Tag: parenting

Some thoughts on the dreams of children

One day, a child came snuffling and sobbing down the stairs in the morning, and when I asked what was the matter, she said, “Mama, I dreamed that you were dead.”

Oh, poor thing. I tried to wrap my arms around her and give her comfort, but she wasn’t done.

“And . . .and I had a REALLY HARD TIME GETTING MY BREAKFAST,” she wept.

Ah. My first impulse was to be offended. Is that all I am to you? A pourer of juice? The one who knows how to work a toaster? My death makes you weep because the most important meal of the day is now compromised?

But then I considered. This is a very young child. She has barely emerged from the age when food and mother are all one thing, not to mention the age when mother and she are one thing. To such a little one, a cold, empty breakfast table really is a terrible thing, a dreadful loss.

It’s very much like the song “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” You wouldn’t scoff at that man and say, “Oh, I guess you don’t really love that woman; you just care about getting your vitamin D!” To him, she is the very sunshine. To my daughter, I was breakfast. That’s how much I meant to her, in her dreams. When I thought it over, I was very moved (and I made her a nice breakfast right away).

I do love hearing about my kids’ dreams. They’re sometimes fascinating, and often very funny. And some of my kids are usually fairly tight-lipped, especially when they hit the teen years, and I am openly hungry to know what is going on in their heads, and dreams are where it’s at.

But I do have to brace myself when I turn up in their dreams.

Dream parents, when they’re not dead, behave abominably, at least at our house. We are just the worst. We are constantly missing their birthdays, telling our bewildered children they get no Christmas this year, driving them off cliffs, refusing to look out the window when they’re trying to warn us there’s a tornado made of tigers outside, and so on. Sometimes we spread a giant feast on a table and then tell them they can’t have any; sometimes we just throw away their favorite shoes.

I don’t think I’ve ever behaved decently in their dreams. I don’t take it personally anymore. I know I’m a pretty okay mother in real life, and I know the kids more or less know I love them. I also know that dreams are where people work out our feelings about things, and the emotional content of a dream is much more significant than the actual plot and characters.

Just as the very young child was unable to tell the difference between the death of her mother and the loss of breakfast, and older child may not be able to discern (in their dreams, at least) the difference between “something bad is happening to me” and “my parents are monsters.” At different stages of development, the lines between me and thee, inside and outside, are blurry and shifting, and that’s doubly true when we’re dreaming.

So when a kid dreams about parents doing unfair, outrageous things to the kid, it may very well not be a dream about the parent at all. It’s pretty likely actually a dream about the kid and how he is feeling about his life. The parent gets to be the aggressor in the dream because parents are the main doer-of-things-to-kids, so parents are the most obvious choice to act the part as the one who does something unpleasant to the kid.

Parents loom large in real life, so when kids need a way to express to themselves that they feel impinged upon in some way, it’s probably going to be the parent acting that part. But what the dream is really about is how that kid feels and responds to the unpleasant thing.

Do they feel powerless? Do they feel angry? Do they feel afraid? Do they feel energized and motivated to save the day? This is the important part. That’s what the dream is about. Kids, especially, are very self-centered (in a healthy, developmentally appropriate way, I mean), so when they dream, they dream about themselves.

It’s very common, especially as they hit pre-teen and teen years, for kids to feel that life is unfair, or that they’re the only one who understands something and no one will listen to them, or that things have gone out of control –maybe someone who is supposed to be in charge has disappeared — and they have to struggle desperately to get back in control.

And so these overwhelming feelings turn up in dreams, and the larger machinery that produces those feelings is likely to be parents. If a child is having a lot of dreams of being hunted and persecuted and tormented, and if they are disrupting sleep regularly, then it might be time to take a closer look and see if something bad is going on with the kid; but some dreams like this seem to be a normal part of growing up. Unless there is some very obvious catastrophe or betrayal or injustice in the child’s life, these are probably not actually dreams about the adult doing anything wrong. They are probably typical dreams that signify a child slowly coming into his own identity as separate from his parents and from his family, and facing very normal mixed emotions as they come of age.

