Tag / Parenting

by Michael

Question of the Week

My son walks with a limp, not because his legs are injured or because his feet are pained by little shoes, though my wife was found once to keep the boy in too small sneakers for weeks beyond the day he should have been.  No, his feet aren’t hurt.  He walks with a limp because he’s learned to dip into his step while reaching to his backside in order to pull up his pants.  He’s already turning challenges into new skills.  He’s a genius.  But I’d like him to have a waist.  Which leads to my question: when will my boy grow hips?

I realize that this is an elementary question, but you’d be surprised how important hips are for effective social development.  It’s plainly inappropriate for my son to meet a room full of kids, all of them jumping to Stevie Wonder, and for the boy to join in only for his pants to drop after his second jump.  It impresses a memory upon the little could be friends but-the-cute-kid-is-a-little-weird-mommy-because-he-mooned-us.  How many times can I explain to people that Bryce doesn’t simply like grabbing some part of himself (that will come soon enough) but that he’s attempting to be modest?

Everyday one of us is looking for a safety pin or a rubber band, since the kid’s pants have never fit the rest of him.  We tell family members that his size in shirts is one thing, his pants another.  They don’t laugh at my son, not out loud at least.  But I imagine them, aunts and grandparents, friends and loved ones, shaking their heads at all those counters when passing their gifts across the bleeping scanners.  They giggle that the boy’s body is awkward.  They giggle, and I wonder.

I look at him and think back to when I had that 28 inch waist, the size that never went away.  I think back to standing in my godfather’s attic-turned-department store, the way he shook his head whenever he asked if my size had changed.  We’d rummage through never worn suits and jackets.  I’d choose shirts and ties while he’d try to convince me that the pants, once altered, wouldn’t make me look like a nut, even if the pockets were too close together.

I can’t remember when those inches stretched.  It was probably after I got married.  I’ve been at a 34 inch waist for years.  I’m proud of those six inches at or under my stomach.  Now, instead of wondering around my small hips, I clench my teeth when pants don’t fit, I hear Dr. Oz saying I have no room along my waist before I enter into an area of concern for my long-term health, and I look around to see that my son has room to spare.

Bending my knees into lunges, I breathe deeply, and I secretly envy my son’s smallness.  I sit behind that chest pad, eyeing the televisions overhead, seeing nothing at all except the imagine of my stomach.  I crunch slowly, watching carefully that the plates don’t clink.  I laugh at myself between rests.  I call myself vane.  I rehearse the benefits of living and not dying.  Exercise wins the argument going on in my head, and I move to another machine.  I think about cooking and eating.

Sometimes, after exercising, I come home and see my son’s clothes.  I get amused because he has as many clothes in the laundry as I do, because, together, our clothes squeeze my wife’s garments into invisibility.  I wash the clothes.  I do this a lot.  At times I wash because I’m a loving servant of a husband.  But that’s not the predominant reason.  I mostly wash because I run out of some things I need, some things essential like t-shirts.  I can go without socks but not t-shirts.

So I wash.  But there’s probably a part of me, some part far off under some layer of consciousness that washes to see my son’s little pants.  That part of me, hidden from real view, probably likes that the bands at his pants are so slim.  That part of me knows that the answer to the question of the week can only be affirmative.  Some day his waist will expand.  I think of my relatives and our proclivity to pear shaped bodies.  I say yes out loud.  And then, with gratitude and to the tune of our romping washer spitting and shifting water, I go and cook something to feed my wife and my little waistless child.

by Michael

These Are Fantasies

Children are unable to provide for themselves.  Not unlike travelers in the ancient world, who often depended on the kindness of strangers for meals and shelter, children are born into the world naked and hungry and dependent for their very lives upon being taken in and fed and clothed and otherwise nurtured by people they have never met before, namely, their parents.  They depend, in other words, on hospitality.

Hospitality does not require perfection on the part of those who offer it nor those who receive it.  It can be tempting to believe that it does.  The perfect host or hostess, we imagine, is one whose house is immaculate, whose table is beautiful, whose food is elegant, and whose parties always come off without a hitch.  The perfect guest, in turn, is well dressed and well behaved, a charming and witty conversationalist who always pleases and never annoys and goes home promptly at the end of the evening.

And so we are sometimes inclined to believe concerning parents and children.  A good parent, we suppose, is a perfect parent.  Good parents know all of the answers and never make any mistakes.  They are endlessly patient, endlessly nurturing, endlessly loving.  And good children are perfect too.  They are beautiful and healthy and intelligent and obedient.  They never demand more from their parents than the parents are prepared to give, and they always reflect well on the families of which they are a part.

