praying the particulars: parenting a talkative child

A Prayer for Parenting a Talkative Child:

God of the Word,

This child never stops speaking. I cannot even hear myself think.

From sun-up to sun-down, he’s trying to figure out his world through words. Constant questions, endless repetition; the same books, the same songs. He wonders every blessed thought aloud, and I become his de facto audience. Or his spelling mentor. Or his number guru.

But too often I tune out and turn away, thinking radio’s music more beautiful or voices on the news more important. I long for adult conversation; I pass over the innocent wonder of a child’s chatter.

Help me to listen, really listen. To bend the ear of my heart to his needs, his wonders, his wants. Let me value his voice like you value mine: unique, worthy, loved.

When my mind spins too busy to hear, quiet my heart to a slower rhythm. When my ears grow tired, let me listen with your own. When my lips slip to let a harsh word pass, let me whisper forgiveness in his small, sweet ear.

And when morning’s bright chirps unravel into evening’s grating whine, let me remember the days when I longed to hear any sound of children bounce off these walls.

God of Scripture and song, you find me in words and I find you there, too. When your Word reminds me to ask and it will be given, to cry out when I am in need, to shout praise and sing thanks – all your words ring true to a toddler as to his mother. He is full of questions. And so am I.

Thank you for his words, his wonder, his life. Which has filled my own to the brim, spilling over with shouts and giggles, yells and cries, questions and challenges.

May he never stop speaking, asking why, or wondering aloud.

May I always keep my life open enough to listen.

May we both bring our words to you in prayer.

With ringing ears and spinning mind,

A tired, talked-at mama

what if we had a mommy war and nobody came?

Several parenting blog posts recently went viral among my Facebook friends.

First there was Glendon’s cry to not carpe diem and to soak in the kairos moments. Then the Huffington Post offered “Apologies to The Parents I Judged Four Years Ago” about one mother’s conversion from harsh critic to sympathetic insider.

In Catholic circles, Simcha’s encouragement to the mother with only one child was shared and reshared. As was the stay-at-home-mom blues.

But as post after post popped up on my friends’ walls, I noticed one thing. Only the new mothers were sharing them.

Moms with babies, toddlers and preschoolers leapt on these stories – of being real, of encouraging each other, of stopping the cruel judgment. But the moms I know with grade-schoolers, high-schoolers and beyond? Silent.

Did they not need the same reminder to play nice? Was the battle no longer theirs? Did they simply stop caring?

As someone swept up in the worries of new parenting, I found myself floored by this obvious fact. All the wise and experienced moms I knew seemed to have risen above the mommy wars, while my friends were firmly entrenched in the fight.

When would I, too, reach the place where I was confident enough in my own parenting to let all my silly insecurities go?

All the arguments over how we bear and birth and feed and clothe and teach young children – they’re meaningful to the extent they help us figure out how to take our first few steps in this strange new land called Parenthood. But once we’ve learned how to walk, we’re no longer concerned with bickering over breastfeeding vs. formula.

Because, as this wise and witty blogger describes, little of it matters in the long run.

I often find comfort in the fact that whenever I ask my own mother, over a panicked phone call, if any of her five kids did x or didn’t do y, I always get a pause and then the same light-hearted response: I don’t really remember!

During my first few months as a mother, I simply could not believe this was true. How could my mom have possibly forgotten the Life-Altering Transformation That Is Getting Your Baby On A Nap Schedule or Starting To Feed Your Child Solid Foods or Diagnosing That Strange Childhood Rash?

But now that we’re on baby #2 and seem to have lost any knowledge we thought we gained with #1, I completely understand how it happens.

I barely remember the days, only a few short years ago, when my first was a baby. Now my new obsessions are potty training and preschool, not naps and nursing. With the questions and concerns that arise at every new stage, we lose the worries of the last.

Which underscores the truth that ultimately, most of the daily dilemmas don’t matter. Each human being turns out to be a mysterious mix of nature and nurture, impossible to predict, define or control.

But when we’re taking our first few toddling steps into the world of raising children, we have no idea what we’re doing. We’re bumbling along, trying to make the best decisions with little experience and lots of anxiety – a perfect recipe for insecurity. So even when we try not to trash-talk other parents, the cruel beast of judgment sneaks in and rears its ugly head.

We roll our eyes. Snicker behind others’ backs. Share juicy gossip of “you won’t believe this…” with our spouse over dinner. I’ll admit to it. I bet you’ve done it, too. But for what gain?

In a season of life when the mommy wars are still raging around me, I wonder about peacemaking. At the heart of the Gospel is a call to make peace. Beyond passive observers or angry protesters, what would it mean to be a peacemaking parent among parents? To actively build up instead of tear others down?

