Preface

It’s been dozens of years since I first planned to write a book on raising children, and more than a dozen more years before I actually shared these chapters with anyone. Even the title How to Really ENJOY Your Children and Love Being a Parent was decided almost twenty-five years ago! 

My desire to write a book like this was never because I thought of myself as an “expert.” I felt led or called to write a book with a catchy title like this. For the most part, it was simply started because I had been encouraged to “write a book” by so many people—most of whom were complete strangers who had observed my children and came up to ask me questions. Many of my friends who knew my children also told me I just "had" to write a book. Even my former husband told me how I needed to get everything into a book on several occasions. Years later, more than a few of my grown children, now adults, who were having their own children, said, "Mom, you've got to write a book."

As God says, the art of waiting benefits us in so many ways—GOD says “it gives us strength,” and oftentimes by waiting for His “appointed time,” He will also bless you with things you could never have dreamed or imagined, like a series of podcasts with incredible parents who are loving their own children as much as I love my own. These close friends have been navigating their own mothering in the midst of all that was thrown at them, as I was. No doubt, their success in truly “ENJOYING their children” and how much they “LOVE being a parent” was due to them going to the same Source. It’s the only Source that I have always relied on and went to when I needed help with mothering—the same Source I go to while navigating my role as a grandmother.

~ Erin Thiele