Like any opinion, mine is purely subject to my personal experience. Understanding that there may in fact be those individuals whose experiences have been in direct opposition to mine, with regard to the raising of sons vs. daughters; I have yet to meet or know one personally.

Having said this I submit that it was far easier to raise all three of my sons put together than it was my one daughter. Please don’t misunderstand, I love my daughter deeply and she is a wonderful young woman. For those of you wondering what I consider young… she is twenty-seven as of this past April. However I still consider anyone under forty young. In fact as I am fast approaching my fifty-third birthday, I’m beginning to think maybe forty-fiveish.

With regard to my daughter, the difference in raising her as opposed to her brothers was her complete and utter lack of reason. This is also a trait many men know as being inherent to the female gender. This becomes blatantly evident to us when we are once again losing the argument because, “NO”, we don’t remember what we said about your mother on the drive home from Thanksgiving dinner fourteen years ago. Hell, if it weren’t for football season and college bowl games we wouldn’t even remember when Thanksgiving is! Besides, what does that have to do with me going fishing with Rick on a Saturday in July? Plus, I know we’ve been to lunch together since then, that supposed to mean its over and done. I swear sometimes women just don’t seem to understand or want to follow the rules. So, as far as I’m concerned, my daughter does at least come by her total inability to be reasonable honestly- it’s hereditary!!! She gets it from her mother and her mother’s mother and my mother and...

My problem became quite apparent very early on. I first noticed it when she was about two and a half years of age. Oh, I’d seen warning signs prior to then for sure but, that’s when I knew I had another no win situation I would be dealing with the rest of my life. My doom was realized one day as I was watching her and her older brother; he was about five at the time. She was in a generally grumpy and argumentative mood and had been picking fights with him and hitting him the better part of the day. I had scolded and warned her repeatedly to leave him alone and “Play Nice”- yeah right, Silly Daddy!

Finally I had had enough. I sat her on my lap and tried to explain to a two year old why she shouldn’t behave this way. Mind you I might have had some degree of success had I been talking to my son but, this was a FEMALE two year old child I was trying to reason with. Not silly Daddy, more like “Stupid Daddy.” I didn’t realize it at the time but I had already lost this battle the minute I started talking and “reasoning” with her. I ended by telling her if she hit him one more time, she would get a spanking and have to spend an hour in her room thinking about how to be nice. I know… like the last futile efforts of a drowning man trying to stay afloat by grabbing onto a sinking anchor.

Needless to say she proceeded to give Daddy a hug and kiss, promptly got down from my lap, picked up her favorite toy and started toward her brother. “Great,” I told myself, “she’s going to give him a hug and kiss too. She’s even going to share her toy with him. Hey, who knows maybe she’ll even ask him to lunch? “

WRONG!!! She smacks him with the toy, walks back over to me, bends over for her spanking, (which I was all too ready to administer), stood up and went to her room and closed the door; all without so much as a whimper.

You know, I could look cross-eyed at my sons when they were little and they’d start to tear up. But Daddy’s little girl…how do you discipline someone like that? Funny her mother never seemed to have any problem with her though….




 

Free agency is not just the ability to choose “right" from "wrong." It is to literally be an agent unto ones self. To be free to decide, choose, create...exactly how and what life consists of each moment. Moment by moment each of us is deciding what our life will be like, is like, in every minute detail. God does not give us anything based on right or wrong; for He has already given us all of everything. He simply allows us to use our agency to choose what it is we want to experience based on our beliefs, thoughts and desires in that moment.

Therefore, if we choose to have a life that is desirable and "good" that is what we will experience; if we choose a life full of struggle and hardship, we can and will experience that as well, for both exist. God has already provided for either option in order that we may choose according to OUR will. He allows us that choice, that freedom of our agency.

So it is truly up to each of us to choose accountably because God would that we choose love and joy but, He always honors our choice even when we choose fear and pain. Because He knows the lessons exist in either choice we make. Therefore, choose accountably!