Of course these are fantasies.  We all know that real life is not like this.  But powerful currents at work in our society encourage us to believe that it ought to be…

(From Are You Waiting for “The One”?, pg. 168)

by Michael

My Adorable Son, An Idol

As a clergy person I lead people in worship.  That means that I spend time with people, and while I’m with them, I point them to God.  I facilitate people’s encounters with the Divine.  I don’t create the encounters.  I don’t create the people.  I sometimes simply nudge people in a direction, or turn them around, or push them to keep listening or seeing or waiting until they notice Who was there but was, somehow, unseen.  You might say that I do this for a living.  In other words, when I’m with a person, a pair, or a group I’m asking the unrelenting question, how can I help this person encounter God so they can live?

What often comes with this occupation is an abiding question: what enables me to encounter God?  The other day I was thinking about why I wasn’t sleeping.  I was turning over in bed, trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t envy my wife or my son.  I was listening to them slumber, Dawn right next to me, Bryce in the other room.  Both of them were whispering little dreams to themselves, hardly moving, content.  I was, as I said, turning and trying to flip away from the little anger in me that comes with occasional insomnia.

It’s not insomnia, I tell people.  I can actually sleep.  It’s just that I can’t sleep like abnormal people, on command.  I sleep in a different time zone.  I sleep later, but I do sleep.  I can’t sleep like my wife or my brother, both of whom will enter into sleep 13 seconds after pulling a sheet over themselves.  I look at them and I wonder why they aren’t more normal.  Why don’t they fall asleep?  Why must they jump into it?

When I am not asleep, my head dances.  It doesn’t throb or ache, but it dances to the music of a thousand thoughts.  I think about a congregant and it gives me reason, again, to pray.  I think about class and whether I should just get up and read in preparation.  I think about the novel I’m currently reading, Donna Freitas’s The Survival Kit, which I greatly enjoy, about the book of Maya Angelou’s poems I’m slowing reading and some snatch of words it left me.  I think about one of my heroes in ministry, how he’s aging.  I think about what I’ll cook tomorrow with that roasted chicken and whether I’ll cook the potatoes with onions and asparagus or just with the onions.

On the pre-dawn morning in question, I got to remembering when my son was crying a few days before.  He has a tactic—I’m convinced that’s what it is—where he’ll whine, which I despise because it is a pernicious method in undoing me, and while whining he calls for his mother.  He’ll do this in a tone that makes me contemplate how quickly I can climb down from our balcony and onto a neighbor’s despite our sixth floor setting.  His voice, which isn’t a voice as much as a dismal sound in the distance just like the fire truck that kept sounding all night long that night prior and that I counted screaming four times from 6:55 to 7:23AM, his voice drones as he calls.

That day, last week, he called her as was normal and then he started into my title.  Daddy.  Daddy.  And like a dripping drain it came until I turned looking for a clue because I had already started failing at my dogged resistance of the boy.  I am really good at keeping the rules of our parenting pact.  We don’t go into him after he’s in bed.  But that week was a strange week for a lot of reasons.  And we caved.  Dawn mostly did, but I did too.  I had come home late two evenings, rather than one, and he hadn’t seen me.  He missed me.  Dawn said this to me.  I said this to me.  Bryce’s whine said this to me.

After it all was done, days later, there I was listening to those damn birds that sang all night long because they, too, were confused about the weather outside and about whether birds should be awake and singing from 2:30 to 5:30AM.  I didn’t know they were keeping me company.  It took the congested sound of the delivery truck, gurgling below at 7:35AM, for me to remember that earlier, melodious birdsong.  I lay there thinking about the way my heart jumped when the boy called for me.  I didn’t move as quickly as I wanted to, but I did want to.

It got me thinking that my son was in a dangerous position, a position anyone loved by another can be placed in.  Bryce was a potential idol.  He was a potential reason for getting up and doing.  He could become, I thought while fighting for sleep, the reason why I did what I did.  That little toddler, full of nonsensical noise and play and fun, could turn me away from the One for whom I’m spending my life.  I know it’s a slip of movement.  It’s a crazed thought, one that I’d probably only come to when I hadn’t been taken my some real night dream instead.  But it stayed with me, that thought.  It was like all those birds and that heaving meat truck and those red blaring engines from the night and the morning.  It didn’t leave me.

by Michael

Radiance Shining Back

I was tempted to title my re-post of this great article “Standing Naked in the Mirror.”  But I didn’t want the spam.  In writing his post Janell Burley Hofmann does a great service to parents, playmates, friends of children, uncles and aunts, and extended family members.  I saw it on Margo’s FB wall and over at the Huffington Post, but it appeared originally at rachelsimmons.com, where I’m linking below:

I am sitting, cross legged, on the bathroom floor trimming my five year old daughters’ toenails.  My nine year old son showers his muddy body as I lean against the tub.  My three year old daughter wrestles herself into pajamas in her bedroom.  My eleven year old son bursts in from football practice and hollers upstairs about reheating leftovers and having a sore throat.  My husband is out dropping our minivan off for a tune up.  The sun has set and we’re putting another day to rest.  In the confusion of this typical weeknight, I glance up from the floor at my seven year old daughter, standing on the step stool, completely undressed, brushing her teeth.  I don’t like the way she is looking at herself in the mirror.  I don’t like the way she pokes at her belly and frowns at her profile.  I watch her for another minute and step in.

