What They Teach Me

I was good with children, I had heard say, and was led to believe I might be a good parent.

But I did not know they would eat all my good food. I didn’t know when something of mine became loose or weakened they could not stay back and away but would rush in and jiggle, rattle, and worry at it with their coony little hands until it fell away. I didn’t know they would stand on the back of my couch and grind their feet into the seam between the back and the pillow until it began tearing and then return to it again and again. I didn’t know they would never shut the door, and consequently, my wife Amy—undeserving of the suffering—who never wanted a cat, would come home after leaving briefly to find first a magpie beating and squalling at the living room window, and later, the yellow cat licking itself in our bedroom after doing its business on her nice clean soft white chair.

Neither did I realize “good with children” would prove so useless, that my skin would reveal itself to be so thin, my sarcasm so mean, or my silences so crushing.

I didn’t know my children and I would put in so much time reeling into the biblical ditches, the blind leading the blind. We are holding hands, sometimes stumbling after the voice of the Good Shepherd, sometimes leading each other astray. Sometimes I teach them; often they teach me. Here are some things they’ve helped me see.

What to do when you don’t know what to do. Parenting: The time of your life when you don’t know what to do. To parent is to be constantly confounded. The highly fluid situations, different personalities and rapid growth of your children conspire to render consistent precedent obsolete. When something must be done, and you have no idea what to do, and you go in with only love, prayer, and humility in your hands, those will be your finest moments. A clumsy, inept parenting action born of love and executed in sincerity and humility will always out-perform a clever, pre-packaged tactic you brought home from the experts.

How weaknesses in your marriage are compounded by stressors. Parenting will stress-test your marriage, showing it to be either a resilient, growing relationship, or a fragile, static one that will break down with the heavy use children subject it to. If both of you grew up in homes where heavy-handed authoritarianism was the mode of operation, one of you may see this way of doing family as strong leadership, while the other may have vowed never to be that parent. Maybe both of you lived in homes where capitulating parents orbited the children’s whims under the guise of understanding and empathy and one of you felt validated and the other frustrated. You’ve had easy travel in your marriage so far, but now a difficult child is driving wedges and planting explosives. The best thing you can do for your child, it has been said, is to love its mother, and with those beautiful and profound words, I rest my case.

The value of honesty. “If you drink creek water you’ll get the scoots,” you tell your child. Interested, they test the theory and don’t get the scoots. Instead, your credibility gets flushed.

Disingenuous predictions given in hopes of an “I told you so!” teaching opportunity are high risk propositions, unlikely to pay off. When we exaggerate dangers or misrepresent reality to create a heightened sense of drama we feel justifies the whitish lies, we are no longer walking in truth. Who of us has the parental courage and commitment to truth to say, “Almost all surface water has giardia, but you can get away with an occasional sip”? If you are a long-game parent, and if your child’s relationship to reality is important, the absolute necessity of honesty, even when—especially when—it hurts your case, cannot be overstated.

How framing big subjects in children’s language will tell you what you really believe. Sexuality, church trouble, politics, adult crises. Hearing yourselves discussing these subjects with your children reveals to you what you believe and feel. Listen carefully to how you explain the questions you’ve hidden from; you may be surprised at what you hear. A child can push you to say what you really believe, and sometimes only your children can show you what those beliefs look like after they sprout.

Your influence in your family may not be as indispensable as you think. We are always right to be deeply moved by the responsibility of raising children, and usually wrong in our perception of the quality and scope of our influence. A huge block of formative force comes through school, your children’s peers, their siblings, what they read, what they see at the grocery store and on the sidewalk. Not all of this will be premium content, but most is necessary.

You and your wife alone are responsible for your children’s formation, but this fact that flawed, broken, childish you are at the wheel is why they need to spend time away from you with better people. If you insist on being the only influence your family is exposed to, marrying your first cousin would have been a better beginning. Be humble about this. Other people are helping me with my family, thank you.

The times you are wrong can be more valuable than when you’re right. Those times when there’s nothing left to do but get on your knees, pull the child whom you’ve failed close and tell them you meant to do right, but instead you did wrong. Can they forgive you, and you will try to do better. Remember, the parent who loses his life will find it. Being wrong and sorry is the best and most useful course of action.

And I didn’t know either how willing my children would be to let my mistakes go, or the power of those beautiful moments in the chaos when you get glimpses of real integrity in your family, in spite of you.