She got frustrated and I got frustrated yesterday morning. So I threw down the hairbrush and it bounced on the kitchen floor.

Not my best moment, I know.

My oldest daughter is ten-and-a-half and quickly heading toward preteen-ish-ness and I’m quickly heading toward being the mother of a preteen-ish girl.

I have no idea what I’m doing.  In fact, I think neither neither she nor I know what we are doing.

There are manuals for getting babies to sleep through the night and books about getting toddlers to eat green veges. There are myriads of parenting seminars and classes one can take about how to be a better disciplinarian but there is no manual for this. Not for this: For the on-the-ground, we-are-both-crying, leave-me-alone times. For the times when we look at each other as mother and daughter and we don’t know how this is supposed to work.

Hair brushing is small compared to the issues we will be dealing with in short years but regardless the issue, it’s all new territory. But there are a few things that aren’t new:

It’s about love {it’s always been about love} and it’s about reconciliation. It’s about grace and it’s about forgiving the major and minor parts of our personalities that will never be easy.

It’s about me gathering her sixty seconds later and apologizing for my unpredictable behavior and telling her she didn’t deserve that.

It’s about her obeying me and then asking for forgiveness with sincerity.

It’s about both of us recognizing that we were wrong.

And it’s about reconciliation.

My hope for my daughters is that they would grow up to be responsible individuals who love God and others and are good stewards of their resources. But they may, no will, have a few hiccups along the way.

They might leave the Church or fall in love with the wrong guy, they might screw everything up, but if in the end of it, we are reconciled to one another the journey to that redemption is of lesser importance than the redemption itself.

We took our girls to see Brave the other day and, unlike other Princess movies {even Tangled}, Brave is not about a prince falling in love with a girl. And it’s not about finding your “true” self or following your heart. Brave is about redemption. It’s about reconciliation. It’s about the broken relationship between a mother and a daughter and how the courage to forgive and be forgiven heals it.

As silly as it sounds, as I held my daughter in the kitchen yesterday morning I thought about that movie and I thought about us and about our willingness as parents to be molded and shaped by our own children. I thought about my own failings as a person and a parent and how we must be brave enough to forgive one another.

That’s right.

When we don’t know what to do, forgive. When we don’t know how to move forward, love. When we don’t know how to fix it, seek to reconcile and redeem.

Lord, help us to have the courage to forgive today and help us to have the bravery to admit our own faults. Give us an appropriate understanding of our own failings but help us to reconcile and redeem the broken things of this world. Continue to bring reconciliation into our families and lives in ways only You can dream up.

Do you ever feel like you need a “manual” for this stage of life? Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you are doing? Does it take a lot of courage to forgive?