“What’s up, girl?”  I ask.  “I’m fat.”  she responds without hesitation.  I’m instantly weak.  She continues, “My stomach jiggles when I run.  I want to be skinny.  I want my stomach to go flat down.”  I am silent.  I have read the books, the blogs, the research.  I have aced gender studies, mass media, society and culture courses in college.  I have given advice to other mothers.  I run workshops and programming for middle school girls.  I have traveled across the world to empower women and children in poverty.  I am over qualified to handle this comment.  But in reality, my heart just breaks instead.  I am mush.  Not my girl.

I rally some composure and stay cool.  “You are built just perfect – strong and healthy.”  And she is.  But this doesn’t soothe.

Click here to finish reading.

by Michael

Child-proofing Relationships

Several of my friends are looking forward to bringing babies into the world.  More babies.  These folks have at least one child and they’re looking forward to the one coming.  I don’t think there are twins coming… But getting news of someone’s pregnancy always leaves me with a scratching question: How will that kid change things for you?  In the case of marriage, how will that kid change things for your marriage?

Children definitely impact your other relationships too.  I can list a dozen people I haven’t seen or spoken to outside the occasional text and email.  Those people either avoid me because they think I’m busy (and I AM), or we can’t find the time to do more than periodic phone-tagging.  It took me two days to call Winfield back the other week.  And I was trying to find the right slice of time for us to talk unrushed, and when the third part of our conversation came around (the call got dropped twice), we still didn’t finish.  We haven’t been able to finish.  And we were talking about being fathers!

I read this article the other day.  It talks about how important it is to know what to expect when children are on the way.  Kelly Alfieri offers some helpful prompts that make good sense.  Then, I saw this article in Psychology Today, and I think Vivian Diller heard me in my study screaming my agreements.  The Psychology Today post was about marriage in midlife.  She offered marriage myths in it.  When she got to the myth about kids solidifying marriage, she said, “Even if creating families may have been the motive behind why some couples marry, the truth is that placing your focus on children over your marital relationship invites major problems over the long term.”

A lot people talk about divorce-proofing marriages.  There are books written about it.  Some of them are good.  Along with all those words and along with the words in the posts I’ve linked above, I think marriages need to be child-proofed.  My friends have lived through baby-bringing days, and more of them are bringing infants into the picture.  They’ll push little plastic plugs into wall outlets.  They’ll open gates across doorways.  They will stick foam things over the corners of tables and attach weird locks on their cabinets that will take a seminar to figure out how to work.  They’ll hide poison from themselves and see how all the little things in their lives have become safety hazards.  And I hope they won’t miss their marriages.

So, here’s my attempt to start a “Child-proofing your relationship list”.  It’s unfinished so that you can comment, add to it, and, together, we’ll finish it.

1)  Build a life and bring your kid into that life.  This comes from one of my mentors.  He says, that children are meant to be integrated into the life you already have.  They aren’t meant to have lives built around them.  Of course this is difficult in practice because children (and I have a toddler) expect to eat when they’re hungry, be cleaned when they’re dirty—although Bryce can be dirty for a long time before it occurs to him that he should complain—and generally believe the world revolves around them.

2)  Establish a routine for your important relationships.  This may look like a weekly conversation with a spouse about your marriage.  It could be an appointment with your buddies after work twice a week, a date night, a girls’ night, a visit to the gym with a workout partner, whatever.  It will be a routine, something you do regularly.  Establish it.

3)  Keep that routine religiously before a baby comes.  The routine will be stretched.  The relationships will change and necessarily so.  You’ll never run completely away from the relationship you’re developing with that non-rent-paying-person called baby.  But you can consciously run in the opposite direction.  You can seek to strengthen your friendships in the face of parenting as opposed to letting them lapse because you have a kid.  This will keep you from using your kid and from ending important relationships.

4)  Learn to listen to the needs of your significant other.  Again, this can apply to marriage or some other relationship.  Sometimes the error in a relationship, especially when children show up, isn’t talking but listening.  The careful and hard work of paying attention is more important than speaking actually.  Listening is inherently generous.  Listening is humbling because you keep all that important stuff in your mouth.  It’s an unselfish behavior, which is why it’s so hard and why it means so much when you’ve actually been “heard” by someone.

5)  Look for a trusted baby-sitter and map out intentional times to be away.  Preferably you’ll begin the search when you find out that an infant is coming.  It will take time.  But here’s the thing: you need to leave that kid.  I know, I know.  I don’t mean all the time or everyday or, even, on some regular schedule.  But you already know that you don’t like to be around anybody all the time.  Is that just me?  No, you need a break from that child.  Choose who you’ll be with when you leave, whether it’ll be your own time alone.  But leave.  Go away.  It’ll replenish you for the next contact.

