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Scary Parenting

Scary parenting

I am standing at the kitchen window, elbows deep in a sink full of frothy bubbles, when our giant extension ladder stumbles by. It jerks and halts and tips haphazardly to one side as it makes its way across my view.

I grab a tea towel and run outside. The wind digs little bits of sand into my cheeks and grit bites at the corners of my eyes until they water.

It’s been blowing like this for three days. The sky is sickly orange—not like a sunset, but murky and miserable like a moldy bowl of last week’s macaroni.

Right around the corner, three of my children are wrestling with the extension ladder. It writhes like a captured alligator, but they are determined.

“What are you doing?” I yell over the squall.

They grin at me. “Dad said we could throw things off the roof!” Micah waves some long wooden spears in the air and Paul holds up a box of paper airplanes.

“Dad said…what?!”

“Yeah, Mom—watch this! You might wanna back up.”

All at once, the sky is peppered with paper airplanes. I jump to one side as the wind hurls them about like rockets.

“Cool!” the kids cheer and jump up and down on the low, flat porch roof, just inches away from an ER visit.

“That was awesome! Hey, Mom, hand me my spear!”

“You are not going to throw spears off the roof!”

They are quiet for a minute. “Why not?” Jonathan asks. It is pathetic how woeful he can sound when he wants to.

“Yeah,” my husband joins in. “Why not?”

Because…I begin to compile a list in my head. Because broken legs and broken necks and neighbors calling CPS and full-body casts and poking your eye out and …

He grins like a school boy, shrugs his shoulders, and interrupts my thoughts. “It’s fun!”

“Yeah, Dad!” they cheer louder.

I stand in the middle of my swirling yard with my offspring on the roof, feeling very much alone. Worse than alone; I am outnumbered six to one. Mom is no fun at all.

Why not?

It’s a sore spot, an old wound from where our parenting differences have rubbed me raw.

I am the cautious one, the parent who thinks of things like sunscreen and bike helmets and keeping mayonnaise properly refrigerated.

My husband, on the other hand, believes there are worse things than scraped knees and stitches. He tells the kids that if they don’t get hurt once in awhile, they’re doing it wrong. They’re playing it safe; they’re holding back from the adventure.

“Yes, yes,” I say, until my babies are on the roof throwing spears into a windstorm. And then I forget that my husband has never been irresponsible with the children. While he is far more adventurous than I, he is not dangerous. But all I want in that moment is for my husband to parent like me. I want him to be more careful, not take any unnecessary risks, and pay attention to that one story of that one time one kid did something like this and ended up in traction.

I want him to parent with a little bit more fear. I would feel safer if he was appropriately worried about tetanus shots and the very real danger of choking on grapes because anything else feels like scary parenting.

I remember how incredibly irritating it was to find him feeding our toddler uncut grapes when he knew better. “You’re feeding him whole grapes?!” I squealed while vowing to never leave the house at lunch time again. “Don’t you know kids can choke on those?”

He didn’t roll his eyes, but he wanted to. I could feel an eye roll churning in his soul when he patiently replied, “Don’t you think it’s a better idea to just teach our kids to bite the grapes?”

No. No, I very much did not think that was a better idea, actually, and suddenly, I found myself trying to mother my husband and control his actions, as if a man with two master’s degrees and part of a PhD is incapable of properly feeding fruit to a two-year-old.

My children have watched this whole game play out over grapes and potentially scary DVDs and a million other things as they have grown up, and they have formed the following impression of their parents: Mom is a kill-joy, and Dad isn’t to be trusted. Mom makes the rules, and Dad breaks them. Mom is smothering; Dad is reckless.

Once, when my husband decided to show the kids a new movie, my daughter leaned in to him and said, “Did you ask Mom first?”

I overheard her and said, “Daddy doesn’t need my permission to show you a movie, Baby.”

But he did, and she knew it. I had taught her that.

Rather than growing up feeling safe and secure in the diversity of our parenting styles, she had learned that Dad’s ways were suspect.

