Parenting Archives - Page 7 of 39

We’re Expecting!

I have been dying to tell you the wonderful news: Five in Tow is about to grow! Jeff and I are excited to announce that we’re expecting.

I know you probably thought we were done having children. Five certainly is a handful, at least that’s what the Costco sample ladies tell me when my kids clear out their toothpicked cheese cubes in one fell swoop.

There’s also the small part about how motherhood didn’t come easy to me. It took me about…well, five kids to get broken in to this gig, and for some time prior to that, I threatened to pack up my children and send them to Argentina.

But, this child, this sixth child, is something different. This child is not growing in my womb. This child has been growing in my heart since I was old enough to notice that not all children have it good.

Not all children are safe.

Not all children are wanted.

Not all children are loved.

And not all people who can do something about it are. Including me.

Many years ago, before I was married, I wanted to adopt all the babies. I had lived in third world countries and worked with street children and orphans. By the time I was nineteen, I had seen more unwanted children than I could bear. I determined to do something about it.

But then I got married. And pregnant. And pregnant again, and…every time I thought about adding another child to our home, life would get crazy and I would wonder what on earth I was thinking.

I began to believe that I really am terribly busy, and I have used those Costco ladies as my justification for passing up many opportunities to be Christ to this hurting world. I have my hands full already, thankyouverymuch.

But God’s been talking to me about being the Word, and it’s all terribly more self-sacrificial than I am comfortable with.

So I read all through the Word looking for some fine print that would exempt me from anything harder than where I am right now. What I found was Jesus telling poor people to care for poorer people. Jesus telling busy people to stop and bind up the wounds of the hurting. Jesus telling moms who pounded out their daily bread to feed the widows and the orphans with some of it. Jesus saying, “Hey, the harvest is ready, but the trouble is, none of you are willing to stop what you’re doing and labor for me.”

So we stopped. We prayed. We talked to our kids. We did the next thing, and the next thing more. Now, we are knee-deep in the foster licensing process with the intention of adopting a child out of the system. We have to get the licensing part done before Jeff deploys, which is so insane, our case worker is developing a twitch. But we have a set of fire extinguishers in our kitchen and fingerprints on file and a whole lot of friends and family with permanent hand cramps because they had to fill out pages of references forms on us.

It is labor, all of it. But with the labor comes great expectation, abundant joy, and a good share of nausea.

I hear that’s normal for expectant parents.

Hopefully, we can act like a normal family for a few weeks longer so we can wrap up the foster-licensing process. Jeff will deploy, and even though it’s not ideal to welcome a new child to the home while the father is away, we’re kind of over waiting for ideal. When it comes to foster care, there is no ideal.

Our hope is to foster-adopt, so we are praying that the Lord will bring us the right child right away so that we can begin the legal process as quickly as possible. Jeff will be getting orders to a new duty station soon after he completes his deployment, and we need to complete the adoption while we’re still living in Texas…or we might lose the child and have to start the whole thing all over again.

But even if we cannot adopt, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to love and invest in another child for as long as God lets us have her. When you think about it, that’s really what parenting is all about.

Won’t you pray for us? We’re expecting God to show up big time because this whole thing is crazy-scary and infinitely bigger than us. Those are exactly the circumstances God seems to like the most, when I have nothing of my own to offer and He gets to remind me why He’s God, and I’m not.

Pray particularly for this sixth child who may, at this very moment, be experiencing unspeakable trauma at the hands of those who are supposed to love him. Pray pray for the family who is so broken, a child isn’t safe in their care. Finally, pray that we will remain steadfast and diligent as we labor to make room for one more.

Six in tow? I kinda like the sound of that.

Take the Rose

All across the country today, churches are handing out flowers to mothers in honor of Mother’s Day. And all across the country, women stand at the doors of those Christ-dwellings, trembling.

They are the women who yelled at their children just five minutes before.

They are the women who conceived but never bore.

They are the women who feel their motherhood is trapped inside where no one can see it.

They are the women who fought for a child and lost.

They are the women became mothers in their bodies before their hearts were ready.

They are the women who do not love motherhood.

They are the women who long for motherhood.

Long ago, when someone pondered the good and lofty calling of motherhood, she could not know that declaring a national holiday to celebrate maternity would end up being such a nasty business. After all, everyone has a mother.

Yet not everyone is a mother.

Suit-clad ushers stand at church doors with buckets of roses to thrust at the women who come in with a gaggle of children, but they cannot know the depths of motherhood in the hearts of the women who come in alone.

This one suffered a miscarriage just the month before.

This one is putting part of her paycheck aside every month for an adoption that may never happen.

This one has put more miles on her car and gotten more invasive exams than any woman ever should just to find out why.

This one hugs neighbor kids whose own mother cannot be bothered.

This one struggles to be the mother she knows she needs to be, even though she feels the weight of failure night after night when the kids are in bed and she relives the day.

This one knows she is a mother, and she knows she is not a mother, all at once.

It is a beautiful, nasty business the way God created women to mother. He wove the threads in so tight, they pull and rip and ache sometimes, especially when some women are clothed in motherhood, and others are half-naked and clinging to rags.

Women, we are mothers; we are not mothers. All of us.

All across the country, the church doors are open and meager roses try to distinguish which is which. Only it cannot be done. If motherhood was nothing more than a biological distinction, it might be easier.

But motherhood is so much more than pregnancy. It is so much more than birth. It is even more than sheer emotional attachment. It is all of it and none of it all at once, and just as soon as you think you have it all figured out, another mother comes along and messes up all the algorithm.

So who gets a rose?

You do.

You who have borne children.

You who have nurtured children.

You who have lost children.

You who love children and you who want to love them more.

