Letting Boys Be Boys and Squirrels Rest in Peace

Two of my three little men have phones now.  So I am currently in the business of keeping track not only of my own password, but theirs as well.  The technology age has me a little stressed out.  I've become a bit of a stalker.  I periodically check the boys' texts and Instagram accounts just to see what evils are lurking out there.  Mostly, I want to see if I can still keep the dream alive that none of their friends use curse words.

Shattered, by the way. 

If you want to give me grief about respecting their privacy and all that, please save it.  I will stop asking for their passwords and checking their texts when they can make me a taco and serve me a Diet Coke on a dinner table in an apartment in which they are paying the bills.  Plus, these little peeks into the minds of middle school boys have so far proven to be less than exciting and they don't reveal a heckuva lot.  The great majority of the conversations between boys go like this:

Sup?

NM (not much)

Gtg (got to go)

K

Riveting.  And very similar to many conversations I have with my husband . . . I kid.

But, the other day, I read this from one of my boy's long-time  friends.  This boy, by the way, is one of the sweetest boys I know.  I adore him.  Precious and polite as he is though, he is still, most certainly, A BOY.  Moms of girls, just taking a leap here, but I'm guessing you don't come across something like this too often.

 

Nice, right?  Perhaps you are gasping and appalled.  But honestly, I don't find this all that disturbing.  I'm sorry for the squirrel, but in all my time of checking texts, this has become my very favorite text of all time because I LOVE BOYS.  I know I complain about the smell and the incessant ESPN and the complete disregard for whether their pants match their shirts, but I LOVE BOYS.  Boys are curious and fascinating and gross.  And they are physical and loud and aggressive.  And they just want to share all of those things (including photographs of bleeding rodents) with the world. 

 

I think God made our boys so wonderfully and I think we, mommies, need to let them be the marvelous, smelly, disgusting creatures He meant them to be. 

 

I'll be honest. I was fine with the crawling to the tip-top of a snow mountain and the capturing of bugs and the overwhelming number of activities that could PUT YOUR EYE OUT early on in their little lives.  What I am finding as my boys grow up is that I want to shield them more from other dangers, not as much the physical ones, as the emotional ones.  I want to save them from failure and struggle at school.  I want to spare them the disappointment of not making the team.  I want to keep them from being devastated by those creatures called girls. 

 

I read an article by Jen Hatmaker, that really spells this out  HERE.  

 

Jen says (This would be Jen with one n.  She is soooo much smarter than Jenn with two ns):

 

"I’ve seen older kids babied within an inch of their lives, headed off to higher learning with no clue on how to be resourceful, how to figure it out, how to handle life’s knocks and bruises. Over-protection has its place for, say, kindergarteners, but at some point we need to put down the bumpers on the bowling lane . . . Not all risk-taking is bad risk-taking. For the love, don’t we want to raise kids who go for it? Who are brave and headstrong? These are not just the marks of achievers; they are the hallmarks of disciples. If we expect our kids to engage this broken world one day, safety has to be somewhere around #14 on the list. Our children will be totally ineffective if they are still afraid of their own shadow."

 

Jen says we need to be brave mommies.  Mommies who aren't phased by a photo of a dead squirrel or even by the prospect that our baby boys' hearts might be broken.  And faith in our sovereign God makes us brave, ladies.  How can we tell our children to trust in the Lord with all their heart and believe that He makes their paths straight if we only trust in our ways and our efforts to make their paths straight and to keep them from hurt?

 

Mommies of boys and mommies of girls, too:  let's trust Him and be brave.  Take a peek at the article.  I need it.  Maybe you do, too.