Today, I am going to write about something very personal.  Maybe, if you have a child who is difficult, it will help you.  I have an unexpected, and wonderful relationship with my daughter Pat, my oldest child.  Unexpected, because for many years, we were at odds.

When she was born, I was nineteen.  I was in a strange place--California--over a thousand miles from anybody I knew.  Friends or family.  Ken was the air officer for the 7th Marines and working from sunup to sundown teaching ground Marines how to call an airstrike--how to get someone in the air to deliver what you wanted from them--at the exact spot you wanted it--on the ground.  The day Pat was born, someone else drove me to the hospital.  Ken was thousands of feet in the air--somewhere.

The birth was not normal.  The military doctor who delivered her had never delivered a baby before.  He made a terrible mistake--I remember hearing a door open, and someone yelling, "Clamp that you fool."  (I paid for his mistake for many months.)  I went into shock, and it was seven days before I had recovered enough so that they could release me to go home.  I had only held a baby once in my life--when I was five, and my brother was born.  I had no idea what to do with a baby--and no one to help me learn.  I was traumatized physically, emotionally, and frightened.  And the baby was in pain. A colicky, crying, miserable lump of humanity.  She, and I, got off to a terribly rocky start.

I didn't know what to do with her.  I would sit on the side of the bed and jiggle her by the hour.  Which didn't help.  At all.  I was allergic to her saliva, which caused huge blisters--the pain was excruciating--which I endured for weeks before I gave up on what God equipped a normal mother do.   I obviously wasn't normal.

Finally, after three months, things began to even out.  Three months.  An eternity.  I was at my wits end by then.  I survived.  She survived.  We began to adjust to each other.  But by the time she was two, it was apparent that my mothering skills (which were zero) frustrated her, and frustrated me as well.  From then on we were at war.  It was a struggle of the wills.  And it was a matched battle.  She was every bit as stubborn as I was.  I had no experience in the art of how to discipline a child, so I spanked her.  That was how I was raised.  That's how everyone was raised back then.  Spanking Pat was like throwing gasoline on a fire.....continued tomorrow.....