(Minghui.org) I have been looking after my younger grandson during the past few years. I never expected the difficulties I experienced. I would like to share some of my experiences with fellow practitioners.
My son mentioned several times that they wanted me to help look after their two sons. I had little contact with them but knew that the younger one could be mischievous, so I declined each time.
One day, my son came to visit me and said that his wife had been complaining to him that they needed someone to take care of their children. He told me that his wife had just rented a spot in a commercial building to sell clothes and she needed to go to the south to purchase stock, and there was no one to take care of their children for the next ten days or so. I told my son that I could help while she was away, but they needed to find a nanny for when she returned.
I had to move to the city to help out. My older grandson was a fourth grader in elementary school at the time, and the younger one was attending kindergarten. In the morning, I needed to get them ready and take them to school before I returned home and did things to validate the Fa. It was a tight schedule.
Life was not as simple as I had hoped. My younger grandson, Dingding, made a big fuss without his mom around. In the past, I only knew that he was naughty, but I didn’t expect he could be so troublesome. He would wake up through the night and cry hard. I did my best to calm him down for fear of disturbing the neighbors, but nothing worked. I had to wait until he was exhausted before he would finally fall asleep. Then, it was nearly time for me to do the morning Dafa exercises. He also often disturbed me in his sleep and I had to stop from time to time to care for him. It was really exasperating.
When I realized how difficult it would be for a nanny to take care of him, I decided to continue to look after him after his mom returned, even though I still felt a bit reluctant in my heart. I thought that since I’m a Dafa practitioner, I should help my family without complaint.
I talked with my daughter-in-law and we agreed that she would pick up the children in the afternoon, cook for them, and do the washing. I would be back home by 6:00 p.m. before she returned to her store. She had someone to help out during her absence, so it wasn’t a problem. Seeing her running around for the two children every day, my early reluctance to help them out was gone.
My older grandson was no trouble. When I was too busy to fix meals for him, I would give him some money to buy food for himself. Dingding, on the other hand, was a handful. In winter, when the heating was not enough to keep the house warm, he would refuse to get out of bed and would hide under the quilt. Even after he eventually got up, he would ask me to carry him on my back to get around. After leaving him at kindergarten, I had to rush to take the shuttle bus back. I listened to Master’s lectures on the bus, and when I got home, I listened to fellow practitioners sharing articles so that I would not fall behind in my cultivation.
It was a rather difficult winter. I was freezing while waiting for the bus, and the traffic jams in the city made the trips even more time-consuming. As time went on, I began to feel a bit confused. Was I doing the right thing?
When the kindergarten was closed for a holiday, I told my daughter-in-law to bring Dingding to my place, so that I could take care of him while doing things to validate the Fa.
Dingding was very curious when he first came to my place. He would pull this or touch that, or slap the keyboard of my computer, messing up everything on the screen. It was difficult for him to keep still for even two minutes, and he always asked me to play with him. To keep him occupied, I purchased toys for him.
However, my plan did not work and he would pounce on me, or get on the window sill, push open the window and yell. It gave me such a start when he did this and get my heart pumping. He was continuously active and I had to try hard not to fall over when he jumped on me. I thought that he was helping me cultivate Forbearance, so I didn’t react to his mischievous behaviors at the beginning. However, the more tolerant I was, the naughtier he became. He would suddenly rush over to me, put his arms around my neck and start rubbing my head, messing up my hair.
“How come your hair is always such a mess,” my daughter-in-law said to me. “Well, go ask your son,” I said to her in an annoyed tone. Sometimes, when I got annoyed, I would point at Dingding and say, “I cannot tolerate you anymore! Your behavior is just so out of hand. I’ve never seen such behavior in a child. Why do you keep causing trouble for me?!” He stuck out his tongue and said to me, “So what! What can you do?” Looking at his mischievous face, I felt so helpless. Tears welled up in my eyes.
Once, when I was sitting on the edge of the bed to send forth righteous thoughts, he pushed me hard from behind and I fell to the ground. I pulled him over and gave him a good smack. I told his mother that I swatted him and told her that Dingding was causing me trouble. When she told Dingding not to do that, the boy said stubbornly, “I just want to cause Grandma trouble!”
The next day I asked him, “Why don’t you cause trouble for your mother instead of me?” He looked at me and said with a cunning smile, “I will cause you trouble.” I could no longer control my anger, jealousy, and resentment. I pointed at him and said sternly, “If you treat me like this again, I will take care of you and you won’t like it!”
