I Feel Proud Today

Do you ever have those days where you feel really proud and quite overcome with emotion if your child does or says something? I’ve always taught my children to be humble and respect the feelings of others by considering their actions, if possible, in all things. I don’t mention my children much on my blog because I like to keep a measure of privacy, yet there are times when they may do something that really astounds me, and today one of those occasions occurred.

Earlier in the day my 13-year-old boy and his friend were in the sitting room and we were having a chat about this and that whilst eating some lunch. I had a book next to me that I was given as a present for Xmas called ‘Best Loved Poems. It’s the sort of book you can pick up at any time and read the odd page from. Anyway, I found a well-known poem by Rudyard Kipling called ‘If’ which you are probably familiar with. It talks about the virtues needed to be a good human being. It is quite an emotional poem and speaks about the value of respecting others, being humble and truthful amongst others.

The reason I am speaking of this is that I was out with my children for a meal this evening and I spoke to the older one, my 15-year-old, about this poem and the way we spoke of it earlier.

The conversation went like this:

Me: “Me and your brother were talking about poetry earlier, and there’s a  poem called ‘If’, You know the one written by….

My eldest: “Oh, Rudyard Kipling. The one that says, “If you can keep your head about you when all about you are losing theirs and blaming you, If you…

And then, my dear son started reciting this poem word for word, and I sat looking at him like a guppy fish, totally shocked that he knew the words and even voiced them with feeling and passion.

I asked him how he knew it and if it was part of the curriculum at school. His answer was a definite no, and that he’d read it a year back, loved it that much that he was determined to remember the words.

It’s not that it was particularly significant that he’d read a poem, and it’s coming across to you that the incident makes the situation more arty farty. Oh, look my son has just recited a poem isn’t he clever! It’s not that at all. The most important aspect of the whole of this is that something he’d learned in the past motivated him enough to remember it because it moved him and it made him think. He thought it was worthwhile to him.

It’s moments like this, whatever they are, that makes you feel proud and that somehow along the way you may have had a part to play in their learning and understanding.  It didn’t have to be a poem he’d remembered,  it could have been the reading and the memorizing of instructions on how to fill up the pressure on a boiler, or to prune a rose bush properly or to perform CPR on someone. It’s the deeper development of their own conscience that’s the most important thing and their want of an understanding of how things work or how much something may matter to them.

I feel a very proud mother today x