Glimpses

How could I forget!? I'v added the book Glimpses Into the Life and Heart of Marjorie Pay Hinckley to my most influential book list.

Marjorie Hinckley was wife to Gordon B. Hickley, President of the LDS church from 1995 to 2008. His biography was okay. But "Glimpses" changed my life and mothering.

I wanted to share a story and a quote from the chapter about mothering that I still reference and try to emulate with my own kids.

In the first, Marjorie's oldest son went missing. She thought all day about the speech she was going to give him when he showed up at mealtime after a day of shirking all the work there was to do. He had been "down in the hollow." When his mother asked him what he was doing there, he answered, "Nothing."

Well she didn't give him the speech, and shared why she was glad of it. Years later he was home and under a lot of pressure - university, tests, struggles with his girlfriend. He was feeling the pressures of adult life, but he reflected to his mother how his childhood had been wonderful. "Those long summer days, when you could lie on your back in the hollow and listen to the birds sing and watch the ants build their castles."

Marjorie taught, "The memory of the peace of a summer day - 'God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world' - sustained him when the pressures of adult life began to crowd in."

I wonder what will sustain our children if we don't allow them time to find peace and contentment in childhood? I love homeschooling because, as Emerson put it, we can give our children "leave to be what [they] inly [are]."

Finally, the quote. Said Marjorie Hickley, "My mother taught me some basic philosophies of rearing children. One is that you have to trust children. I tried hard never to say 'no' if I could possible say 'yes.' I think that worked well because it gave my children the feeling that I trusted them and they were responsible to do the best they could."

I love this, first because in my home growing up, we were given a knee-jerk 'no' to almost everything. It's a practice I've tried to reverse with my own children. But trusting children is a powerful idea. In our homeschooling journey I am learning I can! They are amazing learners and part of my role is to not interfere with that process which they were born knowing so well. I confess, I am still practicing this.... It's good to have a place to share the good that I'm discovering comes with trusting children.