Okay.  Your turn.  What’s next on this list?

by Michael

Question For The Week

Am I wrong for despising the pacifier?  I still remember that we had taken it from the boy, safely removed it from his mouth, back in January.

He got passed it.  He was beyond it.  He was fine.  Then he got sick.  And Dawn gave him the thing.  It was a moment of weakness probably.  I don’t think I was home.  I don’t think I found out until some time the next day.  I have a rule about not going into his room when he’s down for bed.  So I wouldn’t have found the thing stuck in his mouth until he popped his head up above the blanket flapping over his crib, his cheeks and lips folding up into a smile I couldn’t see because the white circle.

“Take that out,” I said, using my fathering voice.  He took it out.  And that started a ritual for us.  He’d wake up and call for us.  If I came in, I’d tell him to remove the pacifier.  He would.  One day it turned into the nonverbal gesture of my finger falling from my mouth.  And then, later, I wouldn’t even need to do that.  He’d see me turn the corner to his room that has no door, and he’d remove it when he saw me.  He still does it.  If he has it in his mouth and I’m around, the thing comes out without request.

I’m good at holding on to small memories like that—that being my wife returning the plug to the boy.  I’m a little too good at it actually.  I bring it up from time to time.

I say that it was a mistake to give it to him.  I say that I didn’t give it to him and that I’ve never actually given it to him since we took it from him, except for twice maybe, even though I don’t physically remove the thing from his crib.

I’m good at keeping a commitment.  And every time I see that pacifier, it’s a symbol of a commitment discarded.  He doesn’t need it.  I know he doesn’t because I’ve put him to bed without just to get proof for those women who I love and who love him.  If he drops it out of the bed, I pick him up and tell him to get it himself.  When he wakes up at night, crawling and scraping for the thing, I’ll put him on the floor and tell him to walk around the bed and get it.  “No light,” I say.  I have to include some punishment for him waking me up.  And he will get it.

Am I wrong?  It’s his pacifier.  I got rid of mine years ago.

Since January we’ve had these false attempts to take the thing.  But the grandmothers got in with Dawn to prevent success.  They did their own thing, when their own thing was secretly my wife’s thing.  They all colluded to keep my son’s mouth shut with a mini plastic nipple, making it a “necessity” for bedtime.  As I’ve said to them and to you in the paragraph above, it’s not a necessity.  He’s got them fooled.

At least they abide by the law I laid, I told myself.  “He only gets it when he’s in the bed.”  Success.  It’s interesting how I’ve started redefining my words since the boy came along.

by Michael

Rushing Through Parenting And Everything Else

We were eating breakfast yesterday when I noticed something Dawn told me a couple weeks ago.  I said to her back then that I was trying to get the boy’s breakfast done.  She asked if I was going somewhere.  I wasn’t.

That small exchange reminded me of something that came back yesterday morning.  The boy teaches me, in small and big ways, to slow down, to resist rushing.

We were eating again.  There’s something about eating that speeds me up or, in this case, slows me down.  The morning routine is routine.  We get up.  I complain and grumble and mutter for an hour or so until I can find my words.  At the same time, the boy runs around.  He sings.  He runs one of his trucks down the small hallway.  He pushes that mower thing and I say stop.  Then we get dressed.  Sometimes that means the boy showers with me.  Most times he’s already been bathed the night before and simply needs to change clothes.  He’ll run to me when my shower stops.  We’ll finish our father and son routine.  After we’re dressed, he’ll ask for breakfast.  I’ll get things together, explaining how much quicker things would go if he were able to help.  He looks at me in that confusing-but-knowing way.

Breakfast is on the table.  I start with helping him pick up his spoon.  We transition to him eating himself.  I’m eating my food; he’s eating his.  His spoons are filled with smaller heaps of oatmeal.  I’m almost done with mine.  At one point I thought about my wife’s comment.  Where are you going?  What do you have to do?

I read Parker Palmer last summer.  I think it was The Active Life.  It may have been Hidden Wholeness.  I read both of them in preparation for a class, and I bleed the memory together of both books.  But there was a part where he was describing contemplation.  If memory’s right, contemplation has to do with being present.  With living in the present.  Often you get at contemplation by solitude or by practicing something like silence—which no parent can conceivably do.  He said that contemplation could be anything, that it could be any activity, not just sitting.  It wasn’t a particular type of activity or inactivity.  Living contemplatively looked differently and it looked like a lot of things potentially.

I’ve thought about being a contemplative parent.  I’ve thought about living with an awareness of myself and my son and my family.  I don’t want to rush through life or through the stages of life with the boy.  And then there’s breakfast.