Since then, I often spanked him when he was naughty. Sometimes, when I tried to put him in bed for a nap, he would say he would listen to me only if I carried him on my back. So I did, and walked around the house with him on my back, but he still would not sleep. I put him on the bed, telling him to go to sleep, but he cried and insisted that I carry him on my back some more. I ignored him. I resented his mother for causing me so much trouble, wondering why she had a second child.
A few times, he grabbed my neck, he began to strangle me. I got so angry that I bit his hand. I didn’t bite hard, but I was just so frustrated and felt no sympathy for him. Afterwards, I realized what I did was very wrong. Even an ordinary person wouldn’t do such a thing to a child, much less a practitioner.
When a fellow practitioner came for a visit, I told her about my grandson and tried even harder to keep him under control. “You can’t spank him like this,” she said to me, “he’s just a naughty little boy. What drives you to treat him worse when I visit?” I thought: This boy likes to act up in front of others. If he doesn’t listen to me, I have to spank him. It’s as simple as that. There is nothing that drives me to do so. He needs to learn a lesson.
Just then, a scene came into my mind. It was a long time ago when his father was still little. One day, I took him to a wedding and he was quite naughty. When I got home that evening, my mouth was covered with blisters due to anxiety. I thought I had lost face in front of others. The attachments and human notions I had then were still with me today.
I often spanked Dingding and began to hold more hatred and resentment against him as he kept annoying me. My voice became louder when I spoke. Sometimes, Dingding would ask me, “Grandma, why don’t you smile anymore?” “Because you’re so naughty and you never listen to me. How can I smile?” I said to him coldly. I also found it hard to calm down when doing the meditation exercise. I was rather annoyed with myself, too.
One day, when I was studying the Fa, I read the following lines,
“Some people blow up even when they’re disciplining their kids, they’ll yell and make a big scene. You don’t have to be like that when you’re disciplining your kids. You shouldn’t really get angry. You should teach your kids with reason and good sense, and that’s the only way you can really teach them well.” (Lecture Nine, Zhuan Falun)
In the past, each time I read this line, I never felt anything special, but this time, I stopped and thought, “Isn’t Master talking about me? I must pay attention and teach my grandson with reason and wisdom so that he can truly become a good person.”
His kindergarten was closed for a few months due to the pandemic, and he was with me during that time. I thought to myself: Was I wrong when I treated him with parental authority? I thought he should listen to me because I was his grandma, but by the standards for a cultivator, it was wrong. Wasn’t this the evil Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) culture at work? Fighting with him by way of being the same only left me feeling exhausted, with no effect. I realized that I must change myself first.
One day, he got bored and shouted, “I’m so bored, Grandma never plays with me!” I asked him if he would like me to play a video for him. He was happy with my suggestion, so I played the DVD “Coming for You.”
“Grandma, who is this person? What’s he saying?” My grandson asked me when he saw Master standing on the heavenly carriage. “He is Master, and he is saying: Follow me to descend to the human world to save sentient beings,” I told him.
Since then, my grandson often recited the words “Follow me to descend to the human world to save sentient beings.” We also watched DVDs downloaded from The Epoch Times.
One day, he asked me seriously, “Grandma, are you doing what you are doing to save people too? I won’t cause you trouble anymore, and I want to be a good boy so that I can return to heaven, too.” I told him that all of us came from heaven, but got lost and turned bad after we came down to the human world, and if we wanted to return to heaven again, we must try to rectify ourselves according to the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, and only then could we return to heaven with Master. I also explained to him about how to follow these principles in our daily life. He then said to me, “When my older brother hits me again in the future, I won’t fight back and I will practice tolerance.”
One day, I took him back to his parents’ home. As we were waiting for the elevator, he ran off to a small supermarket nearby. “Come back Dingding, the elevator is coming down now,” I called out to him. He ran back to me quickly and said to me, “Grandma, how did you call me just now? Say it again. It was nice. Could you talk to me like that in the future?” “Yes, of course, but how was I talking to you before?” I asked him.
“It was like this,” he said, and started staring angrily, and shouted, “Dingding! Come back now!” My heart felt very heavy and I felt so ashamed for my conduct in the past. In the eyes of my grandson, I was nowhere near a Dafa cultivator, but an ordinary person shaped by the CCP culture.
I realized that the Party culture had deeply wormed its way into my body and soul, and I must eliminate all its wicked elements in me. As I was thinking deeply about how to achieve this, Master’s teaching came to my mind:
“During the process of transforming karma, to keep yourself under control—unlike an everyday person who would mess things up—you should always maintain a heart of benevolence and a mind of kindness.” (Lecture Four, Zhuan Falun)
The Party culture goes directly against the Fa, and it encourages people to harbor resentment, hatred, and evilness. Master teaches us to always maintain a heart of benevolence and a mind of kindness. If we conduct ourselves in line with such principles, we will be able to disintegrate the poison of the Party culture in ourselves.