I know that I want more peace and less anxiety around my parenting, and I imagine most new parents are in the same boat.

So I’m throwing it out there:

The next time someone invites you to a mommy war – through their gossip or email or jokes or judgment - try not showing up.

Instead, wonder about what it means to be a peacemaker.

Take a stand against pettiness and pride. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. Try compassion or empathy. Picture yourself as an older, wiser parent and imagine the better perspective you’d bring with more confidence.

Because wouldn’t it be lovely to live a world of parenting peacemakers? To be at peace? To teach our children the same?

What if they threw a mommy war and none of us came?

on guilt, growing up, and (ira) glass

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re happily reading some mildly interesting article, when all of a sudden – WHAM-O! – the expert or the study or the news smacks you with The Finding That You Should Have Known And Now Means You Have Completely Failed At A Major Portion Of Your Life.

Case in point. Yours truly was idly surfing through the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, generally equal parts interesting-news-articles and opinionated-Manhattan-mommies-up-in-arms about the latest parenting buzz. And being the parent of a child who occasionally expresses his disdain for my insufferable rules by wailing at the top of his lungs, I clicked on this post: Seeing Tantrums as Distress, Not Defiance.

So there I was, all innocently reading about toddlers’ inability to self-regulate their emotions and how parents need to lovingly guide them through this challenging phase. When I got to this line:

Dan Siegel, author of the “Whole Brain Child,” gave me the science behind this. “During those early years, the ability to coordinate and balance your own subcortical source of emotion is dependent on a caregiver’s response to you,” he said. We freak out, they freak out. Our ability to stay tuned in to them literally helps their brains grow.

WHAM-O! And the whole room slants. My (now fully developed) brain screams, “I KNEW IT! I LOSE MY TEMPER AT MY TODDLER’S TANTRUMS AND NOW I HAVE PERMANENTLY SCARRED HIS BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND HE’S GOING TO BECOME A SOCIOPATH!!! COMPLETE AND UTTER PARENTING FAIL.”

Ah, parental guilt. It bursts into a calm mother’s mind as quick and sudden as a newborn’s wail, and it lingers in her heart as long and pitiful as a toddler’s whimpers.

Before calling child protective services on myself, I thankfully went back and read the entire article again, only to find that it wasn’t as drastic and dramatic as all that. In fact, it might actually help me handle tomorrow’s tantrums with a bit more love and grace. (Maybe.)

But the memory of that flash of mommy guilt lodged itself in my brain and wouldn’t let go.

I remembered other sinking feelings from my first year of parenthood. Doctor’s appointments when I feared my baby wasn’t hitting every single developmental milestone. Parenting magazines whose glossy photos celebrated children who neither slept, napped, or ate like mine. A fellow mother in a “baby & me” class who actually uttered the words, “I just can’t believe how easy this has been!” in response to the question of the biggest surprise of motherhood. (I’m still surprised that my unshowered, bleary-eyed, anxious, hormonal self didn’t lunge across the circle of newborns to strangle her.)

Motherhood brings with it a new and special kind of guilt. A guilt that screams to your deepest fears and insecurities. A guilt that terrifies you into thinking you are not only making a mess of your life, but a brand-new person’s as well. A guilt that rears its ugly head just when you think you’ve cobbled together some kind of confidence about the whole raising-a-kid thing.

Along the way, I’ve learned to handle the outbursts of guilt with slightly more finesse. The second year of parenting brought with it the ability to forgive myself for being a decidedly imperfect mother. And the third year has dawned with daily reminders that since the many ways I supposedly failed my first child did not – it appears thus far – ruin him for life, I may actually be able to successfully help raise a second.

But I still feel the mother guilt on an all-too-regular basis, as I imagine many of you do, too. How can we help it? We want to raise our children well, and when we start out, we have no clue how. Fertile soil for the rapid growth of guilt, if I ever saw it.

So when I came across this delightful bit from Ira Glass, I was cheered. Not only because I love his wry voice and his quirky story-telling, but because his wisdom speaks to me as both a hopeful writer and a hopeful mother.

Ira reminds me that we can’t help but start off frustrated in the early years of any good work we’re trying to do. We have a grand vision of what we’d like it to be – the family we’d like to have, the book we’d love to write – but the daily slog often falls far short. Many days we want to throw in the towel and declare we’re beat. But when we stick it out and make ourselves keep going, we start to close the gap between hopes and reality. We find that we might actually have a chance of becoming the parent – or writer or artist or minister or teacher – that we dreamed we could be.

Nobody tells this to beginners, Ira says. And maybe they should. So the more we remind ourselves – and each other – that most everybody goes through this, the easier we’ll be able to breathe. And perhaps the guilt, or the fear of failure, or the frustration of not living up to our high hopes, can even spur us on to more than we dreamed in the first place.