Sometimes a kid will even dream that there are zombies or some other scary monster pretending to be their parents. I used to think this signified that my kids thought I was a hypocrite, and that they could tell that my patience and dedication were just a mask that could slip at any time.

But this was me massively projecting my own fears about my adequacy as a parent onto them. Dreams about something scary pretending to be your parent are most likely about things in general not being what they seem — about a child not being as secure or in control as he once thought he was when he was younger, for instance.

Anyway, that’s what I think. Probably the significance of dreams varies as much as individual psyches themselves vary, which is quite a bit. But I do think that parents shouldn’t put too much stock in the dreams of their children, or at least remember that dream rules are different from waking rules.

What do you think? As usual, my training and expertise in this matter are absolutely zero; it’s just something I’m interested in! 

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Image: Wallpaperflare.com

The thing about having kids

If you are wondering what things are like at our house, here is what you need to know: We have FOUR teenagers. Wasn’t that good planning? Aren’t we smart? It also smells wonderful here, believe me. And whatever the levels of snark and sarcasm you’re imagining, multiply it by 10. The four of them tend to gang up on us and act together like some kind of unholy army of scoffing and scorn.

Sometimes my husband will fuss at them, because they need to be fussed at. I recently learned that, after he leaves the room, one of my daughters will turn to the others and say, with a look of mild astonishment on her face, “I never did catch that man’s name.”

Pandemonium. She has very good comedic timing, just like her father, and she gets away with way too much just because she’s so funny. Just exactly like her father (whatever his name is).

And that’s what it’s like at our house.

I set this essay up like I was complaining, but this is actually one of the greatest parts of having children — or two of the greatest parts, I should say.

One is that they are so entertaining. They start out that way when they are first born (all babies are beautiful, and all babies are incredibly ugly, which is hilarious), and they keep it up as they trundle through one developmental stage after another, gracefully or clumsily blossoming into life as if they’re the first ones that ever thought of trying it. These comic firsts — first goofy laugh, first words, first joke, first completely insane knock-knock joke, first pun — they don’t get old when you have a lot of kids. If anything, they get better and better, because you’re relaxed enough to enjoy it.

It’s possible that I’m predisposed to enjoy my kids’ humor because I love them, but I have also heard so many people say that they had kids for various reasons — for duty, or because their wives wanted it, or by accident — and were amazed to discover how entertaining the little buggers turned out to be. I remember seeing a post on Facebook where some hapless young man loaded down with a stroller and diaper bags smiled goofily and told the cameraman, “I never thought I’d be so proud of someone for rolling over.” He knew the kid wasn’t some kind of genius for hitting a basic milestone, and yet that’s what milestones are like: They feel huge. They feel historic, even though trillions of people have done them before.

I suspect this is a large part of why people answered as they did in a recent Pew study…  Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash

The life-changing magic of being yourself

As a lifelong untidy person, Marie Kondo is my hero. I have never read her book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” or seen her Netflix shows. I have no plans to stop being untidy. But I want to be just like her.

Let me back up a bit. When Marie Kondo first made her tasteful splash on the homemaker scene, many of my mom friends swooned at the idea of becoming entirely new people who could whip everything around them into delightful, streamlined, orderly shape. Others raged and fumed at Kondo’s insistence that they throw out most of their cherished belongings, get rid of their books, spend all their precious time fussing over trivialities and strive to live in a sterile museum rather than a comfortable home.

None of those folks had read her book, either. They had all heard about Kondo and her ideas through sloppy, sensationalistic headlines and snarky memes that misrepresented what she actually suggested in her book and shows. If they had actually read her (according to my friends who actually have), they would know that she’s quite gentle, doesn’t demand or even suggest radical shifts that work against your lifestyle, and never claims that her system or ideas are best, or that they work well for everyone in every circumstance.

Still, when the Washington Post recently quoted Kondo as saying she had pretty much given up tidying because she has three kids now, the internet exploded in a unanimous, rather vicious, “Ha-ha!” Now she’s a slob, just like the rest of us! Now she knows better!

