Waxing Philosophical. (and mixing metaphores!)

Lately I've been thinking a lot on a rather odd subject. That subject being "backstage." Odd, right? A random blog post started the thought going through my head. The blogger described being backstage as being where the actors have their hair down, are their "real selves", and where you see all the inner workings of the glitz and glamour that goes on on-stage. It's where the *real* show goes on.

It brought to mind my life-long interest in architecture and how things are made. Figuring out how a beautiful structure is made is something that's always been a bit bittersweet for me. It's always a little disallusioning to pull back a gorgeous facade and find a jumble of plain wood, nails, insulation, and wiring. And yet, it's also enlightening to see how a bunch of simple, mundane things, are absolutely necessary to make something beautiful.

And such is life.

We see families that seem to have it "all together". Kids always well-behaved, make-up on mom always perfectly applied, dad making his way up the ranks at work, nice car, nice house, etc. etc. But it's the mundane things underneith that determine the real value of what's going on in that home. Children may behave well because of threat of violence. The nice car and house have payments attached that can barely be made each month, and dad is cheating his way to the top. It's like a beautiful-looking piece of machinery made with plastic parts.

Or you have real craftsmanship of families where the children behave because of love of their parents, and because they've been taught to know deep inside what is right and what is wrong. All the nice things and promotions are earned through honest, hard work, and the family is organized and focused on their goal of achieving a pleasant home environment.

Having this little "epiphany" of focusing on what's going on "backstage" in my family has helped me to be much more patient with my kids. (well, more patient than I used to be... of course there's always room for improvement). A child can't go out onto the stage of life and automatically know their lines, and so I have to "rehearse" with them what my expectations of them are, and practice, practice, practice, so that the way they interact with the world (the stage) is second-nature. They'll still fumble their lines from time to time, but it doesn't help to have me yelling their lines to them. ("Sit down and be quiet!" "I told you to clean up!") Taking them aside, removing them from the stage for a bit, to explain my expectations really works wonders. Not that they listen 100% of the time. They're still learning. And so am I.

When the facade of my family is pulled back, and the mundane parts revealed -the family dinners, Family Home Evenings, picnics at the park, homeschooling, bedtime stories, etc.- I want it to be obvious that a lot of love and care was put into making sure the supporting structure was everything it needed to be to make a long-lasting thing of beauty.

I need to get my kids ready to shine on that stage. :)

/wax off