A Pilgrim’s Digression

This morning was one of those mornings.

We got up at 6:30. Lynn and Brendan had to get ready for school. I had to make Brendan’s lunch, and also make sure he was dressing himself, brushing his teeth, and otherwise staying on track to leave the house at 7:20. Lynn made him a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a piece of sausage, so he also had to eat in the fifty minutes allotted him.

Sometimes, the morning routine is easy; sometimes the morning is difficult. Today, it was difficult.

Lynn says it is because he did not go to bed until 9:30 last night, and she might be on to something, there. That’s my fault. Lynn went out to Wal-Mart late, and it was my responsibility to get him to bed. Instead, we watched The Iron Giant and ate popcorn. When Lynn came home a little after nine, Brendan was still up, and mommy was not happy.

Still, it was a horrible morning, the kind that leaves you asking, “Where did I go wrong? Was it at conception, or sometime afterwards?”

The common refrain in our house is “He just won’t listen!” and that seemed to typify our reaction this morning. Everything had to be repeated at least twice, or three times.

“Brendan, brush your teeth.”

“Brendan, put the dog down and wash your hands for breakfast.”

“Brendan, get your pajamas off and put your clothes on.”

Constant, constant nagging.

“Brendan, put your sandals on.” After which he sits down to put his shoes on, and sits there fiddling with the strap on his Tivas. Then the dog runs by and he grabs her.

“Brendan, leave the dog alone and get your shoes on.”

He let’s her go and begins putting a sandal on. On the wrong foot.

“Wrong foot, Brendan.”

We go down to the car for the ride to school. He gets in the car, and I think the worst of the morning is over. Then, “Oh, I forgot something!”

And he jumps out and runs back up the steps.

“Hurry up, we’re going to be late!” I said.

“Brendan, I’ve got to get to work!” Mommy said.

It was one of those mornings. You feel pressured, harried, and you take it out on your kid by nagging or worse, yelling. We made it to school with five or seven minutes to spare, and I thought to myself, “Wow, all that stress, and here we are on time. Better than on time.”

Why is it that the more hurried you feel, the more time your child takes getting ready? Is it some unwritten law of the universe that if you are running late, or feel you are running late, your child must inevitably find a hundred other things to do than help you not be late?

Or maybe the problem is not wholly with the child, but with the adult.

Yesterday, our new interim pastor, who is going to be with our church for a year as we select a new minister, gave his first sermon. It was on happy families. Tolstoy, you’ll recall, said that happy families are all alike, a sentiment much disputed in the decades since he wrote it. But our pastor seemed to agree that there are certain components that make a happy family.

He talked about the naughty, definitely un-PC word “submission,” which I am sure raised a few hackles amongst the females in the pews. He began by reading Paul’s admonition in Colossians 3:18 that wives should “submit themselves” to their husbands, and then quoted a companion passage in Ephesians 5, which he claimed taught husbands and wives “mutual submission,” but which if you read it yourself really says the same thing as the passage from Colossians. Wives are to submit to their husbands: “23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

Even the pastor’s anecdote supposedly demonstrating “mutual submission” really demonstrated nothing of the kind. He told a story about how his wife had planned a trip to South Carolina to visit their grandkids, but he did not really want to go. His wife, sensing this, told him, “You’ve been really stressed lately, so why don’t we do something different?” And so she took it upon herself to plan a weekend getaway for them both to a trout stream in West Virginia, even though she would rather have been visiting her grandchildren.

That was an example of “mutual submission.” Yeah. I wonder if female pastors ever preach about being submissive in a marriage? Female pastors are such a rarity, I honestly wouldn’t know.

But the pastor did say one thing about child rearing that really struck me. Quoting from the same chapter of Colossians in which Paul tells wives to be submissive to their husbands, he read the following: “Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.”

One of the things I am working through in therapy is letting go of my past, a past that I feel was embittered by the men in my family whose expectations I could never meet. I’ve mentioned to my therapist that I still remember every slighting or hurtful thing my Dad and Grandpa ever said to me over the years. Every comment that made me feel inadequate remains in my mind as clear as if they said it yesterday. As my therapist pointed out, they surely don’t remember these things. But I do.

And I often worry that I am doing the same thing to Brendan–embittering and discouraging him–though in different ways.

Do I nag to much? Am I consistently negative?

Lynn often has to remind me to use my “nice words.”

“Brush your teeth, please,” instead of just “Brush your teeth.”

But this morning, neither of us were using our nice words. Kids cannot be rushed, though. They never feel a sense of urgency about anything, least of all about getting to a place on time. Maybe its because they know, as adults often forget, that life goes on, even if you don’t make it somewhere exactly on time.