But my friends who actually read her book and considered her advice were not at all surprised. Kondo never claimed that a rigid minimalism is superior. She apparently only offers suggestions for how to make yourself more functional and peaceful if the current state of your house is making you unhappy.

She is perhaps most famous for her advice to question whether some item in your house “sparks joy,” and if not, to consider discarding it. And now?

“Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times. I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home,” she said.

In other words, it is her children, and spending time with them, that sparks joy for Kondo.

And this is why she is my hero. Not necessarily because she clearly enjoys her children (although that’s a wonderful thing, and refreshing to hear someone say in public), but because she is courageously demonstrating something so few people understand: that you can change how you act and still be yourself. In fact, you have to….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Marie Kondo photo by RISE via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Christmas morning: Are you doing it right?

One of the great mercies of being the mother of a large family is you know one thing for sure: This can’t all be your fault. How could it be? You have raised at least some of your children more or less the same way, at the same time, using the same parenting techniques and the same amount of money in the same house, being the same person the whole time, and yet they all turn out so very different.

If ever I feel sorry for parents of one child, it’s because they might think all their child’s virtues and flaws are the result of their parenting. They’re not. Some are, to be sure, but some is pure witless genetics, and some is environment beyond family, and some of it is luck, some is miscellaneous, and a lot of it is meaningful but completely mysterious, known only to God himself, and he’s not telling.

Let’s take a look at my own kids. Let’s take a look at them on Christmas morning after Midnight Mass, when they’re opening presents, and the secrets that lurk in the hearts of Fishers are revealed. I have tried to teach all my children generosity and gratitude, thrift and any number of other salutary virtues that I think will serve them well in life. How’s that worked out?

Well, one of them will be sitting in a pile of wrapping paper and random things her siblings grabbed off the rack at the dollar store, every single time she opens a present, she will shout, “It’s just what I wanted!” and she will mean it, too.

What a grateful and generous heart, you will think! Yes, up to a point. But that same kid will have carefully wrapped either a 50-cent Walmart cake or a 50-cent Walmart pie for everyone she knows, because it was the cheapest thing she could think of. She figured out long ago that this method allowed her to pocket a good half of her allowance, while the rest of those suckers were blowing the whole thing. But also, she is so extremely delighted with her cleverness, and that delight is so contagious, that everyone who opens a present from her is delighted, too, and we eventually all begin chanting, “Cake or pie? Cake or pie?” as each person opens up yet another tiny, squashy box from her, only to cheer uproariously when it turns out to be either a cake or a pie. And so it became a tradition. The “cake or pie” chant is now my favorite part of Christmas morning.

One of my less favorite parts is when one kid invariably manages to convince themselves that all their carefully curated presents are disappointing, not anywhere near what they wanted, and probably a sign that nobody really knows them or loves them, and then retreats guiltily to their room with their stocking to sulk, and also feel embarrassed about sulking. It’s not the same kid every year, mind you, just to keep us on our toes. Next year, that same kid will spend November earnestly begging us to donate their present budget to the food pantry, because they already have everything they need…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

 

Four ways to keep the Advent season in proportion

Off we go, into Advent and Christmas! If you’re a mother, you’re probably in charge of setting the tone for the entire family for the next month or so, and it probably feels like a gargantuan job. Here are a few things I’ve learned, that help me keep things in proportion.

Nobody is doing everything. If you read a lot of lifestyle magazines and websites or if you go on social media, especially if you are a member of a lot of women’s groups, your feed at this time of year will become an overwhelming parade of gorgeous, meaningful, liturgically appropriate practices and traditions. Foods you can make, prayers you can pray, special events you can plan or attend, presents you can craft, decorations you can arrange, songs you can sing, stories you can read, and all manner of fragrant and illuminated and sparkly and reverent and crafty and fulfilling ideas.

You must firmly tell yourself: This is the work of a CROWD. Nobody is doing all of this. Most people are doing a few things, and when you put it all together, it’s a lot. That’s what you’re seeing. If you look at your individual efforts and match it against what you’re seeing, of course it’s going to look paltry, because you’re just one person.

