Mums being Dads

English: Mother’s Day card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today we celebrate Mothers day.

Now it has to be said Mothers have one of the hardest jobs that you can have… not only do they have to carry the baby inside them for 9 month (while it takes first pick of all the nutrients etc…), they then have to give birth to him/her, and from that point on they are assigned to a full time job with no weekends EVER… In fact there is as saying that says

“Yay it’s Friday, the weekend is finally here… oh wait… that’s right I’m a MOTHER”

Isn’t that true… and lets be fair how many Mothers still had to make their own dinner and tidy their houses for their family today? (guys you really need to step up!)

As much as I think days like Valentines day have been “Hallmarked” to sell as many cards as possible… Mothers day is one I will happily buy into.

However there is a trend in our society that is getting darker and stronger… and I wonder how good it is for our society as a whole.
Women are now choosing to their job over their children… in other words they are choosing to let someone else raise their child.
Now I understand that in some cases a mum going back to work is a necessary thing… Mortgages,  rising bills costs etc… and then all of a sudden you get pregnant… It’s hard…I understand this.
What my issue is that women are so intent on being shoulder to shoulder with men in society that they are BECOMING like men, and that’s not a good thing.

It used to be that the Mother stayed home and raised the child… taught it the values that the family had and gave the children boundaries that they used as building blocks in life.
The Father went to work and brought home enough money to keep the family clothed and feed and pushed them to excel and stand up for themselves… however in today’s society there is such a sense of entitlement that all this has been left in the gutter.
Today parents want the new house, the new car, they want to use the degree that they spent time and money working on… but you see once you start to look at it like this you start to notice… it’s about ME.
I want a new car…
I want a new house…
I want a holiday…
(and sure you can come up with 50 reasons to justify your decision but the reality is still the same isn’t it???)

The role of a Mother is far to valuable to throw away as a part time job…
A Mother is the hub of a family group.

With the trend to work instead of home… what ends up happening is the Mother always loses.
She may work hard and get all the way to the top of her field… but when you talk to a lot of these people they will tell you about the sense of guilt they had letting someone else raise their kid…
Someone who doesn’t have the same values… someone who doesn’t have the same beliefs… and a lot of what they end up doing is buying things with the kids in mind, taking them places, buying them things, filling the weekend with the things they couldn’t do in the week to make up for the time they didn’t spend with their children…
When all the child wants… is time with their Mama!
You see they are cheating on their child… running away with work.
We’re all cheating time from someone… who are you stealing your time from?

And then on the other hand…

You have the Mother at home… working hard to raise their child, not having the same amount of money, meaning they have forfeited the new house, they have passed by the new car, they have to wait for that holiday. They are helping give their child the tools they need to live as a valuable member of society as a member of their family group.
However… they still feel like a loser, they’re guilty because they can’t support the family (especially if they’re living on a lower income), they are aware they’re letting their degrees and study go to waste as they spend time up to their waste in nappies and snacks and laundry.

Around this time of year I’m reminded of the famous story of a nun who worked in a men’s prison.
One day, she said, a prisoner asked her to buy him a Mother’s Day card for his mother. She did, and the word traveled like wildfire around the prison. Deluged with requests, she called Hallmark Cards, who obliged with huge boxes of Mother’s Day cards as a donation. The warden arranged for each inmate to draw a number, and they lined up through the cell blocks to get their cards.

 Weeks later, the nun was looking ahead on her calendar, and decided to call Hallmark again and ask for as many Father’s Day cards, in order to avoid another rush. As Father’s Day approached, the warden announced free cards were again available at the chapel. To the nun’s surprise, not a single prisoner ever asked her for a Father’s Day card.

Fathers who are not an active part of their families often leave a child wounded by absence–emotional as well as physical.
And it’s harder to recognize than others. However what often happens is it leaves women who may feel the need for physical intimacy that they have never felt from a guy before… women who have never known what a love from a guy should look like… If you have a look in society you will find that this is leading to so many unplanned pregnancy’s.