It is okay for my children to realize that their dad is not like me. It’s okay for them to know that he does not always parent in the same way as I do. But it is not okay for them to learn that he should, or that he is wrong or reckless or disobedient when he does not act like me.

My husband is not like me, thank the Lord. He is brave. Eager. Undaunted. He weighs risks—he doesn’t run from them. These are qualities we honor in adults, and they are the exact qualities he is infusing into our children.

I might have the corner on the market when it comes to child safety, but he brings to the table what I lack. I cannot give them what he does, and that’s exactly the point: we need each other to do this parenting thing well. Together, we create a balance in our home that our children desperately need: the wild and the tame, the seeds and the roots, the home in the wilderness.

We need each other to do this parenting thing well

That’s the reason God put a man and a woman together and said, “Now, go make a home out there.” Because God is one, and yet the members of the Trinity are both maternal and paternal, nurturing and creative, protective and fearless, completely trustworthy and never reckless. They uphold the same standards and rules and objectives while living in the complete freedom and diversity of their personhood.

When we work together as a husband and a wife to raise our children in unity and uniqueness, each one of us completely trusting and valuing the other to do the job well, we live out the image of God for our children to see.

The biggest danger we face as parents does not involve safety or smothering—it is failing to show our children the face of God. When I do not trust my husband to care for our children, I am teaching them that the attributes of God that my husband exhibits are scary and untrustworthy, or that the attributes of God that I display are confining and ridged.

That is much worse than a skinned knee.

But when I wrestle with my irrational fears and give up my need to control, my children get to see something of God that they don’t get to see when I try to make my way the only way. From the top of a flat roof with a box of paper airplanes by their side, they get to see a more complete view of God.

That is far from scary parenting. That is glorious.

“Why can’t we throw spears, Mom? We’ll be really careful.”

Because…well, why not indeed?

The Sweet Middle

The sweet middle

He sidles up to me and takes my hand as we walk along past the reclusive tiger and the shaggy sloth bear. The sun tosses freckles across my son’s nose, and the air hugs us close.

His palms are rough from dirt-clod making and fort building. They are sweaty and sticky with boyhood, and I try not to wonder if he washed his hands after touching the snake.

He is seven, and the babyhood has stretched right out of his face. He tells me he knows how to spell “Mississippi.” It’s a secret he’s been saving for just such an occasion. “Oh yeah?” I taunt. “Show me.”

And he does.

“M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.” Micah flashes the toothy smile of a second grader whose teeth are too big for his face.

My nose stings with the sudden urge to spill hot tears all over the pathway through Asia because it’s almost over—this salty-sweet season of his childhood is almost over. I squeeze my son’s hand tighter and look down into his thinning face and wonder if this will be the last time, the last time he puts his hand into mine and skips along next to me with cheerful acquiescence.

I won’t let go for anything in the world, snake smell or not.

Sweet season

We walk past the tree house playground. It is Way Past Naptime and the toddlers are eating wood chips and hurling sippy cups and using their words to communicate just how unlikely it is that they are going to leave willingly. The mamas are running on fishy crackers and juice pack fumes and looking every bit like they had no idea what they were getting into when their husbands said, “Honey, let me give you a massage.”

I want to stop and tell them that it is worth it. They are knee-deep in planting season, now, and torn up like a field in spring.

It is hard to imagine it will ever be any other way.

But I am just a few warm months further into the season, and those muddy, upturned fields are greening with the evidence of a work well done. I hold onto my son’s sticky hand and know that by the grace of God, some of the things I planted are growing. (And by the grace of God, some of the things I planted are not). Beautiful leaves are unfolding where furrows once lay, and I have the hope of a harvest in fields I once fought to win.

It is so worth it.

Beautiful leaves are unfolding where furrows once lay

It is hard still; of course it is hard. The labor doesn’t stop when the babies are birthed. It just…changes. There are weeds to pull and plants to prune—but I look down at that boy by my side and realize we are working together now, most days. The child who once would have gone to the cross over apple juice is now my companion in the sowing.