There are a few people who are doing a lot of things, and hooray for them, but they truly do not win any prizes for this. If you are doing anything at all to mark Advent and Christmas as a season that is different from the rest of the year — even if you’re just making sure you get the family to confession sometime before Christmas! — then you are doing it right. Light a candle and call it good. Nobody is doing everything.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

Sing, muse, of the anger of our children

One of the great things about having a big family is that somebody is always mad at you. When I say “great,” I mean that somebody is always mad at you anyway, no matter what you do, so you might as well enjoy it.

It’s hard to explain. I never would have anticipated it, but there is a special kind of exquisite glee that comes with knowing that you’ve revolted your children down to their very souls.  I suppose it’s a small act of defiance, like a conquered people crouching in their cell blocks, grinning at their oppressors as they sing forbidden songs and eat forbidden . . . mouse sandwiches . . . I forget what we were talking about.

Anyway, the point is, I was nearly forty years old before I finally said certain things to my mother about the mistakes she had made in raising me, and it felt very psychologically important to me at the time, and I guess I’m glad I said it; but when I think of her being nearly seventy years old and having to still hear about things she did wrong thirty years ago, I’m kind of amazed she didn’t just smack me. My mother was a good woman, and didn’t do a lot of the smacking she was entitled to.

But this isn’t a heavy essay. I don’t want to talk about all the horrible mistakes one can make with one’s children, the wrong responses, the coldness when there should have been warmth, the weariness when there should have been attention, the sarcasm when there should have been sympathy, the times we forgot to pick them up, the times we got them the wrong present, the times we called them the wrong name, the times we did the wrong thing, and weren’t even sorry, and instead wrote stupid essays about it for clout on the internet.

Instead, I want to tell you about the worst thing my husband and I ever did to our children. They were all unanimously, instantly disgusted with us at the time, and as the years have passed, their revulsion has only deepened.

It has to do with a couch.

Someday, it may come to pass that the Fishers will buy a brand new couch. We’re not there yet, but in the last few years, we have started buying our couches at respectable used furniture stores, and this is quite a step up. We started out our family life acquiring couches by skulking into better neighborhoods at night and seeing what they had dragged out to the curb, that might fit in our minivan, and that seemed fine.

But on this particular day a few years ago, we were still halfway through our evolution from garbage pickers to respectable used furniture buyers, and we had made arrangements to buy a couch from someone online, someone who turned out to be . . . less than respectable.

I seem to have blotted the details out of my memory, but this couch we were going to buy must have been pretty horrible, because we came home without it. But we knew the kids were all waiting in an empty living room, champing at the bit to see the splendid new couch we had found for them. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s disappointing kids. So, I did what any normal mother would do in these circumstances: I said to my husband, “Let’s pretend we got an invisible couch.”

Now, one of my husband’s main jobs in life is to listen to my ideas and say, “No, that’s dumb.” But for some reason, he didn’t do his job on this day. Instead, the two of us parked the rented truck in the driveway, opened the back, and went into an elaborate pantomime of carefully, laboriously unloading first the cushions and then the body of a heavy, unwieldy, slightly wobbly, completely invisible couch.

We shooed the kids out of the way, had some imaginary trouble figuring out how to wedge it through the door and had to back out a few times, scuffed our way through the dining room, slid some furniture out of the way, and set the nothing down, panting, and then asked the kids what they thought.

Well, they thought we were a couple of idiots. And they still do.

I, on the other hand, fall off my actual real couch laughing every time I think about this story. It may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done for no reason at all. Those kids were so profoundly disgusted with us, and for once, we totally deserved it. Somehow, that feels like a some kind of score was evened up.

Let me sing you the song of my people! We’re morons, my husband and I, and there’s nothing our kids can do about it.

***
A version of this essay was originally published on February 22, 2022 in The Catholic Weekly.

Photo by artistmac via Flickr (Creative Commons)

In real life, they are so big

Here is a little child sitting in the gondola of a Ferris wheel, nervously crushing fistfuls of cotton candy into nuggets as they wait for the ride to start. She and her mother are in number 16.

