Our Family Is Forever

I remember being a younger Mom (I was never really a young mom since I had my first baby when I was 29) and being fascinated by the experience of mothering, and also being frustrated.

There came a time when Nick and Sam were old enough to start pestering one another and *gasp* fighting with each other.

I could not believe that my beloved children would actually fight with each other. That just wasn't acceptable to my mind.

But what to do??

One day, after many days of pondering and thinking about this-because I knew I had to do something so that this didn't continue-Nick and Sam got into a fight about something.

As I went to them, Heavenly Father taught me what to do and what to say.

This is what I was directed in my mind to do, and what I did:

I sat on the floor and put each boy on one leg and I put my arms around them and I spoke to them very softly. I asked Nick, "What did you do?" and he immediately started telling me what Sam did. I stopped him and again asked. "What did you do?" That went on another time or two until Nick understood and answered appropriately.

Then I turned to Sam and asked, "What did you do?" and Sam also tried to tell me what Nick did to him and I stopped him and asked again, "What did you do?" And he told me.

And then I talked to them about being brothers and what a great thing that is and that they should always take care of each other and always love each other. I told them that they are best friends. And then I said, "Friends will come and go, but our family is forever."

And we talked about that a little bit, about how they will have lots of friends through their lives and some of those friends will be their friends for a long, long time. And some of those friends will move on.

But they will always be brothers. Always. Even if they might not want to be brothers, they always will be.

And so they need to always take care of each other.
And always be there for each other.
And then I had them give each other a hug.
And then we all hugged a group hug.

And as each child has joined our family, and as each child has grown and entered that fighting stage of childhood, I've sat down on the floor and put each fighting child on one leg and had this conversation with them.

Once I had three boys on my lap, and they were kind of big. And it made us all laugh! And they kind of just said the mantra together without my "talk" (probably so they could just be done with it all!):

"Friends will come and go but our family is forever."

And we had a group hug.
And it was all okay.
I didn't know, all those many years ago when the Spirit taught me what to say and what to do, how important those words would be for our family. But I did know that I wanted my children to be one another's best friends. I wanted them to be there for each other through the easy times and the hard times.


And they are.