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The Lilly Pond |
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August 28, 2001 - Issue 13 |
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Greetings
and thanks for subscribing to TheLillyPond.com ezine! I'm Lillian Hinds
and this ezine is dedicated to all mothers, daughters and the other
important women in their families. Its goal is to give you a lift and
inspire you with enjoyable true stories from you and from me about
mother-daughter relationships. Because
we respect your privacy and value your subscription, we don't share your
email address with anyone. If you'd like to be removed from our mailing
list, please see instructions at the end of this ezine. =============================== I am so very gratified and
humbled at your response to our Lilly Pond efforts. Your notes and
comments are so endearing. And Bob (the brother) and I
have been listening to your comments about making the web site easier to
navigate and easier to read. So we’re sawing off a little here, tacking
on a little there, and giving the site quite a face lift. We want our readers who find
our site for the first time to be able to find what all we have with just
a couple of clicks. And we want our loyal readers to be able to see
what’s just been added so they don’t have to go through everything
else. And we’ve got a couple of surprises up our sleeves that we can’t
wait for you to see. We’re pretty excited and we
hope you’ll be pleased at our new look. We’re still a couple of weeks
away from unleashing it on you but we wanted to start giving you a little
advance notice so you’d know you were still at the right Pond when we
change it up. Stay alert. We’ve got some
pretty exciting things happening at The Lilly Pond this Fall. With all my heart, =============================== Just
knowing that you cared enough to write your story will help encourage
others to write theirs. And YOU DON'T KNOW whom your story will touch. So,
write me your story, and see instructions for submissions at the end of
this ezine. =============================== I
don't think I can address the idea of time in a relationship without going
back to Scripture and God. This step may sound more like a Bible study
than a counseling lesson, but when I think about time, I think about God
and His impact on time. First
of all, he created it. It was His idea to begin with. Genesis 1:4-5 “God
saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light day, and
the darkness he called night."
God made time. And He made us so that we would function best in our daily
lives within the structure of time. The
second thought is that God made a time for everything that we need to do. Ecclesiastes
3:1 “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under
the heaven:” I know that some of you who were listening to pop
music in the 1970s may think that The Byrds wrote those words but it was
actually Solomon who came up with them about three thousand years before. Take
a moment with your Bible and read this entire passage. It goes on to list
nearly everything you can think of that is part of the human experience.
a time to be born and a time
to die Several
sections of this passage relate to our discussion on broken relationships. a time to tear and a time to
mend My
final thought on God's part in time comes from Psalm 31:15 “My times are
in your hands.” God pays attention to time and how it affects our lives.
I heard a minister say one time, "God is never late." I was
frustrated then because I was waiting on God to do something in my life
and it seemed that He was ignoring me. I didn't feel that God was paying
attention to my needs or to the passing of time in my life. But it just
wasn’t time yet. A
beautiful example of this is found in the Old Testament. Genesis 18
contains part of the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They wanted a
baby so badly and God had actually promised them one. But Sarah was too
old to have a baby. And when she heard what God said, she laughed. Look at
verse 13 and 14 “Then the Lord said to Abraham,
Why did Sarah laugh and say, Will I really have a child, now that I am
old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the
appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.” Turn
over a couple of pages and look at Chapter 21:2 “Sarah became pregnant
and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at
the very time God had promised him.” Now
how do all of these verses apply to our struggles with mother-daughter
relationships? Working
on a relationship that has been wounded for many years may take time. You
and your daughter probably did not get to this difficult point after one
phone call. It may have been one phone call that pushed you over the edge,
but usually, it is a build up of hurt and disappointment over many years.
Someone finally gives up and says, "This is not working and I'm not
going to keep beating my head against a wall." This
may be the “time to refrain from
embracing” that our scripture mentioned. Back up and give things a
rest. Think about what has happened and your part in it. Go through some
of the other steps we've talked about and see if you have missed something
in your own life. We would all like to have a magic formula that makes
things better immediately. But deep in your heart, you know that
relationships take hard work and time.