I realized that my past behavior had cast a big dark shadow on my grandson’s heart, and I must apologize to him. So I said to him, “Dingding, I shouldn’t have hit you in the past. You’re five years old, I should reason with you calmly. I was wrong and I must apologize to you.”
“Don’t worry, Grandma,” he said to me, “It’s my fault. I used to mess up your things all the time and made you angry.”
Dingding still acts up from time to time, but I never hit him anymore. When he was really naughty, I would look at him seriously. Even though I didn’t lose my temper on the surface, I still felt a bit agitated inside. He would look at me and say, “What’s wrong, Grandma? Are you being angry again?” His innocent look made me laugh, and immediately, I started looking within to rectify myself.
At bedtime in the evening, I said to him, “I almost lost my temper today. I’ll do better in the future.” “No problem, Grandma. You’ll be fine once you relinquish your attachment.” I suddenly realized that it wasn’t that my grandson was being naughty, he was actually helping me let go of my attachments. But in the past, I always thought he was a troublemaker and interfered with my truth-clarification work. I always felt resentful and complained about him in my heart.
Our cultivation paths were arranged by Master, and nothing happens by accident. Everything is for our cultivation. When I thought this way, I felt very ashamed of myself. What my grandson did was to help me improve my xinxing and let go of my attachments, but I didn’t see it this way in the past and always thought he was just being naughty.
Dingding often says, “Falun Dafa is good. Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good.” When I study the Fa, he asks me to read it aloud so that he can hear it too. I also let him listen to Master’s lectures at bedtime. At the beginning, he said he could not understand what Master was saying, and he didn’t want to listen. I told him not to worry and if he kept listening, he would understand.
One day, he said to me, “Grandma, Master created Dafa, and Dafa created the universe. Is that right?” “That’s right,” I assured him, and told him some miraculous stories in Dafa cultivation. In Dingding’s heart, Master is the most significant and profound.
One day, on our way back home, I was carrying quite a lot of things and wanted to take a rest. Just as I bent down to put my things on the ground, Dingding shouted loudly, “Grandma, there is a bus coming!” I grabbed him and rushed aside. A big bus stopped sharply about a meter away from us. As it turned out, the bus driver was backing up the bus and didn’t see us. He pressed the brake when he heard my grandson’s shouting. It was very close.
As we were leaving, my grandson said to me, “Master saved me and Grandma today.” “Yes, indeed,” I said. “We must always listen to Master’s teaching. He is protecting us all the time.”
One morning last fall, my daughter-in-law called and told me that Dingding was running a fever at night and asked me to take him to the doctor for an IV drip. I took him to a private clinic where he’d an IV drip in the past, but the doctor said his temperature was not high enough for an IV, and told me to take him back home and watch him. When it was almost noon, my grandson complained about a headache and his temperature was 38.3 degrees C (100 degrees F). I took him back to the clinic again.
By then, Dingding’s face was really hot and red, and he was running a fever of 39.8 (103) degrees. The doctor told me to take him to a hospital and said there could be serious consequences if his temperature remained this high. I thought about it and asked the doctor to give me some rectal acetaminophen. The doctor also inserted a suppository into Dingding’s rectum on the spot.
After we got back home, I gave Dingding some water, covered him with a quilt and said, “Let’s recite ‘Falun Dafa is good. Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good,’ Shall we?” Dingding nodded. So, I sat down by his bedside and started to recite the two phrases.
Gradually Dingding fell asleep and his breathing became steady. Half an hour later, his face looked normal and his forehead was not that hot. He was perspiring a lot. I checked his temperature and it was 38 (100) degrees. I thanked Master again and again in my heart for saving my grandson. An hour later, Dingding woke up and his temperature was completely back to normal. He was very happy and said to me, “Grandma, my head doesn’t hurt anymore.” I told him that Master saved him. By the evening when his mother came back home, he was happy and jumping around as if nothing had happened.
One day in January this year, I was waiting for my daughter-in-law to bring Dingding to me, but they still hadn’t arrived by 1:00 p.m. I called my daughter-in-law to ask what was happening. I could hear that Dingding was crying hard in the background. My daughter-in-law told me that Dingding hit his ear against the wall and may have damaged his ear and had been crying a long time. I rushed to their place.
