Things I want my girls to know: The Real World

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From time to time on this blog you will find this series, Things I want my girls to know. My girls are thirteen and seven. They have very different personalities. They have been raised along the guidelines which were set down by my mother, my grandmother, my aunts and my great aunts. 

 

You’re probably saying to yourself, that’s a lot of female relatives.  I have many, and they are vocal. However my girls have also been raised according to my husband’s beliefs as well.  

I bought a scrapbook for each of them a few years ago. When I bought them I had grand ideas of sitting down and making them each a scrapbook. The scrapbooks have sat at the bottom of my closet. The idea however has been percolating in my mind. 

When I left home I was a sheltered openly vulnerable seventeen, who had never been away from home or family at all. I cried for two weeks, but I was determined to make it on my own, so I pushed forward. I want that for my girls that tenacity, that ability to feel fear and still move forward. 

I wasn’t prepared for what living in a new country and culture would mean. My mother stricken with cancer at the age of thirty two and orphaned at the age of five had been over protective. This is not a criticism. This is a statement of fact. Her upbringing via maiden aunts and her illness drove her need to protect her children with everything inside her.

I too am over protective. I have only let my older daughter attend a sleep over once, and only with  people that I’d gotten to know well. I want my girls to know, that I like my mother before me care about happens to them.  I want to protect them, to shelter them from harm. But, I promise that I will try not to shelter them so much that they have no skills to survive in the real world.