Her mother says that she may need to hold hands so she doesn’t get too scared. It’s not a trick, like something Grandfather Bear would say to give courage to Little Bear. The mother is some form of scared all the time. Most of the time, the mother’s fear gets crushed down into manageable handfuls. But not always.

She has found herself in charge of her youngest child on the final fun trip of the final week of vacation. The oldest kids are too busy to go on a day trip; the tweens band up and run off together, being cool; the dad is bonding with big sister who desperately needs to be treated like a little kid for once. So it’s the mother and her youngest, navigating the world of the amusement park alone together. It was a long ride to get there, and now there are long lines for everything.

There are rides that are out of the question. Some of them drag you up to ludicrous heights, turn you upside down, shake you very hard, drop you, shove you backwards, put you in the dark. Why would you pay someone to do this to you, when it happens to you anyway on some random Tuesday, just in the course of ordinary living?

But the rides with no lines are all the same: Around and around and around. It’s hard to know what to do. So the mother and kid alternate: Rides that are too boring, and rides that are too scary.

Here are all the moms, draped along the fence, watching their baffled little toddlers swoop up and down, up and down inside metal dragons that beep and flash and whine. “WHEE! WHEE! WHEE!” shout the moms, grinning.

Here’s a little cluster of blonde cousins rushing and tumbling into the serpentine line barrier at the double decker carousel. One child wants desperately to ride the only giraffe, but there are many other people in line. “Whyn’t we just duck under the fence?” a woman rasps.

“We all have to wait our turn,” her sister answers mildly.

“Aunty will make sure you git that giraffe,” the first woman insists. “You’ve ben such a pretty girl all day. Aunty will make sure you git that giraffe. Pretty girl.”

The mother, shriveling a bit inside as she imagines meeting these pretty girls in fifteen years, is relieved to hear that her own daughter wants to ride the panda, instead.

She finds a horse next to the panda, and surprises herself by heavily climbing up on it. Her legs are the right length for the stirrups, so maybe it’s a normal thing to do. The horse’s tail looks like a real tail, and someone has taken so many pains painting scenes from Venice on the ceiling and brushing in little yellow and pink bouquets in between the mirrors.

A chubby hispanic man gives his shell-shaped bench a spin, and it twirls, and he beams like a baby. It is a beautiful carousel. There has never been such a beautiful carousel. It’s two stories high, and everyone on it is smiling. But the ride is very short.

Here are a set of tiny twins, dressed to the nines in identical new sneakers, athletic shorts, and patriotic tank tops, strapped carefully into a blinking helicopter. All the other kids are yanking on the bar, jerking and swooping and clanking up and down, but the boys are staring solemnly ahead and moving smoothly on their appointed rounds, around and around.

“Pull on the bar! Pull it toward your belly! Make it go up! Don’t you wanna fly?” the operator screams. They do not. Their father comes to collect them when the ride is over. God willing, he will understand that they did what seemed right to them. They are extremely small and the world is very big…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

How to actually raise teenagers

A lot of digital ink gets spilled over what it’s really like to raise older kids. I mean really, truly, no jokes, just the unvarnished truth.

We currently have four teenagers, and I’ve tried, myself, to put down some useful words on the topic, but the truth is, nothing scrambles your brain or flattens your ability to function like raising kids this age, these days. And yet it must be done. So here’s my contribution:

Writing about teenagers tends to fall into two categories.

The first comes across like a final report discovered decades later from deep inside a sealed bunker. You know the kind : “They have taken the bridge and the Second Hall. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. We cannot get out. They are coming” kind of thing.

Poor miserable souls these parents are, for so many years they clung to the illusion that their own children would be different, and that they alone would maintain discipline and order and even an amicable relationship with their offspring.

