dads Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

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?

I got married in my home church in Wisconsin on a day in January when the sky was blue and biting. The lake was frozen solid and dotted with shanties the sturgeon fishermen had hauled out and stocked with beer as soon as the ice was thick enough to hold a pickup truck.

I stood at the back of the church in a dress that could have been warmer with my brothers on either side. They were both as tall as my dad, or taller, and looked so much like him, it made my grandmother catch her breath because when she saw them, she could almost swear she was looking into the face of the son she lost so many years before.

It should have been my dad on my arm that day.

But it wasn’t.

I had my brothers instead, and it was fitting and right because we had been down so many other roads together. I wanted them there beside me the way I wanted them beside me when my father slipped into eternity without saying goodbye. We stood together when we looked into his coffin and we stood together then, stepping awkwardly down a too-narrow aisle in time to the music. On that bitter cold day in January, they gave me away in place of my dad to a man my father would never meet.

It was hard not to feel the loss. There’s something about a bride walking down an aisle without her daddy that makes people blink fast and swallow hard.

My dad with my older brother and me on just another ordinary day.

Dads should be there on days like that, on the red-letter days when the calendar screams of life-changing events like high school graduations and college commencements and birthdays and marriages and babies and the news of twins growing inside.

My dad missed every single one of those.

And I miss him on those days.

But I also miss him on the brown-paper bag days, the ordinary days filled with a million insignificant events like scraped knees and bedtimes and cold cereal mornings.

Dads should be there on days like that.

Because life is short. I learned that fast and young when a snowy winter road took my dad before I even had a chance to say good-bye. I watched him go, that morning, you know? I watched him go and I didn’t say good-bye because I thought he’d be back.

I missed him hard, at first, like some piece of me had been cut out and replaced with cold air that kind of numbed but mostly burned. I missed him every day and in so many different ways, I didn’t think I’d ever stop grieving because I kept finding new ways to do it.

Many years later, when I looked back on a grief-journey that spans more years than my father ever lived, I realized I have learned something along the way. It is something so important, I wish I could grab you around the shoulders, dads, and make you hear it.

Someday, you’re going to slip right out of your body and your kid is going to be left grappling with the loss. It’s kind of strange how one soul can be free and another weighed down by the same event. You will be gone, and they will be here, remembering.

Do you know what they’re going to miss the most?

I do.

I want to tell it to you because it’s important, and I’m a kid who lost a dad so you need to hear it because one day it might be your kid who’s learned it, and by then it will be too late.

More than anything, they’re going to miss the ordinary days.

They’re going to miss those brown-paper bag days, the days that drone on and on and you kind wish you could fast forward because they’re all so much the same. They’re going to miss the days you thought didn’t matter.

Turns out, those are the days that matter the most.

You know those soccer tournaments you manage to make it to? Those are important. So are the graduations and the weddings and everything in between.

But they are not the most important thing.

What is most important is all the countless minutes filled with nothing much but you and them and the span of time between waking and sleeping when you say and do the mundane things that make them feel loved and important and a part of you.

Anybody can show up at a wedding.

But your daughter is going to remember how you talked to her at breakfast.

Anybody can cheer at a playoff game.

But your son is going to remember what you did when you came home from work.

Anybody can drive the family to church on Sunday.

But your kid is going to remember what you said when he messed up, whether or not you showed up, and if you lived up to all you said you believed.

Your daughter will think of you on Christmas, it’s true, but she will miss you most on some Monday morning when the sky is perfect for flying and the smell of an engine makes her think of all the hours she spent in the hangar, watching you work. She will think of you when a wood stove crackles and someone makes popcorn late at night. It will be stale jelly beans and Risk games and badly-sung hymns and mustached smiles and grey-blue eyes that search out the hurt and motorcycle roars and coffee first thing in the morning that will make her wish she could bring you back, just for a second.

It’s easy to think it’s enough to be there for the big stuff. But I’m here to tell, dads, it’s not the big stuff she’ll remember, and it’s not the big stuff she’ll miss.

It’s the ordinary stuff, the stuff you never thought twice about because it was just life.

Hear me, dads–that’s the part of your life that is everything to her.

I know.

I think of it today because it’s Father’s Day, one of those red-letter days when dads get new ties and handmade paperweights and everyone is together because they’re supposed to be, and it’s good.

But tomorrow is Monday. There’s Wheat Chex for breakfast and groggy kids to get up and a long day before you come home again. It’s tempting to slide a bit because there’s a good show on TV and you’re tired and after all, you just made a memory on Sunday, if you believe holidays make the best memories.

I’m telling you, they don’t.

Give your kids Monday. Give them Tuesday too. Give them all the ordinary minutes you can, dads. Because one day, you’ll be gone, and those are exactly the minutes they’ll miss the most.

They will miss your ordinary.

Give it to them.

My dad enjoying an ordinary day with my younger brother

Scary Parenting

Ordinary Days