There is no substitute for either. But oh, how they are worth it. When
my oldest daughter, Karen, left for college, our relationship was very
strained, to say the least. On the day she was to go, we stood nose to
nose in my kitchen literally screaming at each other! When she came home
for Thanksgiving, we did a little better. At least there were no screaming
fits. But our relationship was still not what I had hoped for. Then
one day during that Spring semester she mailed me a little note. She told
me that she appreciated all I had done for her growing up and that she
loved me. I was stunned and my heart melted. I sat on the side of my bed
and cried like a baby. I was the therapist but she had gone first! (See
Step #5 for this point.) We began to send each other notes and I can't
begin to tell you the impact that had on my life and our relationship. Each
time I would send her a card with some encouragement, she would call me
and say, "You always seem to know just when I need a lift. I can't
tell you how awful things have been going and it helped so much to get
your card." The mystery
is that I didn't know, I couldn’t know exactly when she needed
encouragement. I just knew that I loved her and wanted to reach out. I
have always struggled with Pride, the idea that no matter what, I am
always right. Her little notes picked away at my pride. It didn't matter
if I was right. It mattered that she loved me. When the notes came from
her, I was so delighted and filled with hope. Even though she had not kept
her room at home clean to my standards and did not wear the clothes that I
picked out for her, even though we disagreed on so many things, maybe
there was something for us after all, and we could still have a good
relationship. That
was several years ago. It took some time. Time for her to grow up; time
for me to forget my pride; time for me to find my way with her as an
adult. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. As
Karen's notes began to make such an impact on me, I decided that every
time I sent a little note to Karen, I would also send one to my teenage
daughter, Jacque. Sometimes I put a stamp on them and actually mailed them
(even though she was just down the hall) and sometimes I would just tape
them to her door. Recently,
I was helping Jacque clean her room. (Shudder!) We were trying to get
ready for school to start and we wanted to make some adjustments to her
living area. As
we moved her bed to vacuum (actually we were using a jack hammer and a
shovel!) I noticed a stack of cards on the window sill by her bed. She had
saved all my cards. When I picked them up, she told me that she often
looks at them when she is discouraged. Again, my heart melted. Since she
is a teenager, we are still in that time of struggling, pushing and
pulling on an almost daily basis. And yet the time I put into sending
those note cards to her had apparently meant a lot to her. And that means
a lot to me. Breakups
in relationships usually come from many things that have happened over and
over again. It is the frustration, anger, and disappointment over many
months and years that finally results in a hurt so deep, a tear so wide,
that we feel we can never go back. It can never be fixed. But it can. It
will take some time. So
how much time? How long does it take to put this back together? Since
problems like this usually don’t happen overnight, I ask women I am
working with not to expect overnight results. We often want a quick fix.
We are conditioned to believe that any problem can be solved within the
confines of a 30-minute situation comedy on television. Instant
gratification is one of our cultural pitfalls. "I want what I want
and I want it right now" is our birthright and we refuse to settle
for anything less. But
that’s not the way it is with broken relationships. Relationships break
down over a period of time, and it takes a period of time to put them back
together. What
if your relationship with your daughter could be just a little less
stressful in a year? Would that be worth your time? What
if you and your mother could have a peaceful lunch in two years? Is it
worth that much time to you? The
real question is, "Is there anything else
that is worth your time?" We
must make the time. If we gave a priority to each task we do, we’d find
that we spend so much time on things that are not really important at all.
And we spend way too little time on our personal relationships that are
all-important. We
each take the time to do so many pointless things. Why not take some of
that time to invest in the relationships that mean the most to us? And
then you can say with the wisest man, Solomon, "He has made
everything beautiful in its time."
(Ecclesiastes 3:11) With
all my heart, =============================== And
if you've missed any of the ezines, they're posted on the website in the
Archive. We've got an "Archive" link on the right border of the
web site to make it easy to find. So
check back to www.thelillypond.com and stay connected. =============================== If
you received this ezine from a friend and you'd like to subscribe, you can
go to http://www.TheLillyPond.com and subscribe for free or just send an
email to thelillypond@thelillypond.com and put "SUBSCRIBE" in the
Subject line. Thanks. ++
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your story or question, or FOR LILLIAN'S EYES ONLY AND NOT FOR
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send your story by email to stories@thelillypond.com I'm
waiting to hear from you! Note
from the Legal Pad: If you do grant permission to publish your story, you
would also be granting me the right to make very minor edits for spelling,
grammar and readability; to make minor edits to preserve your anonymity;
and to use your letter in my other publications and books. =============================== With
all my heart,
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