It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.

toddlers, tempers, and forgiveness

Now there’s a week in review, eh?

I was surfing through some websites I’ve saved in a running list of things to link to from this blog, and I came across an episode of Speaking of Faith on the spirituality of parenting. I bookmarked the show ages ago and still haven’t gotten around to listening to it. But a post on the page caught my eye: “A Toddler’s Capacity to Forgive.”

I’m willing to take advice on the subject from any corner lately. Why not from my own child?

The author writes about his two toddlers’ amazing ability to forgive their parents with ease. Perhaps, he says, we are “born knowing the secret of forgiveness;” it is only with age and cynicism that we forget.

During the moments when I have lost my temper at S, he looks at me with wide eyes and a blank face, as if to say, What was that? Who are you?

Waves of guilt immediately wash over me. I usually sigh, take a deep breath, and lean over to kiss his head, say I’m sorry. Some dark days I can’t even do that; I pick up his squirming, squalling self and stomp upstairs to his room to figure out what to do next.

But regardless of my reaction, he is generally quick to forget and offer me a smile, undeterred by the storm cloud still hanging over my head. I am astonished by his resilient good nature, while I am more likely to write off the morning as a loss to my Irish stubbornness.

I’ve never considered that I had something to learn from him in this regard – only that his emotions and memory must not yet be developed enough to comprehend anger, conflict, resolution. But perhaps I’ve been wrong: perhaps his is the more developed sense of forgiveness. Mine suffers from an inflated ego and years of wounds from other relationships. Growing up means gaining baggage, not always wisdom.

I like this turn to the child as I think about going forward into a year of (hopefully) quieter tempers and calmer days. I don’t think it’s an overly romanticized or idealized view of childhood to say that adults have much to learn from those whose horizons are less muddied than our own. It’s humbling to consider what more he has to teach me.

The idea of learning forgiveness from our children reminds me of this remarkable poem: Nursery, 11:00 pm by Robyn Sarah. What mother doesn’t find herself, guiltily, in these words?

I, the mother who did not smile all day,
who yelled, Go away, get out, leave me alone
when the soup-pot tipped over on the stove,
the mother who burned the muffins
and hustled bedtime, tight-lipped.

But the poet reminds us that the quiet of day’s end brings forgiveness in its hope for a softer dawn. The sleeping babe will awake tomorrow with a grin, oblivious to yesterday’s tantrums and tempers. There’s something God-like in that, I think – being created anew and loved unconditionally.

on forgiveness

This week has turned out to be much more about forgiveness than I would have liked.

First there was the situation I wrote about yesterday, which I am still struggling to forgive and move past. Just when I think I am at peace, small snarky thoughts sneak into my head about cruel retaliation and sweet revenge. Clearly I’ve not forgiven wholeheartedly.

Then there was my attitude towards my spouse one night this week, when I was exhausted from a day of taking care of S and trying to prepare for a program I was leading at our parish that evening. Overwhelmed and overtired, I snapped at him when he told me he wouldn’t be home by the time I wanted (which, coincidently, I had failed to communicate clearly to him). Then when he walked in the door, I breezed out to the door to church with barely a goodbye.

When I got home several hours later, he was sulking. And justifiably so. I had to swallow my pride (which was already shrunken and bruised, remember?) and ask him for forgiveness. I felt rotten that I had ruined his perfectly fine evening by my own dark mood.

Thankfully F is much better at forgiveness than I. (Maybe because I give him so many opportunities to practice.) But the misunderstanding was quickly resolved and the rest of the night unfolded peacefully.

Yet over this whole week has hung the pall of the Arizona shootings. I first heard mention of the rampage when I was running errands on Saturday morning, and I gasped as I pieced together what the radio was reporting. My poor attempt at a pacifist heart rages when I hear about such violence. Innocent bystanders? Children? The elderly? Unthinkable.

As the week went on and details unfolded, I struggled with my desire to react to the news in such unforgiving ways. I wanted to blame the hateful political rhetoric of the moment, or our country’s approach to gun control, or the failure of authorities and institutions to prevent a dangerous person from hurting others.

But I definitely did not want to forgive anyone.

Then I heard a simple story on NPR while I was crawling home on the highway in a snowstorm. My eyes filled with tears as I listened to the commentator read a short biography of each victim of the attack. (I can’t find the exact piece online, but these descriptions are pretty close.)

Young and old, political junkies and everyday citizens, high-school sweethearts and devoted Catholics – their stories were shared with dignity and grace. There was no political slant, no judgment on the killer, no angry call for revenge. Just a moment of quiet respect for each man, woman and child whose lives were taken. Their stories reminded me that rage and revenge were not the right responses. Forgiveness was.