But they suffer the same fate as everyone else. Their kids are absolute sociopaths, and the parents can’t wait to warn their peers about the fate that awaits them. They hang around at maternity wards just to gloat. They turn up at kindergarten graduations of strangers and throw tomatoes at the stage, because these kids may look adorable now, but they know what’s coming as soon as puberty sets in.

So that’s one kind of advice you’ll get from parents of teens. The other type valiantly pushes back against these tired tropes of the surly, smelly, antisocial adolescent. These parents insist that it’s neither necessary nor normal for teenagers to behave so poorly. Give them some higher expectations and a little guidance, and they’ll grow and bear fruit like the most elegant of topiaries.

They themselves have an entire phalanx of teenagers in their house right now, they will tell you, and the only way you’d guess it is because of the sounds of the viola wafting up through the floorboards as they willingly practice their arpeggios. One teen is tutoring his younger brother, two are about to come home from work at the Fine Young Man Store, and one is sitting at the desk he built himself, writing a letter to apologise to his elderly neighbour for how unevenly he chopped the shallots in last Sunday’s boeuf en croûte.

It is simply a matter of having the right expectations, and you must simply expect your children to be as inexhaustibly fabulous as you are yourself, and the job’s halfway done.

(The other half happens at boarding school, it turns out, which the grandparents pay for. Also the kids spend their weekends at the grandparents’ house. The grandparents themselves live in a metal trailer in the desert, desperately petitioning the courts to terminate their visitation rights.)

I joke, I joke. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Teenagers are by no means natural sociopaths, but neither are they [excuse me while I get up and make sure my door is locked] especially willing and eager to be formed into useful members of society. Not. Especially. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image source PXhere (public domain)

10 gifts you ought to give your teenagers

As our kids get older, we find it harder and harder to choose gifts for them, now that we can no longer just scan the toy aisle and pick out something neat and colorful. We ask for wish lists, and on them are items that, not only do I not understand why someone would want them, I don’t even completely know what they are.

But I do know how to give older kids the intangible things they need on the 363 days of the year, when it’s not their birthday or Christmas (and not a single one of them needs a charging cable). These are things that may or may not delight them when they receive them, but may stay with them and help them for the rest of their lives.

  1. Being needed. Let them feel the feeling of being important to another human being. This can happen automatically in large families, but even there, some kids are good at escaping responsibility. But understanding that we are responsible for other people is a fundamental part of being human, and kids should learn it early. Some families overdo this, and turn kids, especially girls, into mini parents. This is unjust, and will lead to resentment and burnout. But if your child tends to feel that the world is here to serve him, that needs correcting. All kids should be in charge of something important, even if it’s small.2. The gift of being listened to, even if it’s something you don’t personally care about, because you care about your kid. Let them know more than you about something, and be really interested to hear all about it. Teenagers can come across as arrogant know-it-alls, but this, like so many unpleasant teen traits, often stems from insecurity. They desperately want to prove they’re smart and well-informed and interesting and worthy of attention. So sometimes step back and let them show their stuff, and compliment them on how well they know their topic. They may act like they don’t care, but they probably care very much, and will be very pleased to know they’ve impressed you. More importantly, if you are in the habit of listening to them chatter about inconsequential stuff, they are more likely to come to you with stuff that does matter.
  2. The gift of earning stuff they want. It can be tempting to give teenagers everything they think they need to make them happy, because you want them to be happy and you want them to be happy with you. But you’ll be giving them a much more long-lasting gift if you help them figure out how to do some work to earn some money to get the thing. This will also help them become more discerning about just how badly they want or need some item.
  3. The gift of getting away with things. Sometimes, let stuff ride. Just don’t notice it. It will be easier on all of you if you just pretend you don’t hear that tone of voice, didn’t notice that mess, aren’t aware of that screw-up, don’t care about that bad habit. It’s okay to have personal limits about what you’ll put up with, but make sure you’re not constantly correcting every last little thing. Prioritize, and save your correcting energy for things that really need it.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

Image by Luisella Planeta Leoni from Pixabay

You can get a dolphin picture anywhere

Back in the days where cameras used film and you only had so many shots to take, my father took us kids to the aquarium.

