Gifts

People often wax rhapsodically on about the love that children introduce into your life when you have them, and talk about how they force you to enter that perfect state of presence and attention that it seems we are all seeking in multitasking, distracted modern America.  While I'm sure these paeans to parenting are quite genuine, they often sound sort of abstract to me, inaccessible and without what the poets call an objective correlative, some real point of reference held in common between the speaker and the listener.  I realize that this post may end up feeling much the same, but nonetheless, I've been thinking about what my children have given me--in addition to two very nice felt and foam Christmas tree ornaments and a gingerbread man (that I baked) decorated with a mixture of frosting and, I'm sure, copious amounts of their own saliva ("Please don't put the frosting tube in your mouth before using it," I said more than once).

For me, it's been like this: Before I had children, I would have thought of myself as a relatively patient and controlled person.  I don't typically stress out about traffic; I figure being anxious about it won't get me there any faster.  I virtually never lose my temper about work-related things, and interpersonal conflict typically inspires me to compose retorts in my head but I'm not a shouter or a door-slammer or a thrower of objects.  Or at least, I wasn't.  Then I had three small children within about 5 years, and I have shouted more than I care to admit ("GET IN THE CAR" or "I'VE TOLD YOU TO STOP SEVEN TIMES ALREADY"), slammed a door or two, and even once in a now-famous incident thrown something (a book onto the floor, which in a highly unfortunate concatenation of events, then triggered the vibration-sensor alarm system on the back door, which emits an ear-piercing siren).  It's not like I'm doing this stuff all the time, but it's all happened over the course of my almost 8-year parenting career.

These things typically happen at a moment where not one but two things at least are going very wrong, while at the same time I also have to do something that I am being prevented from doing often by the people who would most benefit from my doing it.  E.g., this morning, two individuals were crying loudly due to unrelated grievances (neither of which from a rational perspective warranted tears), and I was pretty sure that these disproportionate responses were related to low blood sugar since we hadn't eaten breakfast yet. I spoke calmly to each child, listened to her and then him, offered solutions and explanations, and tried to make breakfast as fast as I could.  Inevitably, breakfast was delayed more and more by people crying and clinging to me and asking me questions (like "Why is my breakfast so late?" and "Can you also make sausage?" and "Why does it have to be sausage?").  The very thing they were doing (clinging and crying) was preventing me from doing what I needed to do to stop the clinging and crying.  Even this was more or less manageable until someone else came in and asked one innocent, if ill-timed question, at which point I became exasperated and said something like, "Argh! If I could just make the breakfast, but everyone is preventing me from actually doing it!"

So that was this morning.  And I wasn't, as I tell my daughters that I want to help them be, my best self.   And I hope that they understand that even though I wasn't, my loss of my temper was not their fault and they were loved, and I was trying.  Because there are so, so many other moments where there's just one child crying, and that one person is crying over something absolutely absurd ("tomorrow is already today!"), when my entire rational apparatus says, "This makes no sense.  There is no optimal outcome here.  Abandon mission!" When my middle daughter is disappointed and devastated and angry and nothing I say is right, but if I try to leave, she wails for me to be with her (not too close, but not out of the room) while she cries.  And it doesn't make any sense, really, for me to stay, since it seems like I'm not really helping and there are other things I should be attending to.  But because she wants me to, I do stay.  And this is what she's given me, like her sister before her--a willingness to drop the calculating, rational approach and instead to just feel how much I love her and stay even though I'm not helping her.  To abandon efforts to make things better according to my own judgments, and dwell in that love alone for a few minutes.

Often this feels exasperating and inefficient and useless.  But to watch my hope of resolving a problem drift away and to choose just to be with her clinging to her five-year-old frustration in what feels to her an unjust world, to abide with her, is a kind of spiritual discipline.  It's practice.  It's the practice of submerging ourselves in love, over and over again, fruitlessly and without hope of seeing a particular result, until it becomes easier, until it becomes habit, until it becomes part of who we are, in spite of our rational calculus and our logical frame of mind and the schedules through which we hope to do as much good as efficiently as possible.

We do this with other people too--we choose to be selfless.  Usually with adults though, the dramas unfold more slowly, with an phone call and then some time for pondering, then an email, say, and there's time to muster your reasons for doing the right thing.  This can make it feel easier, but the very intentionality required can also make it harder.  And with adults there's fallout and memory.  With these little ones, there's the present and that's it; you're there in the room, close but not too close, or not.  And you can stay miserably wishing that you could get something else done, or you can feel how hard it must be to be five years old and you can beam empathy out at this little sinner who's so torn up.  You practice, and it gets easier.  You submit to love, you fold yourself down into it, and you find that in spite of your very limited self, it's endless inside of you.