Lying in bed this morning, I was thinking about the shooting again. (Honestly, who wakes with these thoughts? My mind works in overdrive some weeks). And I remembered the story of the Amish community in Pennsylvania who forgave the man that burst into their one-room schoolhouse and killed five young girls. They forgave him. Went to his funeral after burying their own children. Raised money to help his widow and family. And did so without seeking grandiose publicity or praise for their remarkable ability to forgive.

Remembering that story reminded me that forgiveness is radical, no matter how it is practiced. We’re blown away by high-profile stories of victims’ families making peace with death-row killers, but the kind of everyday forgiveness that Christians are called to practice can feel just as radical. Forgive the co-worker that back-stabbed me? The family member that betrayed my trust? The friend whose carelessness hurt me? These can be seismic revolutions in our little worlds.

Forgiveness is wildly counter-cultural. Blame, anger, revenge, resentment – these reactions are more popular in today’s world. They grab the headlines and tantalize our emotions.

But to forgive, quietly and without fanfare, is a small yet challenging act. A statement of our beliefs and a witness to our faith. A response that we must make again and again, in every relationship. We try to grow through it, but we fall back and fail again.

Seven times seventy. Christ never said it would be easy. But it would be Right. I seem to need to relearn this truth at every new turn of the road. And figuring out how to teach S forgiveness? That will be another challenge all its own.

This week I’m just struggling to get by. Any kind of forgiveness feels radical.

wounded pride

The other day while walking into a meeting, I slipped and fell on the ice.

Yes, it was snowing, and no, I didn’t have the best shoes on for winter walking. But I was still shocked, looking around from where I now sat stupidly on the sidewalk, my knee and hip aching. And my first thought, even before “I hope I’m ok?”, was: I hope no one saw that.

Embarrassed, I pushed myself up, picked up my scattered belongings, and inched my way slowly towards the door of the building. Despite the black and blue bruises now rising on my leg, the real pain was to my pride. I must have looked like such an idiot, I thought. Who doesn’t walk slowly when it’s snowing?

Later that same day, I learned that someone close to me was mocking me for things I’ve written on this blog.

If I thought my self-esteem took a blow with a slip-and-fall, this news wounded much more deeply. Whenever you write something, especially on subjects that are close to your heart, you know that you putting yourself in a vulnerable position. People may disagree with you or insult what you love.

But you usually hope the criticism – or worse, mockery – will come from anonymous sources that would be easy to ignore. Not from someone very close to you.

I nursed the blow to my ego for a solid eight hours of restless sleep. Then I woke up to a cold black dawn and a gnawing feeling in my gut. I thought about how I did not want this to ruin my day. I had too much work to do, and the babysitter wasn’t coming that afternoon – I would have to be on task and not distracted by my own pity party.

I tried to pray for forgiveness and a loving heart. But, like my throbbing leg, my ego was bruised too raw to let me forgive quite yet.

So I tried to think about the situation from another perspective. What was I going to do, as a mother, when S found himself in the same position? Because life guarantees that he will. He will fall in front of peers who laugh at him. He will have friends who turn against him. He will struggle in school, or get cut from a team, or lose a job, and his pride will be so wounded and angry that he doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

What will I do then?

Will I try to jolly him along with the kind of motherly platitudes that every kid rolls their eyes to hear? I think you’re the smartest, the best. It’ll get better next time. No one will even remember tomorrow. Your real friends will stick by you.

Will I make the mistake of not seeing the depth of his pain, of brushing off his hurt because I’m distracted by my own worries and to-dos?

Or will I be there to listen to him, to offer a hug and a sincere That really stinks. I bet that hurt, a lot. How are you feeling? What can we do to get through this?

Will I help him to navigate the thorny path of forgiveness – the real kind of forgiveness that doesn’t lay down and let people walk all over you, but that asserts your position while trying hard to understand the other person, and ultimately hands over to God the situations that cannot be resolved?

I hope I can do that. I’m honestly intimidated by the prospect. I feel like a lousy role model at forgiveness some days, and I pray that he will do better. But I know that he will learn from me, for better or for worse.

So I have to do my part to set an example. Maybe I have to tend to the wounded pride for a day or two, like icing a knee or limping on a sore hip. But then I must move on. Resolve not to be daunted – in love or in any of the other calls I’ve been given. Pray for a heart that seeks peace and not revenge. Remember how it feels to be on the receiving end of cruel jokes. Reconsider the next time I leap to judge or criticize or laugh at someone else’s expense.

Like water off a duck’s back, my own mother used to tell me. That’s how you have to let other people’s words just roll off your shoulders.

Darn it if that platitude didn’t turn out to be 100% right.