Breakfast pulls me into the routine and the schedule.  It pushes me to the familiar, and the familiar isn’t contemplation.  I can learn contemplation and practice it, but it’s work.  It’s hard to not rush through breakfast.  It’s hard to not rush through everything else.  It’s tempting to move through it all without being aware or being present.  But yesterday when I thought about Dawn’s question, I slowed down.  I gave the boy back his spoon.  I took a deep breath and watched him eat.  I watched him turn his head and talk about nothing I could understand.  I let the boy rule that part of the meal.  And it was slow.  And it was everything I needed, even if I didn’t want it.

by Michael

Advocating For Our Children

I asked Sonia Wang, a teacher and friend to write about the importance of parental involvement.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy her post.

Advocacy. This word is often seen as a job of someone else. But I think we forget that advocacy is merely being “in the know” so that we can speak up and respond appropriately as needed. One thing that our students, especially in urban environments, are lacking is having an ample group of advocates.

Where does this absence of advocates stem from? Often it starts with the students’ parents. It is argued that students spend the majority of their day in school, however, the more important truth is that students need consistency in their lives.

Consistency must be obtained in two ways—from home to school and from school to home. When a student is told in school that they need to read at least 30 minutes at home, but they are expected to cook dinner, watch their younger siblings, and then manage their work without a space to do work, there is a mixed message sent to the student. At the same time, when students are told at home that helping out with the family day care program holds priority in their lives and that message is overturned at school, students are flooded with mixed messages.

How do we as adults integrate into the lives of our students to best support them? As a classroom teacher, I strongly believe that there are two main sources for support—parents and mentors, which include teachers.

The role of parents in a student’s life is invaluable. A teacher can only impart so much when it comes to skills, content, and values, but if that is not reinforced by what happens at home, it becomes obsolete to the child. From my years of teaching, I cannot count how many times a student has referred to their parent’s indifference or absence in their academic achievement as a reason for their own indifference or absence of care for their academic progress or goals. The attitude and tone a parent holds for their child sets the baseline for the child’s personal expectations and hopes.

When a student knows that his/her parent knows what’s going on in their lives, especially in their school life, it not only sets a new tone to the importance of this thing known as “school” but it also redefines the student’s approach to school. Suddenly their work in school matters because what they do in class matters to people who matter to them. Reading a chapter and jotting personal thoughts on what was read isn’t just homework but it is an opportunity to show the parent what’s happening in class, what is being learned, and what thinking is happening.

Furthermore, let’s consider an example situation:

If a student is reading a novel that is perceived to be at a lower level than the student’s ability, his/her parent is now able to advocate for their student. This can lead to multiple outcomes:

1.)If the book is in fact easy, the teacher is now held accountable to meet the learning needs of the student in order for the student to GROW!! and

2.) If the book is actually at the student’s reading level because he/she is struggling, then there can be an honest conversation about where the student is at in their reading progress, what supports are in place in the classroom to monitor and assure growth, and what strategies can be implemented at home to support the student’s growth.

Regardless of what the outcome might be, the more important fact here is that the student has multiple advocates in his/her life; no longer is their education a passive one but one that is active and purposeful.

Parents must be involved in their student’s educational journey. Involvement does not mean teaching algebra in fourth grade or having the student comprehend Beowulf in middle school. I would actually discourage this type of involvement.

Instead, knowing your child’s syllabus, asking what he/she is learning, and checking in about their academic strengths and weaknesses are ways to be involved in his/her life. By doing so, our young people know they have advocates, people who will not allow them to be invisible in our current education system where too often our students are reduced to an ID number or a test score.

With advocates, our young people begin to see the importance of knowledge and voice. And in turn, they become our community’s most effective advocates.  

by Michael

Building vs. Being, pt 1

I think Gerald May is one of the brightest, most compelling writers I’ve read.  I was introduced to him by a professor in seminary.  May was a psychiatrist and teacher of spirituality.  He’s got some fascinating and penetrating material in the area of contemplation, for example.  In one of his books, his first one, he talks about parents building children with methods and the importance of being with children.  Here’s a quote from Simply Sane.  I’ll post another tomorrow to round out parts of his thought.

Sometimes parents watch with fear, unable to know what to give their children, how to direct them.  Not realizing the possibility of fully, freely being with their children, parents wonder how to be with their children.  What is the proper technique?  What is the best method?  Caught in this dilemma, it is not unusual for parents to turn to psychotherapy for help.  For guidance in the proper methods of raising children.  And psychotherapy, it seems, always has something to say.

In its many forms, psychotherapy has offered a veritable smorgasbord of guidelines as to how children should be raised.  A host of suggestions, almost all of which take the form of methods and techniques.