We had a wonderful time, but when we got our photos developed, I was disappointed to see nothing but . . . us. “Why didn’t you take any pictures of the dolphin show?” I asked my father.

“I can get a dolphin picture anywhere,” he said. And he was right. The gift shop was full of sharp, professional photos of the animals. But there were no postcards with our faces on them — no tourist brochures featuring me, specifically, gasping with amazement, or my little brother, in particular, laughing in delight as he caught the dolphin’s spray.

And that was what my father wanted: Our happiness, our wonder and delight as we watched the dolphins leaping around and splashing us. That was why he had brought us there: So we would be delighted. And there was something in it for him, too. He enjoyed watching us enjoy ourselves. The one thing better than being happy yourself is seeing the joy of someone you love.

I think of this day when fretting over God’s sometimes baffling inefficiency. God is no businessman. If He wanted to maximize the number of souls saved, there are thousands of ways He could have made it happen: By taking away free will, for instance. By making virtuous behavior irresistible. By writing letters on the wall with a giant hand, rather than hinting with parables, whispering with grace, scattering clues of goodness, truth, and beauty all throughout the natural world.

He could have been more direct. He could have skipped all the strangeness, sorrow, and pain we feel as we blunder our way through life, toward Him. He could have been more efficient.

Instead, he chose the promise of delight. Instead, He gives us free will. He gives us the time and ability and desire to decide what to do with it. He wants us to come to Him not because we’re forced to, but because we have discovered Him, because we have found our own way toward Him, because we have realized organically, from the inside out, that we need and want what only He has to offer. He wants us to delight in Him. Not to find ourselves deposited briskly at the porch of Heaven, but to let ourselves be found.

It’s not a business transaction. It’s love. And there’s something in it for Him, too. He delights in our delight when we find Him.

Do we realize this? We may find ourselves miserably struggling to appease God, or anxiously, resentfully trying to avoid offending Him. But do we understand how He delights in us? He enjoys us. He likes us, and that is the only reason He made us in the first place. God is not deficient in anything. He didn’t need to make us at all. 

But He did. He did, because it’s not about the perfect dolphin picture. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about Him and us, us in particular. It’s about love and delight.

So there are two lessons here. One is more practical and immediate, and is mainly for parents:

Just as God loves us intensely now, for who we are, then we, as parents, must keep on reminding ourselves to enjoy, appreciate, and respond to our children now, as they are.

It is terribly easy to get distracted from this purpose — to pursue the “perfect dolphin picture,” and to forget why we came in the first place.  When we’re planning birthday parties, are we trying to please our actual kid, or to impress a thousand anonymous moms on Pinterest? When our older kids are choosing a college, do we nudge them toward the one that will help them be what they were meant to be, or toward the one with the name that strokes our own egos? When our children declare themselves for who they are — through their interests, their dress, their strengths, their humor, their voices, their hearts — do we remember to stop and delight in them, as specific, irreplaceable children? 

Do we let them know we see and delight in them as they are, for who they are? Or do we hustle past their actual selves in favor of a generic family photo op?  God gave us specific children for a reason. One of our primary jobs as parents is to identify and encourage what is good in them — not what we wish they were like, but what is good in them right now. Our job is to find something delightful in them. 

The second lesson is more universal, and it is this:

This intensely personal, specific love and delight that parents should cultivate toward their kids is the same personal, specific love and delight that God feels toward us. Toward you. Remember this.

The Father made you, specifically, on purpose. Christ came to save you, individually, intentionally. He delights in you for who you are. He wants to forgive your sins “more quickly than a mother would snatch her child out of the fire” (St. John Vianney). He wants to save you because He knows you, and delights in you. 

God is no businessman. He is bogglingly inefficient. Christ said to St. Teresa of Avila, “I would create the world again just to hear you say you love me.”  Oh, it’s personal. He could get a perfect dolphin picture anywhere. But he’d rather have you.

 

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This essay was originally published in Parable magazine in 2018. Republished with permission. 

Image by HAMID ELBAZ via Pexels (Creative Commons)