Or maybe they just have a different sense of time. I can somewhat recall that early-childhood sense of carelessness that comes from feeling that you have all the time in the world and nothing particularly important that needs doing. That feeling dissipates sometime in elementary school, when we submit ourselves more fully to the routine of bells and schedules.

But then that feeling returns every summer, doesn’t it? I still remember how interminable the summer seemed at the beginning of June every year, when you are still a little kid and your mother is a stay-at-home mom, and you get up in the morning (at your own good pace) and the whole day is yours to do with pretty much as you please.

One of the things the pastor read to us yesterday was a short poem of the kind that gets passed from email inbox to inbox (mostly among women) in chain forwards. It can be found various places around the internet; who knows who originally wrote it.

If I had my child to raise all over again,
I’d finger paint more, and point the finger less.
I’d do less correcting, and more connecting.
I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.
I would care to know less, and know to care more.
I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.
I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.
I’d run through more fields, and gaze at more stars.
I’d do more hugging, and less tugging.
I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.
I’d build self-esteem first, and the house later.
I’d teach less about the love of power,
And more about the power of love.

A rather platitude-filled bit of tripe, but the essence of a platitude is “truth,” is it not? In particular that passage about doing “more hugging and less tugging” struck me as particularly true, because it seems so much of how I parent involves “tugging.” On the one hand, I do sometimes feel like I am dragging the kid around by the hand, sometimes, hurrying from this to that.

I also often feel like I am overly judgmental, tugging Brendan into being or acting a certain way, in much the way my father and grandfather tried to do (unsuccessfully and to the detriment of our relationship).

And on the other hand, I sometimes feel like I am too hands off, taking the easy way rather than the more difficult, rewarding way to parent. Letting him stay up and watch the Iron Giant until Mommy came home, instead of putting him to bed, was definitely the easy way of parenting.

One of the reasons I decided to advocate to my wife that we not have another child is this feeling that I just can’t get this parenting thing right. No matter how good a parent I want to be, my efforts are going to be in vain or self-defeating. I want to raise a good kid, one who listens to his mother and me, and who obeys not because he fears us, but because he loves us. I want him to have a happy childhood, too, with none of the hangups and sadness and bad memories from my own childhood.

And yet I have probably created a few of those bad memories, maybe even a hangup or two, either inadvertently or knowingly.

Speaking just for myself, I do not feel like a good, or even an adequate parent. I don’t spend enough quality time with my son. I don’t encourage him enough. I don’t praise him enough. My work requires me to be away from home three days out of the week, and on weekends, the time that ought to be devoted exclusively to my family, I am often peevish at having no time for myself for unimportant things like playing World of Warcraft. Much as I have my whole life, I remain an extremely selfish person, greedy to keep some part of my life untainted by the responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage.

I even often wonder if playing my video game does not set a bad example for him. Do I really want him to develop an interest in sedentary computer games? Does my gaming make me just as bad as a Dad who smokes or drinks?

The pastor was right, even if his examples were rather biased. Marriage and fatherhood do require a certain mutual submissiveness. I would define “submissive” not in the sense of letting one’s self be a doormat, but “submissive” in the sense that we ought to subordinate our own needs and preferences to those of our wife and child, when possible. If the submission is mutual, then everyone in the family is working towards the happiness of each other and all is well.

Of course, that is the ideal, but often as not one person in a relationship ends up doing a lot of the submitting and another person reaps all the benefit of it. And often as not, it’s the father who receives a lot of the benefit of that submission.

“Well, your father works hard during the day,” the mother says, and so Dad gets to sit and read the paper or browse the internet (or play World of Warcraft) in the evening, instead of helping with the dishes or changing the cat litter or vacuuming, or even just spending time reading a book to the kid.

Marriage and parenting draw much of the poison of selfishness out of a person’s system. At least, that’s the way marriage and parenting ought to work. But it can take a long time. The first twenty or thirty years of our lives are spent wholly devoted to pleasing ourselves and achieving our selfish goals. It’s difficult, and for some people may be impossible, to reorient towards an “other” centered way of being. Love must be the prime mover in that effort. And of course prayer helps.

I hope there is still time for me to learn how to let go of my selfishness. I think I do OK, most of the time, but then there are times like last night when because I didn’t want the bother of putting the kid to bed, my wife had to do it when she came home. We all slip and fall, occasionally. I hope my slips don’t happen too often, though.

I would also add, in closing, that I think letting go of my childish, selfish ambition to be a writer has also greatly improved my ability to relate to my family. I no longer feel like my family is hampering me in my ambitions, because I have no ambitions, beyond being a good husband and father. I am learning to subordinate my self. I am learning to submit.