Learning From Those Who Are Older (From a Mom's Perspective)

Amy Scott:

This morning I read an article by John Piper in which he reflects on his retirement. At 35-years-old, I can’t imagine that I was the target audience for the piece. 

It reminded me of something. (Let me elaborate and then I will wind back around to the article.) When I was a young mom with small children, I remember looking for other young moms to share my life with. There’s nothing wrong with that. Women often seek out friends who look like them. 

I understand the reasoning. For starters, the logistics are easier. When you hang out at a house with sippy cups, you don’t have to worry ancient Egyptian relics being displayed at knee level. 

But it also made navigating those early years a little harder than they needed to be. And let me tread carefully (because women need each other in a profound way), but when I surrounded myself exclusively with people struggling with the same issues that I was, it distorted my perspective. Enter, the mommy wars– the field where bottles and breasts are moral issues and vaccinating your child will demote your standing on the playground. 

I remember crying after I got a smackdown on the playground because my toddler was still (!) using a bottle at 18-months-old. He is a teenager now, and he does not use a bottle or suck his thumb. He even makes it to the potty in time. (He doesn’t pick up his big boy toys without death threats, but it is not my fault. Really.) I love my baby, but really, I did not have the mature perspective to distinguish between moral issues and practical ones when he was young. I was young (and still am). 

What does this have to do with Piper’s article on retirement? Only this: that the more we invest our lives into learning and growing from those that don’t “look like us”, the more we’ll learn. It’s a challenge, to me and to all the women who tend to join bandwagons and get all myopic about our pet issues.

Read the rest.