There was a time when psychotherapists advocated strictness, hard work, and solid rules.  Then, in an almost universal misinterpretation of Freud, permissiveness became the way.  More recently, parents have been told that the best child-raising involves listening to feelings and straight communication.  All are methods.  Whether a specific method works well or not is unimportant.  What is important is that parents have an insatiable hunger for methods, and psychotherapists have an unending supply.  When the method is what counts, the child is lost.  For methods are not used for being.  Methods are used for building.

by Michael

Guest Post: Seasons of Parenting

I believe seasons of parenting are similar to the seasons of the year in this regard:  there are certain characteristics of each season we enjoy. For example, plenty of sun and heat in the summer, beautifully colored leaves of fall and the awakening of spring. However, there are also parts we’d rather avoid, such as extra heavy clothing in winter or the humidity of summer. Parenting seasons are the same.

When our children are young, we are in awe of their reactions to new discoveries.  We are overjoyed when they celebrate milestones (like walking).  We could display affection and relish in their cuteness forever. Along with those, we experience the frustration of sleep deprivation, adjustments to schedules, and changes to life as we know it.

I have been blessed to experience several parenting seasons. My daughter Erica is 22 yrs old; and my son Nicolas is 16. Although they both experienced some of the same seasons—walking , talking, school, adolescence, etc—they experienced them differently. Not only were their experiences different, but my relations to them were different as well.

Erica was born 3 days shy of my 19th birthday. I was young, naive and ill-equipped. Honestly, I was so disappointed I was the mother of a girl. My navigation of life as a girl was very difficult up until that point. I was tremendously afraid that I would mess up her life because I felt I had done a poor job with my own. Instead of enjoying the early season of her life,  I was distant, worried and frustrated. Erica is very strong-willed and vocal. She did not accept my demeanor quietly or passively. She asked many questions, got in my face often, and challenged me to see her. Not only look at her, but see her.  In retrospect, her demand for my attention, her engaging behaviors, helped me become a better parent. The first 8 years were rough. In 1996, I developed a relationship with Christ and became part of a church that helped me begin to work through a lot of those issues. We worked through a lot, even going to counseling, I’m not ashamed to say. Today, we are very close.

When Nicolas came along at age 25, I was older, but not yet wiser. As a matter of fact, my stability emotionally, financially, spiritually and socially was probably worse off than when I was younger. I was withdrawn and depressed while carrying him. He was born Christmas Day 1994. At the time, I did not consider him to be a gift. I loved him, yes. He, like Erica, was beautiful and healthy. But as much strength in character as Erica projected in her early years, Nicolas was the opposite. He was very shy and timid, always hanging on my hip. He held my hand walking down the street until he was 9. There were days I felt like his personal spokeswoman. He didn’t talk to many people, not even my own  family. My siblings sometimes joke they didn’t know what his voice sounded like…hahaha. Today, he is a flourishing athlete, well-spoken and more outgoing. To God be the glory.

While I am grateful for positive outcomes currently, I remember having to endure each season. In those early years, this seemed arduous. I’ve learned a lot, but one of the most impactful things is this: You cannot go through a season merely on how you feel. We prepare for each season yearly because we know the basic characteristics of it. We dress accordingly and prepare our homes.  We plan. We must do the same with our children. You may not know everything about them…they’re still growing, learning and developing. However, prepare for what you can. Don’t only endure seasons, but enjoy them. One of the greatest things God ever did was show me the blessing that my children are to me. When I discovered the true value of parenthood, I began to invest in it.

by Michael

Good Memories, pt 1

As I said yesterday, these posts will focus on my scrambled thoughts as I remember good memories from our vacation.  I’m writing toward a new practice, a habit of paying attention to good things rather than my most natural tendency to hold to the bad.  Most of these memories will be good, though there are a few not-so-pleasant moments littered through the last two weeks.

The point of the post today, for you who like points to posts, is to plan a vacation.  Or a getaway.  Or a break.  Or a series of dates.  Or a significant time away from normal life.  The getaway, break, or vacation will give you an opportunity to nurture your marriage.  Of course, you could do this with a friendship or a significant relationship with some modification too.

I’m somewhat of a planner.  And traveling is important to me.  I like to do it.  You could say that I value it.  We started planning this last vacation a couple years back.

Before we had a baby, before Dawn got pregnant, we talked about how we wanted to celebrate our tenth year anniversary.  We wanted to do something big.  We wanted to stretch ourselves, save up, and have a grand time.  We couldn’t do what we really wanted which was to copy some friends who a few years ago spent a month on a different continent.  But we could stretch.  So we talked about what we wanted to do, and even though a little boy got made and delivered since those first conversations, we committed to acknowledge, in some way, that we were a we.  That we existed as a married couple.  That we were together.  To be honest, we had our challenges conceiving, and affirming who we were outside of the parenting thing nourished us in ways that we haven’t always seen.  So we determined to go on a cruise.

