I LOVE having a daughter – I never dreamed it would be this much fun and that she’d be this feminine from the get-go!
But, with all that said, it’s actually a lot scarier to me having a girl to raise. I understand boys ❤ and although they need a lot from their mothers, a lot of the bulk of their gaining and understanding their masculine strength can only come from their fathers. So while it’s been beautiful to see my husband fill that role pratically perfectly, this new baby girl has turned our world upside down in this respect. Now I’m the one who needs to teach her what true femininity and godly womanhood looks like.
Lord have mercy on me! LOL 😀 😛 Even with all my studying, it still feels like a job I’m not fully prepared for. But that’s why I’m forever grateful to mentors, my own mother ❤ , older women at church, and blogs with that kind of guidance.
Proverbs says to get all the wisdom, knowledge, and understanding that you can, and it’s wonderful that we have access to people we’d never know if it wasn’t for the internet! I love how there’s so many women I’ve come across over the years who have been kind enough to give me tons of advice on raising children and being a godly wife!
In fact… I’m seriously considering starting another mini-series, complete with it’s own tab (maybe), called “Letters from Mentors,” where I’ll be featuring emails I’ve received from women usually in their mid-40’s or 50’s, who have given me AMAZING advice on different topics that would fit well here on my blog.
Women you’d see in this series would be people like Sunshine Mary (Sunshine Thiry), Liz (red pill commenter from years back), Stingray (from On The Rock), Lori Alexander (from The Transformed Wife), April (from The Peaceful Wife), Ame (from Blending Ame), RPG (from NotesFromaRedPillGirl), and a few other Christian women I’ve reached out to recently to see if they’d be interested. Hopefully it will be an expanding thing, even with my real life mentors contributing from time to time. I’m in debt to so many of these incredible women for the advice they’ve given me over the years and setting a positive example of seeing them interact online and in real life. And the online ones love to write! LOL So why not try to capture some of the letters I’ve received from them, that maybe would be helpful to other women out there as well who are in the middle of raising a family?
In fact, my husband is helping me create a little booklet for our daughter of all the posts I’ve written under the tab for her. I figured these “Letters from Mentors,” would go great in there as well! I’m a big paper person… I love books you can physically hold. This little booklet is only about 8-9 inches tall, in a mini-binder, and so cute!
And it’s so sweet how quick these older, wiser women were to either reach out to me themselves, or to be open to my going to them to seek their wisdom. They were so generous and kind-hearted toward me, and so humble! And thankfully, I’ve only ever had one woman snub my request to email her and then humiliate me for asking, but then I realized… maybe she really didn’t have any wisdom to impart afterall... LOL 😀 . Oh well 🙂 may the generous, humble ones be honored and praised for gladly giving advice to someone younger looking up to them. It is definitely appreciated, and now I’m hopefully going to find time to capture their words in our homemade book (and here), so others can have access to their wisdom, too.
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Stingray is the first woman’s advice I’d like to write about here on this post. For people who don’t know her, she used to run a very well-written blog on male-female, red pill concepts, with a heavy focus on married women’s responsibilities, called On the Rock. I urge you to go check it out! A woman in her mid-40’s, with a growing family and husband she adores, she is a faithful Catholic with admirably strong convictions. I adore her. When I was pregnant and we found out it would be a girl, she was one of the first women I thought of when thinking of people online to ask for advice on a variety of “raising a daughter” topics. That says a lot about the impression she had on me.
Like I said before, it just seems so much harder raising a girl, than it has been raising boys. Our culture is so dark, and where it used to be more based on virtue and morality, now it’s actually praised to sleep around for years, before finally deciding to get married and have children – if a woman decides to get married at all!!! I don’t want her to be like that. I don’t want her to choose a more painful, even disastrous path for herself. And I don’t want her growing up believing that it is “ok” or desirable at all, even if our idiotic society deems it acceptable.
I’ve rambled on too much. Here is just one of Stingray’s excellent letters, I sincerely hope you as a reader, enjoy it.
Good morning, Stephanie,
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Newborns don’t come with instruction manuals. There are many books on the proper care and feeding of a newborn. But the most important manual to read is the child herself. In many instances, and in many ways, she will tell you what she needs from you (but this only works for those who are paying attention).
Adolescents, on the other hand, need the parent to really know what they are doing – because the parents need to teach them things that the adolescents don’t even know that they need.
I’ve always found the following poems to be a good guideline for the types of values and approaches to life that the adolescent needs to be taught. They make for a good checklist of things to cover before the kids leave home.
The second link contains three different poems. I did it this way so as to not have too many links in this post.
If – a poem for boys
If – 3 poems for girls
So glad to hear more from Stingray. She projects a sort of quietness.
“You don’t want them to squash who they are, you want them to be the beset them they can be.” — such wonderfully wise advice. 🙂 And as far as them wanting to buck you… some do, some don’t. I’ve found that when I admit my mistakes and am “real” with my girls, they respect my guidance all the more.
Seriously – just clicked on your link and scrolled through far enough to see that you have a commentary on “If” on your blog. Interesting thoughts.
https://calculatedbravery.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/if-commentary/
Yes, she does 🙂 And there will be more letters from her in the future. Lots of topics covered… I’m so grateful she’s so humble and generous!
Funny, my late mother had the most problems with raising and interacting with her 2 daughters, not with her 3 sons. It takes 2 parents in the home to successfully rear children.