Or guys who have never been taught how to treat the opposite sex so a young boy thinks that being a man means the need for fast sex, to drink large amounts of alcohol, which then often leads to isolation and sometimes violence. No wonder our prisons are bulging.

Yet the scary thing is that even the average, law-abiding man today hasn’t had a father who said, “You’re my son and I love you,” or who helped him discover his unique talents and abilities. It would be too easy for a young boy to mis-focus his muscles, intelligence and energies destructively instead of creatively.

Yet this is often what Women are wanting for their children… wanting for themselves.
They are wanting to be more like men…
They want to run away and leave their families to be brought up by someone else…

But here’s the thing.

It’s the women who are actually holding our communities together…
It’s just that the society has chosen things like Money and Jobs and Degrees and success to be the measurements of what it means to be a good person… and ‘just being a mum’ falls way down the list and way of societies radar.

If you want to REALLY succeed in society being a great mum is the best thing you could do… both for your child… and your wider community

Mothers I tip my hat to you.

You have the hardest job in the world… it’s often the least rewarding… but I have a sense that if this was removed from our society (as we are already seeing) it all starts to fall apart.

Don’t give up on becoming a great mum …

Fathers who dare win.

Rugby isn’t as important as the things my dad taught me

I remember someone asking me the things that my dad had taught me. It’s easy to rattle off the kind of things that you would expect a dad to do with their sons… fixing cars, changing tyres, kicking rugby balls in the park, going to rugby games and mulling over the technicalities of the All Black scrums front row…
While my dad and I did a lot of these things they’re not the things that I’m proud that my dad taught me.

My dad is my hero… not because he has saved the world from extreme famine, saved someone from a burning building or even something really cool like being a race car driver… while these things are cool, I’m proud of my dad because I know where he stands.

He’s not the kind of dad to try and be cool… he never tried to smuggle me an under age drink without mum knowing… he never tried to start an after formal party as a way to befriend me or my friends… if he had done that the only thing he would have done was to become my personal bank, someone who I would run to when I needed something. It wouldn’t be anything deeper than a personal benefactor.
However my dad was much smarter than that.

My dad was love and friendship wrapped up in authority…

When I was in trouble dad didn’t just tell me off… I knew I was trouble and I knew I had disappointed not just myself but also my dad too.
Dad would help me to think about what I had done wrong… and then gave me the tools to fix the problem.

I respected my dad… I still do.

My dad taught me the important things in life…

• That people are important
• Be a person of integrity
• Don’t be too much of a man to show love
• You may have lots of expensive things but at the end of the day it’s only ‘stuff’
• Having a faith is a wise decision not a foolish hope…

These to me are important things.

And at the end if the day I can go to my dad about almost anything…
he’s a good friend…
he’s an awesome mentor…
he’s a great role model…

To be honest I wish I was more like my dad.

I remember Ian Grant (the father whisperer) once quote Daman Wayan he said:

“I wanted to be just like my dad… except for the drug habit, the failed marriages, the temper and the guns”

I can happily say my dad wasn’t like that…
I’m who I am today because of what my dad chose to spend time working on in my life.

Fathers who dare win…

Father & Son / Vater & Sohn (Photo credit: Malik_Braun)

It’s been said that the only people you can make fun of these days are heterosexual males without offending anyone else…

The problem is it means that in society there is this huge gap where the strong male role model once was…you can turn on almost any sitcom and the ‘dumb’ guy is the dad… heck the hamster usually has more going for it than the father…

In our communities more and more children are growing up without a male role model… and we wonder why there are young men who go off the rails… and why our young women are running to find their self-worth with other guys, who don’t love them anywhere as near as much as their Father could.

What we need to do is let dads be dads…

That’s why I really like people like Ian Grant who are fighting to give guy the tools to be Dads… to help be part of the team that helps develop young kids into young men and women… and an important part of that is our Fathers. Ian has a real passion share some fabulous resources and ideas on how we can ‘give fatherhood a better name’.

Keep an eye on Fathers Who Dare Win a website that is all about dads and their importance as a loving and affirming presence in both their daughters’ and sons’ lives.

Make sure you sign up to this site… lets start giving Fathers a Better name again!