High Places pt 12. Terrible Twos
It was a long haul up the hill to our home. Our first son was nearly a year old and I was pushing the pram he was in, along with bags of groceries, up the steep slope. The day was pleasant, inviting us to be outdoors, and as I passed the neighbourhood homes, here and there could be seen people working in their gardens, talking to their neighbours or taking their dog out for a walk.
Finally, I reached my home and turned to walk down the driveway.
“Hello. Lovely day.” It was my neighbour. She owned a corner allotment and her back fence was our side fence. She had been working in her yard and on hearing me arrive, had called her greeting.
The fence was too high to look over, but I was able to step onto the fence railing and greeted her from that position.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked.
“Supermarket shopping,” I said. “It’s pretty hard work pushing a loaded pram up that hill. Guess it’s good exercise though.”
“How’s he going?” she asked nodding toward the unseen pram on my side of the fence.
“Fine …. though he was a bit grumpy today. He’s usually pretty good. Maybe he’s cutting some teeth.”
My neighbour stopped what she was doing and stood to her full height. She had that air about her that she was about to make an important pronouncement - and indeed she was.
“You wait till he’s two. Then you’ll know all about it.”
It wasn’t the first time she had said this to me - and it wouldn’t be the last. It was the ‘voice of experience’ warning of the inevitable challenges of parenting a two year old.
As a young married Christian woman, she had been programmed by well meaning friends to believe in the ‘terrible twos’. She fully expected her two children to go through this period - and she wasn’t disappointed. Now, having proven in her own life that the ‘terrible two’ stage was inevitable, she had become an evangelist for the phase, offering me no hope, only suffering.
When she first began to warn me of the trouble looming ahead, I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to think that we could somehow avoid such trouble, but I had no real hope of doing so.
It was about the time of the above incident that I was reading Proverbs 29. Verse 17 spoke to me. “Correct your son and he will give you rest. Yes, he will give delight to your soul.”
It was a revelation to me. There was hope! If I corrected my children properly, God assures me I will have rest and they will delight me - not trouble me!
My Christian neighbour had fallen prey to the lies of our culture. She had a strong faith - but it was in the wrong thing. She had faith to believe in the inevitability of the ‘terrible twos’ because the culture had taught her it was so.
However, the Bible teaches us a different ‘norm’. It tells us that our children can give us rest and bring us delight - and it doesn’t make an exception for when they are two, or for that matter for when they are ‘teenagers’.
From then on, whenever my neighbour felt obliged to warn me of the difficulties I would face when my children turned two, something on the inside would say, “I don’t believe in the terrible twos.” I could say that confidently because of Proverbs 29:17, so I was no longer shaken by her ‘prophetic’ voice.
And so it has been for us. Seven children later, I can still confidently declare that truth.
Only now, whenever I hear someone speak of the ‘terrible twos’ as if they are inevitable, I want to SHOUT to make sure they hear ….. “DON’T BELIEVE IN THE TERRIBLE TWOS - BELIEVE GOD’S WORD INSTEAD.”