children Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

It’s Not About Piano

“I don’t like the piano,” my son says to me as we sit around the kitchen table.

“Why not?” I ask, ladling hot soup into bowls.

“I don’t know,” he says, looking down at his hands. “I just don’t.”

I sit down at my place. No one says anything. The soup is too hot to eat so we swirl our spoons around our bowls in a contemplative sort of way and think about the problem of piano lessons.

It’s unusual for Jonathan to be negative about anything. He’s the most agreeable, enthusiastic child I’ve ever met. He loves everything.

Just not piano.

“Your cousins play the piano,” I offer, thinking perhaps he’s gotten it into his head that piano playing is for girls. “Even Alex.” Alex walks on water. It’s underhanded of me to use him as an example in this situation, but I’m desperate. “They’re quite good.”

“I know,” he sulks. I’m pretty sure I can see tears in the corners of his eyes.

“It’s fun, Jonathan!” Faith adds. She has been dying to start lessons again since we moved, and now that I’ve found a teacher for her, she has been practicing her scales day and night just so she’s ready for her first lesson.

But Jonathan has never taken lessons. He’s never so much as laid a finger on our keyboard, and yet he’s decided he hates it.

I do not know what to do. When my husband comes home, I accost him with the question. We wrestle with the pros and cons because there are no easy answers. Every child is so different, and each set of circumstances brings new points to consider.

In what situations do you make your child do something he does not want to do?

I know my son will benefit from musical training. I’m fairly confident he will love it once he starts. I think about where his talents and his disposition and I am certain he’ll be quite good at the piano, although I don’t expect the child to become some sort of maestro. One year of lessons is all I want from him at this point. Just one year.

But my goodness, the very suggestion is causing trauma in the boy’s life. I see the tears in his eyes when we talk about it and they cut my heart. Am I doing the right thing? Am I loving my son by stretching him beyond his comfort zone and introducing him to a skill he’ll have for the rest of his life, or am I causing him to despair? Am I bending him in a direction he is not naturally inclined to go for his own good, or mine?

I second-guess my decision until my husband takes me by the shoulders and says simply, “Make him do it. It’ll be good for him.”

I think about that long into the night, after my husband has fallen asleep and the red numbers on the alarm clock tick through the midnight minutes. “It will be good for him…” If only my brown-eyed boy would see it that way.

The next morning, I search for the piano teacher’s phone number while the kids chatter over breakfast. I do not like making phone calls. If the entire world could be operated by e-mail, I’d be a happy girl. I can talk in front of a thousand people, but put me on the phone and I’m a mess.

That’s when it occurs to me: we all have to do things we do not want to do. A hundred times a day, in big and small ways, I have to discipline myself to do the things that would not be my first choice if left to my own devices. The world does not operate around my desires.

Neither should a childhood.

My son, who loves everything and everybody, rarely has an opportunity to learn how to handle a difficult or challenging situation, one that he would not choose on his own. He always gets to do exactly what he wants, and he always wants to do exactly what he is asked.

He might not understand it now, but challenge is a gift for him.

In this unwanted circumstance, he gets to learn how to try with integrity, how to control his attitude despite the situation, and how to look for the good when all he sees are reasons to complain.

It’s not about piano.

It’s about life.

I am reminded that I am not raising children. I am raising adults. I want to raise adults who understand that often in life, they will be required to give their best to something they do not love. They are slaves, not masters, and most days are filled with the stuff of servitude: cleaning bathrooms, making lunches, wiping noses, answering to a boss.

Too often, I parent my children as if they are going to become sovereigns. It’s easy, in this fast-food life, to give them exactly what they want and nothing they don’t.

I do them a disservice when I do not require more of them than what they are inclined to give. Life simply is not like that, and life will not go well for them if I have raised them to believe their needs and wants are all that matters. I will have failed if they grow up believing they are Boss of Everything.

I should be parenting my children to be servants, good and faithful, because that is who they were made to be. As I parent my son through this season of piano lessons, that will be my aim: to teach him to work at it with his whole heart, whether he likes it or not, because he is first and foremost a servant, not a sovereign.

“It will be good for him,” my husband said. As I dial the piano teacher to schedule my son’s first lesson, I am confident he is right.

Just One

She spat his full name like it tasted dirty in her mouth. “Get over here NOW!” she screamed. Each word got louder and sharper as her emotions mounted.

Her son, who was the same height as the box of colorful sugar-coated cereal that held his attention, ignored his mother. “Don’t you TOUCH that,” she said, her voice big enough to swallow him whole.

He turned around, blue eyes big and searching, from my face to hers. She saw me too, and my audience gave her license to sell her son’s dignity for the little bit of sympathy she might extract from me.

I would see how hard she had it, if she yelled her son’s transgressions loud enough for me to hear.

“I told you not to TOUCH THAT! You know I’m not buying that for you.” She spewed the words at him from behind the protection of her grocery cart. He was close enough to her that she could have led him away gently, but she did not move. She sent her words instead. “You’d better GET YOUR BUTT OVER HERE.”

He yielded to the threat in her voice, drawing near to the mother who could not hide her loathing. She grabbed his arm when he was close enough to reach, jerking him forward so he stumbled over his own feet.

“Would you watch where you’re going? God!”