We’ve cruised before, done what I call the local cruises, the popular one to the Caribbean.  We cruised the year I graduated from seminary, too, because that was my gift to myself after getting another masters degree!  We also decided, in planning this last vacation, that we wanted to return to an early desire to see Italy.  I had a dream when we were engaged at 22 years-old that we’d honeymoon in Italy.  I was young.  I was, in a word, foolish, on many fronts.  I thought about a lot of things for us, but I didn’t think that going to Italy at 23 years-old when you had a mortgage and a construction project called a fixer upper was impossible.  It didn’t become possible in those early years either really.  So we took smaller trips.  We saw family.  We drove to many places.  We went on those ships that I mentioned and saw the Caribbean and parts of Mexico.  I used honorariums from speaking engagements and payments from work-for-hire contracts to make sure we were traveling together.  One reason why we got married young was so we could see the world together, so we saw what we could.

When we planned this time, it was a similar experience.  I started saving money, even though we couldn’t really afford it.  We were blessed.  I cut up portions of my second and third incomes–income that I never count until I have a contract–because my primary income is restricted to relatively fixed expenses and giving.  We agreed on an itinerary, a mix of France and mostly Italy with enough Spain to keep us interested.

Dawn started looking into logistics.  We struggled, waiting for the best time slot.  Back then, Dawn was considering school.  I had a small frame between my supervisor’s sabbatical and the start of my next calendar year in the VFCL program at GETS.  We waited as late as we could because my coworker’s decision wasn’t exactly made.  I knew when my teaching responsibilities would start.  We really could only go at a particular time because of both calendars.  Dawn looked at flight plans after I came up with a window of dates.  She reserved and purchased our tickets.

We decided easily that the boy was staying when the cruise line said he would cost the same amount of money we would.  We thought they were joking.  They weren’t.  We struggled with the matter of leaving him–for about two minutes.  I mean, we are a couple and this was our anniversary celebration.  We are not alone as a couple anymore so we were thinking that including the boy wouldn’t be all wrong.  And yet there was this voice of wisdom speaking.  Why not find a way, if it was possible, to leave the kid.  To leave him and to remember that we were separate from him.  To say our goodbyes and to have that be some shared meaning between me and the wife.  Of course, we are parents and that reality is hard to get away from.  But we are something else, a reality that’s easier to lose sight of as a couple.  Everyday we attend to him, naturally and necessarily, but there is this other thing called a relationship which needs attention too.

We met with our mothers about staying at our home one week apiece, and I texted a few people to secure supplemental childcare.  The week before we left, I went grocery shopping.  I picked up enough apple sauce and wipes and diapers to last for a month.  Just in case, you know, we couldn’t get back.  In case we decided not to come back.  I washed all the clothes in the house.  Dawn bought her textbook and read her first week’s readings.  I finished two contracts so I wouldn’t have them hanging over my head.  I looked over the syllabus for the fall semester and thought through what September would be like.  I did as much work as I could at the church to leave things well and in the hands of my colleagues.  I had a few more meetings than I thought wise.

We talked to friends about Barcelona and France and Italy.  Alan told us about the architecture in Barcelona, leaving me mad that we weren’t just going there.  His eyes widened when he spoke, and he relived days where he ate bread and salami while sitting in a park in front of some building.  I imagined him drooling while he ate in that park, though he wasn’t drooling exactly as he told his stories.  We ate with Libby and Omar who helped us figure out what to see if we only had so much time, which was true, because it was a cruise and not a land-based trip.  Libby wrote up a three-page cheat sheet and sent it to Dawn.  She gave us more direction than any guidebook.  She gave us guidebooks too!  Omar told me to wear a fanny pack to keep our euros hidden from people pick-pocketing.  I refused.  I told Dawn that I’d simply wear my I-grew-up-on-the-south-side-of-Chicago face.  It seemed to worked.

I wrote up the first draft of the cheat sheet we intended to leave our grandmothers and to our friends.  We left explicit instructions to call us only when the boy was hospitalized since calls to the ship would be $10/minute.  We had full confidence that Bryce would cooperate and not injure himself.  We packed.  We dreamed.  We talked about what we wanted to see, where we wanted to go.  We did something that a counselor I worked with during the early years in our marriage called “planning a future together.”

It’s a powerful thing to plan and map out your future.  Of course, you make vows to a spouse about a vague future, but planning it is a second strategic step.  It adds to the vow or the pledge the particular means and the specific steps.  We were doing very romantic and relationship-strengthening work: looking at those next tomorrows and saying how we, together, would face them.  Before us was a delightful series of dates.  They included easy travels, long lines which we greeted with smiles and gladness, and a lot of words we didn’t understand.  Those tomorrows included sumptuous meals and great servers and questionable taxi drivers.  It would be wonderful, a little messy, slightly nerve-wrecking, and glorious.

by Michael

Questions You Should Ask Fathers

A trend started when we brought the boy home from the hospital, after his birth.  I noticed it right away.  The first couple who saw us coming off the elevator in our building asked us.  They are a lovely couple and always have been.  I respect them and admire them.  But they started this trend in my mind, launching me into an experience that’s left me motivated to change how the world asks questions when interacting with parents, particularly fathers.

