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Flipping through a copy of Parenting magazine, I came across an article in which staff, readers, and a handful of writers were asked, \u2018What is the one life lesson you want to pass on to your child?\u2019\u00a0<\/em> The question made me think about my life and what I have learned, and the ways in which I learned them.\u00a0 Life lessons are often learned through mistakes, far too often our own.\u00a0 I am the type of parent who loses sleep worrying about whether I am adequately preparing my child for the \u201creal world.\u201d\u00a0 My son is only two but already I tell myself often, \u2018You can\u2019t protect him from everything.\u00a0 That is not your job.\u2019\u00a0 I have to accept that he will have to step out on his own and learn.<\/p>\nOne way in which I try to impart life lessons to my son is by writing to him.\u00a0 When I was pregnant with him, I started keeping a journal.\u00a0 It was initially a way to chart his progress, as well as my own.\u00a0 I wrote about his developments, what his heart rate was at the most recent check-up, what my weight was, (actually I stopped recording those numbers somewhere in the second trimester when I began to disagree with them), and how I was feeling, physically and emotionally.\u00a0 As I got bigger and bigger and began to realize I was about to give birth to a person, I began to write to him, not just about him.\u00a0 I began to write to him as if I were talking to him as a teenager, the time when I will likely need him to listen to me the most.<\/p>\n
Writing provides a way for me to speak to him without being interrupted, without having to stop and find the right words.\u00a0 It allows me to be open, honest, and understanding, as I hope to be as a parent later when those qualities are needed.\u00a0 I accept that I can\u2019t protect him from everything and that he will have to learn many things on his own and (cringe) go through his own mistakes, but in writing to him I feel that I am providing the best advice and guidance I can give him.<\/p>\n
I think if I could tell my son one thing, give him one piece of advice; it would be to let Allah guide you.\u00a0 People say when you are in a difficult situation to \u2018listen to your heart\u2019 or \u2018go with your gut.\u2019\u00a0 But I think what we call the heart or the gut is really the soul, what I often think of as the way Allah speaks to us.\u00a0 We can go in any number of directions, but our soul, if we listen to it and let it guide us, only ever points in one direction.\u00a0 My son can learn from me, his father, anyone, but anything good he is learning from us isn\u2019t really coming from us, it\u2019s coming from our souls, from the times we actually listened to our souls and let them guide us.\u00a0 It is coming from Allah, the Eternal and All-Knowing.<\/p>\n
So if you could give your child\/children only one life lesson, what would it be?<\/p>\n
\u00a0Ambata Kazi-Nance<\/p>\n