He tripped after her, glancing back longingly at the box of cereal that promised rainbows and beautiful mornings.

Her boy did not touch the cereal again.

I stood in the breakfast aisle alone, holding the sympathy she had cut right out of me.

I didn’t want to feel sympathy for her.

This mother’s common, default tone with her child was so full of anger and resentment, I wondered what he could have done in his three years of living to make her hate him so. The words she spewed in public were harsher than any I had ever heard in private.

What was his life like at home, when he didn’t have the benefit of social etiquette to hold mother’s tongue in check?

I didn’t have to wonder.

I knew, and I felt dizzy. How could any mother speak to her child that way?

A mother does not just wake up one day with that kind of hatred in her heart. She does not simply decide to degrade her child with every word she speaks. It is a learned behavior, and I had a feeling that this mother had learned it long before her child was born.

Decades ago, that little girl wasn’t worth the time it took to speak lovingly. Perhaps her mother didn’t know that she could get the same results from her child by careful attention and kind correction as she could by hot words and hitting. Maybe she didn’t know that if she got up off the couch and pulled her child to her lap, that child would stop screaming.

Instead, she used harsh words to do the job of gentle hands. “Stop screaming! Stop that! If I hear one more word out of you I’ll…”

And so it began. That wide-eyed child listened to all the words, and like a good child, she learned them. The angry words became the soundtrack of her childhood, and she believed it. It never occurred to her that there could be another way, never entered her mind that she deserved better. She was stupid. She was trouble. She was worthless.

Now all these years later, she was a mother. She had a child of her own, and she found she mothered him to the same music her mother played for her. Bitter words and angry tones poured out of her mouth so naturally, it was almost like they were a part of her.

They were a part of her.

They were becoming a part of him too. He was learning. Already, the cycle was repeating. I could hear him a few aisles over. “No! No! No! You stupid Mommy!”

All the brokenness of the mother was breaking the son and neither one of them realized it was happening. All I wanted to do was hold the pieces together, somehow.

Because I know what happens when I let anger into my home, and I have seen how words can sever relationships. I know how my soul is shredded when I allow myself to speak to my children in a way that is not lovely. I know, too, how children can push and pull all the layers off until there’s nothing left but raw emotion, and how, in those moments, it is easy to let anger rule in place of love.

Some nights I go to bed thinking of the words I’ve said during the day and I realize I have chosen the cheap and easy way of parenting. I have served myself instead of my children. I have put my desire for annoyance-free behaviors over my children’s need for true training and loving discipline.

I have had to say I’m sorry.

I have had to give myself time-outs.

I have had to start over.

As much as I disliked that woman in the moment, I ached for her to know that she could start over. I longed for her to stop her cart, grab her boy, and say, “Baby, Mommy is wrong. I should never talk to you like that. No one should talk to you like that.”

For all the generations before her that used words like weapons, I wanted her to know how many generations it would take to stop the cycle.

Just one.

Just one mother speaking love instead of hate could change it all. It wasn’t too late for her to be that one.

Just one

My House: A War Zone

It is 8:42 pm, and my house looks like a bomb went off. Inside-out and mismatched socks litter the living room floor, library books sprawl lazily across the couches, and thirty-two fingerprinty water glasses gather for a conference on the kitchen counters. The dishwasher needs filling and the laundry needs folding and five sets of teeth need to be inspected before they are sent off to bed.

When the last child has asked the last question before finally acquiescing to bedtime, I stand in my living room in a state of shell-shocked exhaustion, assessing the damages. Every surface of my home looks like it has suffered a direct hit, and I feel responsible, as if my home wouldn’t look so much like Ground Zero if I was just…better at this.

I didn’t keep up very well today. The house looks like a war zone, I sigh.

It looks like a war zone because it is a war zone.

The words crowd out my thoughts before I can stop them. It is a war zone, and you are at war.

I gasp, because I have forgotten. In my self-criticizing, I have forgotten all that I have done today to raise up a mighty little army and to equip them for battle. Now, at the end of the day, my house reflects the effort that has gone in to the more important task of preparing my children for war.

It’s just that it doesn’t seem like war when I hold my children on my lap and sit with them at their desks and serve them at the table. But it is. I do not like to look into their sweet, innocent little faces and think that they are engaged in a battle for their souls. But they are. I do not like to think that our enemy will stoop so low as to rob the cradle. But he does.

It is a war, and I must spend my days pouring truth into my babies, demonstrating love, and fighting against sin—both mine and theirs—because I only get one chance to arm them well. Already the enemy is noticing weaknesses, looking for chinks, and hoping I’m too busy cleaning the kitchen to notice them myself.

But I know that one day, they’ll have to face him alone. One day, I won’t be there to gird them up. So every day, we’re hauling out the armor, messing with swords, and building up defenses.

It makes an awful mess of the living room.

But then, war isn’t pretty. It is messy and exhausting. It requires so much focus, dedication, and perseverance that other things simply cannot get done. We don’t always have time to put the tanks back where we found them because we are just too busy keeping them loaded.

Some days, it’s all we can do to make sure everyone makes it out alive.

If my house looks like a war zone on those days, then let it be. Those are shields and swords littering the living room floor, not sippy cups and Nerf guns. This is a battleground, and I am raising an army.

Today, it just happens to look like it.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood, #? I have so lost track of numbers.