Take the rose.

Reach out your hand, not with trembling fear of judgment but with bold confidence that the God who made you made you to mother, whether you bore those babies in your body or not. Take the rose because mothering children is so much more than procreation. Take the rose because it is procreation.

Take the rose because you are a mother.

Take it because you are not yet the mother you want to be.

Take it because motherhood is more than a becoming. It is a being, and you can be a mother long before you have children, and you can not be a mother for a long time after.

It is a beautiful, nasty business, motherhood.

But if God wove motherhood into you, it was because He chose you for it. He is the one who determines your motherhood. Not a baby. Not a rose.

And He is not bothered in the least if your motherhood defies convention. He is big enough to glory in a motherhood that is messy. He is big enough to bless a motherhood that is barren. He is big enough to rejoice in a motherhood that plays out on a stage only He can see.

If He put within you a heart for children and whispered “Mother” into your ear, then it is done. It cannot be undone by any force on this earth.

You are a mother.

Take the rose.

Take Me Instead

All of my children shook their heads and looked at me innocently. “I didn’t do it, Mom,” they each said.

“Do you know who did?”

They looked at each other and shook their heads again. “No, Mom.”

Someone was lying. I held the uprooted seedlings in my hand and stretched them out for the kids to see. “One of you pulled these little plants out of the dirt. Which one of you did it?”

Again, all five children claimed innocence.

I had my suspicions, given the nature of the crime, but I could not tell for certain. The only thing I knew for certain was that one of my children was holding onto a lie and betting on the protection of the pack to keep it hidden.

“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them. “One of you is lying to me. Until that person decides to tell the truth, you will go up to your beds and stay there. No books, no toys, no lunch. If it takes until the afternoon, you will also miss gym class.”

Ten saucer-eyes stared at me. They adore gym class. I felt sorry that all five might miss it at the expense of the one. But what could be done? I couldn’t let that child get away with hiding a sin behind his siblings.

The children trudged upstairs. I could hear them talking. The Grand Inquisition was going on across the two rooms, but no one was budging. A chorus of, “Well, it wasn’t me,” echoed through the living room.

Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Lunchtime came and went. I ate my leftover salmon and salad in silence so I could hear the second-guessing in my head.

Parenting stinks sometimes.

Finally, I called each one of the children to me. I held each one’s hands and asked him or her to be honest. Four of them were. One of them wasn’t.

“One of you is being very selfish,” I said. “You are letting your brothers and sisters be punished along with you because you love yourself and your lie more than them.”

“Maybe it was the kitten,” Paul whispered sadly.

Obligingly, I inspected the little seedlings for evidence of feline foul play. There wasn’t any: no bite marks, no cat hairs, no spilled dirt. Each seedling had been extracted carefully and placed across the dirt like a little corpse. I could only wish our kitten would be so considerate.

I sent Paul back upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom to cry.

I heard a gentle knock on the door. “Mom?”

It was Kya.

“Mom, what would happen if someone who didn’t do it said they did so the others wouldn’t have to be punished?”

I gulped. “Well, Kya, that would be a very hard thing, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. But would you let me, if I decided to do that?”

I thought for a second. “Yes, I would,” I said slowly, fresh tears springing up in my eyes. I didn’t want to let her. I wasn’t sure I should let her.

“Okay,” she said. “I was kind of thinking that’s what Jesus did.”

“It is.”

She nodded slowly, fear swimming in her eyes. “So I think that’s what I should do.”

Sweet, gentle Kya, who loves her siblings with a loyalty that surprises me sometimes, was willing to take the punishment she did not deserve in order to spare the others. She was even willing to suffer for the betrayer, the one who did not care enough to spare her from the same thing.

It was so unfair, so agonizing, so beautiful.

It was the gospel lived out in the curly-haired visage of my middle child.

“I think,” said Jonathan, when he heard of her plan, “that Kya is a lot like Jesus.”

It’s not that she is saintly or without faults. She suffers from the same humanity as the rest of us. She did not want to take a punishment she did not deserve. I could see her wrestling with the weight of it. She would be the guilty party. She would be the one who uprooted her mother’s plants. She would be the one who would suffer while the real offender got away with it.

It was not just.

It was not right.

But in her mind, it was worth it to suffer for a sin she did not commit in order to free her siblings from punishment.

That’s what made it so beautiful. She chose pain in order to grant freedom.

And oh, how the gospel filled our home the moment that blotchy-faced little girl looked up at me and said, “Take me instead.”

Some people like to think that Jesus did not suffer when he took the punishment for us, or that his sacrifice did not come with the agonizing submission of his own will to something he was not naturally inclined to do. They think, perhaps, that Jesus felt less than the rest of us, that his sense of justice was toned down by an extra-human dose of empathy.

We looked at Kya’s tears and we knew that wasn’t true. Jesus actually, truly suffered for us. He agonized over his sacrifice. He wrestled with his flesh before he laid it down.

We rob him of the sacrifice when we allow ourselves to think Christ’s holiness anesthetized his humanity. We steal away the awful beauty of the cross when we believe that it didn’t cost him as much as it would us, that somehow, his sacrifice did not come with the same ripping of the soul that it would have if we had offered ourselves.

He suffered under flesh and with flesh and he of all people knew the disparity in the sacrifice. He felt it.

The miracle is, he did it anyway.

He chose pain in order to grant freedom when he stretched out his arms, looked up into his Father’s face and whispered, “Take me instead.”

I looked at my child and felt a great uprooting in me, the kind that should come in light of that kind of sacrifice. Someone stood in for me, and crushed him.

I have forgotten.

I have been indifferent.

But by His grace, I have been reminded in the curly-haired visage of a little girl who said, “Take me instead.”

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