As soon as I walked in, Dingding ran to me and said his ear was hurting a lot. His ear looked very red. I carried him on my back and said to him quietly, “Don’t cry. Just recite ‘Falun Dafa is good’ with me.” I walked around the house and kept reciting “Falun Dafa is good” in my heart (As the persecution is still going on, my daughter-in-law doesn’t want me to talk about Falun Dafa at home for fear that Dingding might talk about it in kindergarten). About ten minutes later, Dingding said his ear stopped hurting and he got off my back.
My daughter-in-law had to go back to work, so she called my son, telling him to take Dingding to the hospital for a checkup. When my son got back home, he found there was nothing wrong with Dingding’s ear. He called his wife and told her everything was fine.
I explained to my son that Dingding’s ear was hurt, but it was back to normal now because we recited “Falun Dafa is good” in our hearts. My son has always been supportive of me practicing Falun Dafa and he believed me. I also told him about how Dingding recovered from a high fever. He was very grateful and said to me, “Mom, Dingding has changed a lot and become so polite. Thank you so much for your efforts in bringing him up.”
Lately, Dingding has become much quieter and he often seems to be thinking about something. I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said was thinking about why he does wrong things. He got hurt each time he did something wrong and he knew he was being punished for it. “It hurts, but I can endure the pain,” he said to me.
One day, Dingding was playing while doing his homework. Over an hour later he still had not finished his homework. I got uptight and my old resentment emerged in my mind. “Don’t you know you are doing something wrong again? You have wasted so much of my time. I should have started Fa study by now.” As I was saying this, I subconsciously raised my hand. Dingding became scared and ran away.
Immediately, I realized I was wrong to have lost my temper. I mustn’t allow these evil elements to breed in me, and I must eliminate them. I went over, pulled Dingding out from under a chair where he was hiding and said calmly, “Dingding, I won’t hit you. Just hurry up and finish your homework, okay?” He looked at me and said, “Okay, Grandma. If you talk to me nicely, I will always listen to you.” I told him I was wrong and encouraged him to finish his homework. He picked up his pen and finished what he needed to do in a couple of minutes.
It was still very cold this spring. One day, while waiting for the bus, I took Dingding to the supermarket nearby. He wanted me to get him some candy, but I refused because he had cavities in his teeth. Somehow, Dingding put some candy in his pocket without me knowing.
In the evening, while watching TV, I noticed that Dingding was very quiet and he kept touching his face. Seeing that his mom would not be back until very late, I decided to take him to my place. As soon as we left his home, he said to me, “Grandma, I did something wrong today. I took candy from the supermarket this morning because I really wanted it. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“So, you have a toothache now, right?” I asked him.
“Yes, Grandma, but I can endure it,” Dingding answered.
“You wouldn’t have told me if you didn't have a toothache, right?” I asked him again.
“I was afraid that you would hit me. I’m sorry Grandma. I know I did a wrong thing. It won’t happen again,” he said to me sincerely.
I told Dingding, “You should say sorry to Master, who has always expected you to be a good boy and has protected you all this time.”
He nodded and looked deeply remorseful. I tried to comfort him and said, “Now that you know you did a wrong thing, you won’t do it again. You are a good boy. I should take responsibility too for not looking after you properly. Let’s go and pay for the candy tomorrow, shall we?” He nodded and looked rather relieved.
After we got home, while I put our clothes on hangers, I heard Dingding talking softly. When I looked around, I saw him kneeling down in front of Master’s portrait and apologizing for his wrongdoing. I was quite touched by the scene and could hardly hold back my tears, feeling that in some respects, I was not doing as well as my grandson.
Once, while I was watching the truth-clarification short film “New Year Wishes” with Dingding, the scene when practitioner Shen Yu got back home on New Year’s Eve and reunited with his family touched my heart deeply and I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Are you crying, Grandma?” Dingding asked me. I wiped away the tears.
In the past, when I watched such films, I seldom cried, thinking that I was quite good in holding up my xinxing. I thought that sentiment between practitioners was also human emotion and we should let go of it too. Now I realized that the reason I was not moved by such films in the past was because I had very little compassion and kindness. Indeed, with so much resentment, ego, jealousy and bad thoughts cultivated by the CCP Party culture, how could I have much compassion and kindness?
I’ve now realized that when we still have elements of the CCP Party culture within us, we harbor resentment, hatred, feelings of injustice, showing-off and competitive mentalities, as well as other bad thoughts. Such bad elements can also reflect on how we behave outwardly. All these are bad human thoughts and corrupt things manifested by the false self in our mind, and they must be completely eliminated through our cultivation.
I would like to express my highest respect to our Master. Thank you, Master, for your kind protection all this time.