Their question—and everyone else’s question—was something like, “How are you?”  They were looking at my wife.  They never looked at me.  And it started.

When people would ask me, after the birth or after the three weeks I took off from the church, they would always want to know about the boy and about Dawn.  Now, I appreciated this.  I did.  But it’s always left me wondering if people have the curious tools to ask about me, about the father in the picture.  That would be me.  Before you think I’m completely self-serving and needy, consider how important it is to ask the how you’re doing question to a mother.  Why wouldn’t it be so valuable to raise with a father?  Would a person really think a newborn is needy right before asking about that baby?

So, here goes:

  1. How are you?  This is basic.  This opens up many possibilities.  It takes little effort.  Most people have already asked it, as I mentioned, and only need to modify it so that the guy feels included.
  2. Have you slept?  This, again, is basic, but it’s one of the most caring questions you can ask a father.  He’ll think you love you, even if you’re meeting him for the second time.  He’ll walk away with good thoughts of you.
  3. How do you do it?  More people, more non-parents should ask this.  It’ll make them appear empathetic.  Or smart.  Parenting is difficult.  I can’t understand how single moms do it.  I can’t wrap my brain around how a single dad would either.  It takes too many people to screw up at this.  I can’t imagine how I could mess up all by myself at parenting.  A variation of the question above is, how do you all do it?  How do you make it happen is also a variant.
  4. How is your marriage?  How is your relationship with the child’s mother?  This question takes some history with the father to raise.  But since parenting, no, since children change everything, we need help paying attention to everything outside of the kid(s).  We miss the essentials of life outside of the kid during those early years.  And sometimes that leads to erosion in our relationships as a couple.
  5. Who are you talking to?  Dads need therapy or spiritual direction or great, life-giving habits or really good friends or a combination of all of these.  We need people we can tell what our experiences are, good or bad.  They shouldn’t just be spouses, if you have a spouse.  Get a friend.  Use that friend.  The way you would a prescription from your favorite doctor, faithfully and consistently.  It’s good for you.
  6. Are you spending time with the kid?  Fathers need to spend time with their children.  We need more time than most of us are practically able to give.  This question pushes us to think about where the time goes, whether the kid is a newborn or a teenager or a full-grown adult.  This looks different for me and my father.  Our time is spent mostly on the phone.  I don’t rush him, though he’s too sensitive to time when he calls me.  With my son, it may look like refusing to overlook him.  It may mean sitting in the floor and rolling the wheel on that dump truck.  And doing it again and again and again.
  7. Are you getting time away?  Sometimes I feel like my kid gets tired of me.  I get tired of him.  Uh, all the time.  Then I leave.  I do something else.  It’s not selfish.  In fact, the most helpful thing I can do for that boy is leave my house.  Now, I’m coming back; that’s probably the second most helpful thing I can do for him and for his mother.  But for a guy like me—who needs to get away from people in order to replenish, to re-engage, etc—leaving is vital.  And it pushes me raise how much I am there when I’m there.  Am I with him?  Am I thinking about him?  Do I notice the way he rolls his eyes and laughs during breakfast every morning?  Did I see him raising his arms to me as I washed those dishes before one of the grandmothers arrived in the morning?  Or was I spending my thought time elsewhere?  Leaving enables me to return well.
  8. Can I help?  Be forewarned that this question may lead to kissing and hugging and undying thanks from the father.  We need help and if it’s offered, there’s very little to prevent us from heartily accepting that help.  Of course, we aren’t going to leave our kids in the care of people we (father and mother) don’t trust.  But beyond that, we’d love to have you!
  9. Taking care of yourself?  Most people assume this is a mom question.  And that’s true.  But dads need this.  My schedule has generally been more flexible than my wife’s since the boy.  So, I’ve done the things that needed to be done around the fringes.  But I work full time in a church as a pastor, teach a class at a seminary, write curricula when contracted to do so, and like to take a drink of water every now and then.  All of these things that I do are my decisions to make.  But I love that people tell me to care for me.  I need that.  Or I’m no good to the wife, the child, or anyone else.  This relates to question 7, but it’s an expanded question because the answer includes whether we’re attending to physical health, emotional health, spiritual health and mental health.
  10. What are you learning?  Fathers learn all kinds of things.  We don’t notice it most times, but when we’re asked, it makes us consider.  Along with that, I think we should keep some record of what we’re learning.  My blogging is part of that for me.  My periodic posts about what my boy is teaching me or how I see things differently are ways for me to capture those answers.  A variation of this question is, are you growing?  Or, how are you growing?  How are you different?
Would you add any questions?