1 Mother 2 Another

Over the holidays I loosened my
nutritional hold on my household quite a bit, and allowed more than
a modicum of sugar to course through my children’s veins. I
do love to bake, and don’t see how I can fill the house with
goodies and then not allow the girls reasonably free rein with the
cookie jar; I worry it’ll set them up to see the sweets as
something forbidden and oh-so-desirable.


Likewise, as candy comes into the house from Christmas parties and
gifts from friends, I can’t simply take the twenty cabillion
candy canes and dump them in the trash. Ok, if I’m being
truthful, more than a small amount of store candy DID end up in the
trash, but my girls were pretty free to consume whatever they
brought in the house – after checking with a grown-up, of
course. And Maddie’s big request from Santa? A gumball
machine filled with jelly beans.


I know.

But guess what? She got it. AND a huge
stack of pennies for instant access.


All this to say that the Milner household would seriously flunk
most blood sugar tests when the new year starts. So I let the girls
get one week of school under their belts – complete with a
few last Christmas cookies lovingly tucked into their lunches
– and then announced we’d spend a week going sugar
free.


Now, when I say sugar free, I don’t really mean that. We
still consume naturally-occurring sugars, like in fruit, and even
ingest a fair amount of processed sugar still, from ketchup and
sandwich bread and a few things like that. I can’t force a
huge diet change on the girls like that, and most of our
“extra” sugar is pretty lean: agave nectar in our
preservative-free bread; homemade jam on fresh-ground peanut-butter
for sandwiches; that sort of thing. But I made it clear that for a
week, there’d be no hot cocoa after a freezing walk home from
school, no piece of candy from the candy jar, no mid-week whipping
up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies to snuggle and read with.


The girls, to their credit, took the news really well. I’d
expected some fuss, especially from Cora, who’d grown used to
having a mid-afternoon pick-me-up from the cookie stash in the
freezer a few times a week. But they have been quite great, not
complaining at all and not even asking me to reconsider. And I
figured, well, they know my word is good and it’s no use
asking me to change my mind, so all will run smoothly while at
home. Beyond these walls, well, there’s a limit to what I can
control.


Then yesterday after school I was cleaning out Maddie’s
backpack and found a small bag of jacks and a ball. “Hey
kiddo, what’s this?” I asked, holding up the bag.


Maddie looked over. “Oh, that’s just a prize I got in
class today.”


“How’d you get this in class?” I pursued,
intrigued. “What game did you win?”


“Oh, it was no game or anything. Everyone got a treat handed
out,” Maddie said matter-of-factly, “for the whole
class doing something well. Our teacher gave everyone a
Hershey’s kiss, and I knew you didn’t want me eating
sugar this week so I told the teacher I wanted to give it back and
after I explained why she gave me this instead.”


I stared at her, and then broke into a huge grin. “MADDIE! Do
you realize that I never would have known if you’d eaten that
Hershey kiss? Do you UNDERSTAND how proud I am that you chose to do
what you knew I’d want you to do, even though there was no
possible consequence looming? You, my friend, are really growing up
and I am so darn proud of you. Just for that you get an extra book
at bedtime.”


Maddie lit up with delight, hugged me, and skipped off, elated and
glowing from the praise.


I’m still having a hard time letting this sink in, to be
truthful. I don’t always see such fruit from my labors so
clearly, and to know that she obeyed me WHEN SHE DIDN’T HAVE
TO, and even more importantly, WHEN SHE DIDN’T SEE ANY REAL
NEED TO, like a safety issue or some such, makes all the obedience
struggles and all the loooooooong talks we’ve had feel so
worth it.


I don’t want to raise robots. I don’t want to raise
kids who act out of fear of what my reaction might be, or kids who
do juuuuuuust enough to get by and fly under the radar. And
instilling in my girls a sense of real obedience – and even
more importantly, a joyful obedience – has been high on my
list of both Priorities and How The Heck Do I Do That?


I’m not the best model for this one; my obedience to God is
sometimes, um, sluggish. Sparse. Nonexistent. And I’ve tried
to be honest about that, to talk about it with the girls and
explain why we work on obeying even when it doesn’t always
make sense.


I might be making too much out of this. But if you knew Maddie, and
how much that girl loves her sugar, you’d understand.


My girl’s growing up. In her emotions, in her discipline
muscles, in her desire to do what’s right. And I love seeing
that in action.