person will have the strength and spirit to change the pendulum for the generations yet unborn.