This is the sweet middle season, when my babies are not quite babies, but they’re not quite grown. It is the respite between tantrums and dating. My kids don’t need me as much now, but they need me enough. I can sleep for eight hours straight because they’re not driving yet. They can do their own laundry, and the house stays cleaner even if the fridge is emptier.

They are learning to pull their own weeds and plant their own seeds and work with me on becoming who they were meant to be. We stand side-by-side in the same field, more friends than anything, striving for the same beautiful unfolding.

Oh, yes. It is worth it.

I watch a mama wrestle her child down from the curly slide. She is up to her boots in the mucky part of motherhood, and I know she feels it. But I want to tell her that she is almost there–almost to the season where she can see the worth of her work. One day soon, she will look down and realize she isn’t dragging anyone along behind.

She is walking side-by-side with her child, right through the sweet middle. And she won’t let go for anything in the world.

We stand side-by-side in the same field, more friends than anything, striving for the same beautiful unfolding

Crusts and Middles

Crusts

Crusts piled up on the cutting board in a neat mountain of crumbs and edges. Dark sides with white underbellies gathered to the side.

My knife cut away the unwanted bits, leaving perfect squares of pillowy, white middles. That was the best part of the bread—any kid could tell you that—and only the best, prettiest part of the bread could be used for tea sandwiches.

I filled those delicate slices with fluffy egg salad, cut them on the diagonal, and arranged them on a pretty glass cake stand.

But the crusts remained on my board, without purpose for the upcoming party. They were useless, discarded bits. The best had been taken, and the part that was left was not enough for anything good.

At least, that’s how it feels sometimes, like the best of you has been given away already, and the only thing left is the thing you don’t think is wanted.

The leftovers.

The crumbs.

The crusty, tough edges that even a teenager won’t touch.

The crusty, tough edges that even a teenager won’t touch

You are the mama who gave away her 20’s and 30’s to raise babies, and now they are growing and pushing into their own independence, and you feel as if your very middle has been cut out.

You are the military wife who gave up her own dreams to follow her husband from assignment to assignment. But now he’s retiring, full of ribbons and honor and federal holidays to honor him, but no one sees what you gave up, and no one understands how it feels when your country doesn’t need you anymore.

You are the woman who held on to a hope that never materialized, and now, now? You wonder if God really has anything for you in these years that are left.

You feel every bit like the boy on a hill, surrounded by thousands of grown-up men who are eager to fill their empty stomachs, and all you have are a few dried-out loaves and the fish that have spent the better part of the day sitting out in the heat of the sun.

“How much do you have?”

“Not much.”

“How much?”

“Just this little bit, and it’s not very good.”

“May I have it?”

You shift your feet from side to side and look down at your basket, afraid to show him the bits and edges, the browned parts that are left after the middles have been cut out.

But he reaches in with hands that are not afraid to touch, hands that know exactly what to do with leftovers, and he blesses it. It is a blessing that speaks something out of the nothing, that moves mountains into being and tosses galaxies farther than any human eye will ever see. It is the kind of blessing that cannot be quantified except by the leftovers.

“And they all ate and were satisfied. And what was left over was picked up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.”

The soft middles don’t even make the story. But those broken pieces—the leftovers of the miracle–stand as a testimony to all time of the kind of God who knows what to do with the things that are small and foolish, old and broken, unchosen and castoff.

It is as if the entire story of redemption is one big smorgasbord, where all the leftovers get remade and served up in a glorious feast that makes even the hardest heart wonder.

It is the grain left around the edges of the field after the harvest that feeds the poor and draws a young widow to the feet of a kinsman redeemer. It is the remnant of a faithless people that prove the faithfulness of God. It is the last crumb that shakes the coffers and gives Jesus pause to praise a woman who did not hesitate to give the very last bit.

It is the crusts and edges that make up the story.

If you are the woman who wonders if anything good can come of what is left, if you’ve already used up your middles and only have the crusts–do not hold back from God. Open your basket and let the blessing rush in. He knows what to do with the leftovers. In fact, they are his favorite part.

crusts and middles

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